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Showing 7585–7600 of 9481 results
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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.
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The Hollow Beast
$28.95A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.
1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
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The Home for Wayward Parrots
$19.95Accustomed to being an only child, adoptee Brian “Gumbo” Guillemot’s teenage hobby was searching for his birth parents. After years without a lead, when he finally finds his birth mother, Kim, he’s unprepared for the boisterous instant family that comes with her.
No one, besides Kim, knows anything about Gumbo’s birth father. With Kim refusing to answer any questions, Gumbo must choose whether to continue the search, even if it means alienating his few friends and both his families. And the more he learns, the more he wonders whether some things are better left unknown.
Captivating and playful, The Home For Wayward Parrots explores friendship, romance, modern families and geek pop culture with wit, compassion and extremely foul-mouthed birds.
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The Homes We Build on Ashes
$22.95God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason. After surviving the grand tragedy of the Busan Fire that leaves 28,000 people homeless, Nara leaves the squalid tent city that had become her home and is thrown headlong into a new life in Vancouver, Canada, where she elucidates the poetry of home. Amidst violence and abject injustice, Nara finds a way to rise up from the ashes again and again to rejoice in small triumphs in the homes she has lived, in the homes she has lost.
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The Hooves Belonged to the Deer
$20.95When the impressionable young Izzy immigrates with his Arab family to rural Alberta, he becomes the salvation pet project for Pastor Isaac, a local Christian youth leader eager to mould him. Torn between his sexual desires for his friend Will and Isaac’s persuasive indoctrination, Izzy must find a way to reconcile his internalized shame and deep spiritual faith before it consumes him. Meanwhile, in a surreal reimagining of Eden/A’den, Aadam and Hawa—the first couple of the Qur’an—find their relationship turned upside down when Aadam is tempted by the proverbial white-skinned man, Steve, from the north.
With the gravitas of a Greek tragedy, The Hooves Belonged to the Deer is a bold and blistering indictment of white Christian imperialism. Makram Ayache’s daring play confronts the painful intersections of homophobia, Islamophobia, and colonialism, refusing to offer easy resolutions. Erotically charged and panoramic in scope, this cautionary tale illuminates the lingering scars of religious trauma while offering a profound reckoning and prayer for rebirth.
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The Hope Slide / Little Sister
$16.95Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1993.
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The Hottest Summer in Recorded History
$18.95With her signature eye for irony and sensuality, Elizabeth Bachinsky’s latest book of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, balances a youthful playfulness with observational maturity. Bachinsky strings together seemingly non-sequitur images, capturing in these poems the commonality of raw intimacy, dark humour and a sense of immediacy. Her vision is unapologetically bold, finding the erotic in everyday moments and keenly capturing the complicated truths of life in a powerfully candid style.
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The Hours That Remain
$16.95Denise has spent the last five years dedicated to uncovering the truth behind her sister Michelle’s disappearance. Haunted by loose ends, she begins seeing visions of Michelle, who gradually guides her in the right direction. As Denise’s marriage and sanity crumble around her, she remains committed to unearthing an unfathomable truth, and coming to terms with a painfully crucial realization—one she has been desperately avoiding.