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Showing 7585–7600 of 9492 results
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The Healthy Barmaid
$15.00Located at the heart of London’s teaching hospitals, The Red Lion pub is the regular haunt of the area’s most distinguished medical professors. For years, they have been stopping in for a pint, and to talk over the day’s medical issues with Ida, the pub’s remarkably vibrant and energetic proprietor. In The Healthy Barmaid, we join them in their nightly talks, and learn about such vital medical issues as the controversial role of cholesterol in cardiovascular disease, the importance of hormone therapy for both sexes, sporting injuries that should never happen, vitamin therapy, the benefits of moderate drinking, why some people are destined for a medical hell, and many other topics.
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The Heart Accepts it all
$22.00Decades after his death, John Glassco (1909-1981) remains Canada’s most enigmatic literary figure. The Heart Accepts It All: SelectedLetters of John Glassco draws back the curtain on this self-described ‘great practitioner of deceit.’ We see the delight he took in revealing his many literary hoaxes to friends, and the scorn he had for literary fashion. The letters reflect his convictions about literature, other writers and his own talent, while documenting struggles with publishers, pirates and censors.
Born into one of Montreal’s wealthiest families, Glassco turned his back on privilege for a life in letters. At age eighteen, having been published in Paris, his voice suddenly went silent. His unexpected return to the literary scene in 1957 coincided with the great flowering of Canadian literature. In the years that followed, he produced a unique body of work that encompasses poetry, memoir, translation, and several bestselling books of pornography.
Collected here are the few surviving letters from his youthful adventures in France and three previously unpublished poems. Amongst his correspondents were Maurice Girodias, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ralph Gustafson, Leon Edel and Margaret Atwood.
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The Heart Is Improvisational
$25.00Poets attribute an array of roles and capacities to the involuntary muscle and catalyst of our storied lives. The heart becomes a repository of erotic and familial love and a sanctuary for memory. In this collection, poets explore the flux of the heart’s responses and instigations: the heart’s tender overtures, its joyous pulse, its mating call for the other, its changeable temperament, its final tick in freeze-frame. Among the poets featured: Kenneth Sherman, Lorna Crozier, Marilyn Bowering, Roo Borson, Patrick Lane, Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Eugénio de Andrade, John Barton, Robyn Sarah, and Mary di Michele.
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The Heart Laid Bare
$19.95Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print.
This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay’s sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion.
Jean-Marc has fallen in love. The object of his affection is Mathieu, a young actor working as a salesman at Eaton’s while waiting for his big break. As a dowry to their new relationship, Mathieu brings Sébastien, his son. Jean-Marc, a fusty academic, is not sure about being able to make room in his life for this four-year-old boy.
While daring, for some even shocking when it first appeared in the 1980s, this story has, like Tremblay’s entire ouevre, stood the test of time and revealed itself to be a work of both enduring and prophetic vision
The Heart Laid Bare marks a significant departure for Michel Tremblay, because it is the first of his mature novels which is not set in the semi-autobiographical milieu of his childhood. Yet this thoroughly contemporary love story is told with all the warmth and empathy that is so characteristic of all of his other work.
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The Heart of Man
$24.95The final installment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Trilogy of the Boy is a profound exploration of life, love and desire written with a sublime simplicity.
After coming through the blizzard that almost cost them everything, the postman Jens and the boy are far from home in a fishing community at the edge of the world. It is a strange place, with otherworldly inhabitants, including flame haired Alfheidhur, who makes the boy wonder whether it is possible to love two women at once; he had believed his heart was lost to Ragnheidur, the daughter of the wealthy merchant in the village, to which he must now return.
Set in the awe-inspiring wilderness of the extreme north of Iceland, The Heart of Man, the final book in Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s audacious Trilogy of the Boy, is a profound exploration of life, love and desire, written with a sublime simplicity.
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The Heart Specialist
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The Heathens and the Dragon
$16.95A middle-grade medieval adventure starring two orphans, a troubadour with dancing feet, and an irascible pet chicken by an award-winning YA writer.
From award-winning author Kate A. Boorman comes her first middle grade historical novel, set in France in the Middle Ages at a time of great religious upheaval. The Heathens and the Dragon: A 13th-Century Adventure stars twelve-year-old Elodie, a resourceful guardian to her little brother Bertran. Together they perform for their very survival.
Elodie works hard to keep a clean house for her master, take care of her little brother, and guard the secret pagan beliefs she was taught by the mother they recently lost. But the world around her is growing suspicious of paganism and violent toward non-Christians. When Crusaders arrive to arrest her kindly master, a Cathar, for heresy, he flees, and the orphans Elodie and Bertran try to follow his trail.
Armed only with meagre supplies and a few good stories, they head into the forest, where they soon become lost. Luckily, they join forces with Joie, who has mysteriously left court life and appears eager to help them. To earn money and food, the trio improvises a spectacle involving storytelling, music, and a chicken-assisted magic trick. The crowd’s applause almost allows Elodie to forget that her dragon tale dishonours an origin story sacred to her mother.
When Joie’s own secrets emerge, Elodie is faced with a new dilemma. With Crusaders hovering and a voracious audience clamouring, Elodie realizes that, to save herself and Bertran, she?ll need to decide who to trust&mdashand who to betray.
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The Hedge
$22.95The Hedge, set in early New England, is the story of an intelligent young governor’s wife who is repressed by the severe attitudes of the Puritans, to the point where she withdraws from society, and is considered to have lost her mind. Anne Yale Hopkins comes to Hartford, Connecticut in 1638, delighted to have escaped the household of her stepfather Theophilus Eaton, a rigorous Puritan, by marrying Edward, who becomes governor of Hartford. She is a voracious reader, and has written several books. She can hardly wait to make a fresh start in a new land. Her first enthusiastic impressions of the community gradually change as she comes up against the rigidity and judgmentalism of some of the Puritans. Her strong reactions to their behaviour and ideas cause the community to think she is growing “distracted.” A number of events contribute to her decline: the unwarranted punishment of one of her Native friends, her mother’s trial for heresy, the execution of King Charles, and the loss of two her three confidantes: Nellie, her maid,and David, her brother, who returns to England. She corresponds cautiously with her beloved cousin Jane in London, but Jane’s letters arrive infrequently. With the death of one good Hartford friend, and the departure of the other, she withdraws even more. Edward’s friends advise taking away her books and paper, because they say her brain is overloaded, and that is why she is behaving so oddly. She is devastated, hides her journal and keeps writing. Throughout the story, certain incidents bring up flashes of lost memory. Finally, during her pregnancy, a crucial buried memory is uncovered, and the process of facing a new reality begins.
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The Hell of It All
$17.95“A stylish noir.” — The Globe and Mail on The Drop Zone
Retired detective T.J. Peterson is working the table scraps that his former partner, Danny Little, sometimes throws his way. One of them has Peterson hearing from a snitch about a body buried 30 years ago, the same time a drug kingpin went MIA. Peterson is also ducking an ex-con with a grudge, a hitman who likes playing jack-in-the-box with a 12 gauge. Then a former lover re-enters Peterson’s life and begs him to find her daughter, an addict who knows too much about the local drug trade for her own safety. The search for the girl and the truth about the 30-year-old corpse takes Peterson down into the hell of it all, deep into the underworld of crack houses, contract killing, money laundering, and crooked professionals doubling down on their investments of black money.
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The Hellmouths of Bewdley
$14.95In The Hellmouths of Bewdley there are always some murdered men and some gay men. A baby man, a sexy man, and a drunk man. An insane doctor. A wonderful doctor. Twenty guys named Jesus. Men who wonder about women and women who don’t care. A lot of dogs: some of them supernatural. More drunk and dead men. A number of cranes, no herons. A real ninja turtle. A jail, a detox, a fire, and a suicide or two. An agoraphobic with crabs, a bunny messiah, women in ages, some children, and drugs and fried chicken. A very small town. Like sixteen medieval B-movies, The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario’s cottage country. Tony Burgess’s first book is a halfway house for literary delinquents; electro-shock therapy for a storyteller who is grateful for the looters’ paradise of post-modern distraction. Burgess believes there is a shape that fact and fiction both seek, that narratives occur in defiance of the things they harbour. In The Hellmouths of Bewdley nightmares are our babysitters: they tell bedtime stories to normal, happy children while their parents destroy their lives or pass out, dead to the world, in front of the TV.
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The Herb Garden
$20.00Bartholomew the Englishman was a 13th century Franciscan friar and scholar whose only surviving work, De proprietatibus rerum (The Properties of Things), was intended as an encyclopaedia of the world. The Herb Garden is an imaginary representation of what his herbarium might have looked like. The dialect of the collection is a mix of middle and modern English, a verbal florilegium meant to explore the exuberant richness of the English language that much of contemporary poetry has scanted or forgotten. The collection is also conceived as a kind of “sapiential book,” a form of counsel literature or life manual with an emphasis on everyday practice and the poet’s craft.
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The Heretic
$16.95The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: “If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”
Not exactly a new idea, it works well as the basis of a stand-up act, but it relies on the assumption that humanity was made not only in God’s physical image, but that we are all also cookie-cutter replicas of God’s psychological profile. That’s where Murphy thought the act needed to say a lot more about his own personal encounters with religion.
The challenge was to keep the laughs going through the widening gulf that inevitably opens up between the persona of God and the acts of creation in this stock-in-trade formula for comic monologues, and that’s where Murphy eventually stumbled on his alter ego: Jesus Murphy. Now a dialogue of voices performed by a single actor, the play opens up a discourse, where creation interrogates religion; atheists engage believers; secularists confront theists; in the context of the most fundamental and naïve of theological questions thrown out to a live audience of any and all faiths—in a contemporary world fractured by an increasing proliferation of fundamentalisms—including people who have never been exposed to religion.
Laughter is a form of recognition, an affirmation, and when a couple of hundred people all laugh together, all say “yes, that’s true” together, it’s a powerful feeling—a force of nature, which is exactly what the author intended. This story of a Roman Catholic man tormented by the religious anxieties of his youth, who resolves to become Jesus Murphy, an evangelical atheist, makes us all believers—in ourselves.
Cast of 1 man.
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The Hidden Keys
$19.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD
NATIONAL POST 99 BEST BOOKS OF 2016
Giller Prize winner André Alexis’s contemporary take on the quest narrative is an instant classic.
Parkdale’s Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, and it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle.
A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before the puzzle is solved, he presses on.
As he tracks down the treasure, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Würfel, conceptual artist and taxidermist to the wealthy, and fend off Willow’s heroin dealers, a young albino named ‘Nigger’ Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund ‘Freud’ Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their hands on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend.
Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honourable, what it means to be faithful and what it means to sin.
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The High-Rise in Fort Fierce
$19.95Finalist, Ottawa Book Award for Fiction 2019
Long-Shortlisted, 2019 Relit Award (Short Story Category)Drugs. Violence. Racism. Despair. The tiny, northern town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in the high-rise by the lake.
In this visceral, emotionally raw, and completely absorbing collection, Carlucci takes his readers through the ravaged history of Franklin Place, from its construction during the Cold War to its demolition decades later. We meet the Franklins themselves, three generations of landlords, each more paranoid and alienated than the last. And we meet their tenants: a drug dealer, a lonely bigot, a political activist, a struggling father, a wandering sex offender, a woman who refuses to give into it all. They wander in and out of each other’s lives, with little in common but the building and the mould behind its walls.
In The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, Carlucci immerses us in a dim yet eerily familiar world. Love and death, conflict and compromise, fear, determination, and the tense relations between indigenous and settler populations thread the warp and weft of his dark and irrepressible tapestry. We cannot look away.
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The Hippie Pirates
$15.99There are many things that Kent, Ryan, and Amy love about their somewhat eccentric hippie-pirate grandparents; best of all are their wonderful stories about travelling the world in search of hippie-pirate treasure. Central to all their stories is their beloved VW pirate ship bus, the SS Fiona. And now the three children are going to join in on a hippie-pirate adventure, and sail on the Fiona!
Where will they go? Liverpool? Norway? New York? No. Three disappointed children learn their destination is Nova Scotia, their home province. But very quickly Kent, Ryan, and Amy come to realize that there?s a lot more to ?their own backyard? than they?d realized, and that the Fiona knows a trick or two as well.
This time-travelling adventure, the first in a planned series, introduces young readers to some unique aspects of Canadian and Nova Scotian history, including the establishment of Birchtown and the plight of Black Loyalists.
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The Hockey Scribbler
$19.95Canada’s former poet laureate looks back at a life lived in literature and hockey fandom
Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. For many Canadians, the big moments — births, deaths, marriages, moves — are all mixed up with the wins and losses of our teams. The voices of Hockey Night in Canada sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep.
George Bowering, Canada’s former poet laureate, is no different. Growing up in Oliver, B.C., Bowering was entranced by the kids from Saskatchewan who skated and handled pucks as easily as breathing. His fascination with hockey followed him into adult life, from B.C. to Quebec and back again. Bowering followed his teams with a critical eye and a fan’s passion, and his stories bring us on a cross-country hockey-themed road trip, with occasional forays into boxing, poetry, and sports fashion.
Bowering has an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. He has been an avid and attentive hockey fan since boyhood, and has an extensive catalogue of thoughts and opinions on the personalities and events that populate Canadian hockey history. In The Hockey Scribbler, Bowering brings us along on his richly detailed look back at hockey in Canada since the 1950s.