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Showing 7633–7648 of 9492 results
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The Illustrated ‘Ode to Labrador’
$16.95The Illustrated Ode to Labrador is a new treatment of Dr. Harry Paddon’s beloved anthem. Artist Geoff Butler has produced twenty-five vibrant original paintings that feature the various people and regions of The Big Land, executed in oil paint. The introduction by author Robin McGrath outlines the history of the Ode and the life of Dr. Paddon, and in a series of thumbnail vignettes, she puts Butler’s paintings into a cultural and geographic context that amounts to a mini-tour of the Eastern Ungava. The book includes sheet music for the two most familiar tunes to the Ode, with lyrics in English, Inuktitut and Innu-aimun. Paintings and vignettes together make a lively, informative work suitable for cross-generational enjoyment.
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The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie
$44.95The Journals of Susanna Moodie, arguably Margaret Atwood’s finest work of poetry, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1970. In it, she adopts the voice of Susanna Strickland Moodie, an English woman who came to live in the rural area near Peterborough, Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century, and who wrote about her experiences for English readers in her classic account of Canadian pioneer life, Roughing it in the Bush. Atwood’s poetry, based on the Moodie prose, covers Moodie’s arrival in Canada in 1832 and ends with a prophetic commentary by a dead Susanna Moodie on twentieth-century Canada.
Charles Pachter began illustrating the poems in 1968, when Atwood sent him a first manuscript. Of his first reading, he has written: “It was a fateful moment. I was so stunned by its beauty and power that I realized that every early Atwood folio I had done up until now (there were five) must be a rehearsal for this.” The thirty images were completed within a year, but the original folio was not produced until 1980, when 120 copies were hand-printed in a boxed edition, which is now in public and private collections around the world. In 1997, Macfarlane Walter & Ross published a small-format edition in hard covers.
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The Imaginary Museum
$12.00Toronto poet Stan Rogal’s second book of poetry is based on Mallarmé’s idea that everyone has ‘un musée imaginaire’ in his head. Rogal’s collection of poems reflects his belief that not everyone’s imaginary museum would hold masterpieces, but could also house velvet paintings of Elvis.
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The Imago Stage
$22.95Longlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award
A woman must emerge from the virtual world she’s created to confront her flesh-and-blood past and family.
Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self.
Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Set in the past and not-too-distant future of Montreal, The Imago Stage is an ominous tale of oppression, suppression, and disembodiment.
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The Impromptu of Outremont
$15.95Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette’s birthday party—and to have a little “impromptu”—at which they lash out at each other’s personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the fifties, whose interest in art, music, dance and literature is an adopted pose, not their life’s blood. Only one of the Beaugrand siters, Lorraine, has escaped her fate, running off with the Italian gardener to start a family in St. Leonard. The others remain in Outremont, trapped by time; by the choices they have not dared to make; by the position that society has foisted upon them—a position they have accepted, not fought for.
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The Inanimate World
$13.95‘The Inanimate World’ is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within ‘The Inanimate World’ traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of people living through rapid social transformation and an unstable changing economy. Sincere, germane, and tender tales of longing-for love, understanding, acceptance, and peace.
“The stories have a narrative stability not often found in first collections, the writing is sure and mature, and there, and there’s a range of approaches on display, from experimental to intimate to epic.” – Malahat Review
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The Incomparables
$20.00The Incomparables is the debut novel from the Trillium-nominated author of Animal. Lydia Templar is obsessed with fabric, the texture and weight of cloth. Through fabrics, curtains, costumes, she expresses herself in a way she feels incapable of doing in words. For the past ten years she’s apprenticed in the wardrobe department of a small Shakespearean theatre company and has finally been given the opportunity to showcase her designs. When she discovers her husband is having an affair with his leading lady, she seeks revenge the only way she knows how: she weaves her panic, pain, and paranoia into the costumes. It costs her the job. She swears she’ll never sew again, packs her things and returns to her mother and the sprawling country estate she left years ago.
When a group of counsellors from the city book the family’s Bed and Breakfast for the summer to prepare for a special wedding ceremony, Lydia’s plans to never thread a needle again are challenged. Through the one thingshe cannot live without, the counsellors lure Lydia into a role she did not see coming – the true nature of her self.
Reviewers on Animal
“I’m tempted to say it’s a slim, distilled masterpiece.”
– Michael Bryson, Underground Book Club“these quickly unfolding stories are elliptically drawn, tense with action and dark humour. Leggat is a shape-shifting writer”
– The Globe and Mail“this immensely rewarding collection is worth picking up”
– eye weekly“Most short story collections are up anddown. Unlike most, however, Animal is more than the sum of its parts.”
– Herizons -
The Infidel
$17.95Set in contemporary Turkey, The Infidel weighs the elements of truth that flow out of Turkish consciousness in the wake of its historical massacres. In a culture where civic events, history and theology, are as often suppressed as invented, Piccard’s novel creates a path to truth for those with “ears to hear and eyes to see.” Told through a series of tape recordings and commentary, the eloquent narrative of Jesus the Infidel becomes the eyewitness account of the formative events that occurred in Turkish Kurdistan in the first quarter of the twentieth century. What is revealed is as much enigma as it is story for the journalist, Tarik, who records and researches Jesus the Infidel’s account. In counterpoint, Tarik is forced to grapple with his ignorance of his country’s past as well as his personal history of privilege.
Authentic and persuasive, The Infidel is an uncompromising novel of the focussed turning point of events following the revelation of truth. At a time when the world is alerted to the Kurdish peoples’ desire for separatism, Piccard’s novel sets the backdrop for their motivation.
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The Infinite Heist
$22.95When one of their closest allies disappears, without a trace and in impossible circumstances, the Maverick Heart crew is soon on the trail. But they’re already at a disadvantage, for one of their own has gone missing too, leaving them with only the merest of clues to unravel the mystery.
The race is on to solve the baffling disappearances, running from the loneliest, coldest corners of space into the heart of human civilization. And beyond.
Now it’s up to Vrick and the crew to find out who’s pulling the strings and bring the lost home safely. If they can.
For their investigation soon reveals that they and their vanished friends are merely pawns in a vast and diabolical plot that threatens to tear through worlds across the Pan Galactum and across the walls of reality itself.
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The Informants
$20.00A Ty Davis Mystery.
A bloody battle between rival motorcycle gangs leads television reporter Ty Davis into yet another dangerous encounter with a big-city’s underworld. His on the scene account of the violence, for CKCF Television’s “Flash News,” draws Davis and his colleagues into a complex web of drug-smuggling and murder. Turf wars pit local criminal bikers against each other, even as the American-based Hells Angels threaten to establish an unprecedented foothold in Canada. Law enforcement agencies in both countries deal with a deadly alliance between two, powerful mafia families. A multi-million dollar Canada-U.S. drug conspiracy hangs in the balance and one cop and his street informants appear to stand in its way. Davis … stands in the middle.
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The Inkblot Record
$16.95The Inkblot Record is poet Dan Farrell’s examination of the discourse of the (in)famous Rorschach inkblot test. It is a compelling work, by turns hilarious and poignant; it will change the way you view both poetry and psychiatry forever.
The Inkblot Record draws from over half a century of responses to the Rorschach test to construct a book-length poem that places many of western society’s foibles and secret neuroses on display for all to see. By utilizing the most mundane and arbitrary of cataloguing methods – alphabetical order – Farrell constructs a poem with sophisticated internal rhythms, rhymes and alliterations that pull the reader forward in a headlong rush to the book’s surprising conclusion.
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The Innocent Canadian
$29.95The Innocent Canadian is a literary spy thriller and murder mystery inspired by a hidden chapter of Canadian literary history. At its heart is the decades-long romance between Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie and Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, which began in wartime London when Ritchie was stationed at Canada House and Bowen worked for Britain’s Ministry of Information. During that same period, Bowen wrote The Heat of the Day-a haunting and original spy novel. But could her inspiration have come from real-life entanglements too complex or dangerous to name? Picking up where history and fiction blur, The Innocent Canadian imagines a world of covert alliances, Nazi sympathizers, and “America First” conspirators, reclaiming a forgotten thread of World War II intrigue to tell a distinctly Canadian story of romance, loyalty, and quiet heroism-one with striking resonance for our times.
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The Inquisition Yours
$16.95Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
A finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the Lambda Literary AwardIn her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for capturing the complexities of lived experience. In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned, and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time – war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer, and the erosion of personal rights – fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal. Trying to make sense of a world where even language is ‘a danger,’ Currin’s poems reject the old storylines in favour of a vigilant awareness, and wonder whatmight happen if we ‘change the feared penmanship’ and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.
‘Jen Currin writes eloquently; she writes fervently – she writes irony and truth with alarming ease … Currin’s writing is always surprising and often revelatory, punctuated by epiphanies and linguistic acrobatics … Anyone who wants to write will find this book an absolute joy to read.’
– Geist
‘Currin’s poetry … leaves us dazed and amazed at the jumble of words upon the page that fall together like so much confetti in a celebratory parade of language. We are to emerge … with the sense that we have taken a journey to an exotic land.’
– Prairie Fire Reivew of Books
‘Currin updates longstanding surrealist tropes – dreamscapes, disjointed images – with lines that would have been unthinkable to André Breton … This is a new poetry for a new century.’
– Xtra!
‘The pieces are minimalist and sharp, with a dark sense of humour … Though Currin’s surreal style invites multiple interpretations, her vivid imagery and intense storytelling make it easy for the reader to connect with these poems.’
– Shameless Magazine
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The Insatiable Maw
$19.95In this story of eco-resistance based on actual events in the heart of Canada’s Nickel Range, Jake McCool, the injured hardrock miner, returns to work for the International Nickel Company (INCO) but now at its nearby Copper Cliff smelter complex. In no time, Jake finds himself embroiled in a vicious fight over health and safety and, more specifically, over the extreme levels of sulphur dioxide that poison the air in the smelter but also in the entire surrounding area. The fight takes on new dimensions as freelance reporter Foley Gilpin sparks interest at Canada’s national daily Globe & Mail and as local parliamentarian Harry Wardell smells the collusion between INCO and the highest levels of Ministry of Natural Resources at Queen’s Park in Toronto. -
The Inspection House
$13.95In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham’s design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.
Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors’ own mobile devices – providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.
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The Instrument Must Not Matter
$26.00She sees the score for the Bach-Brahms in her mind’s eye, hears the indigo notes unfurl.
In this sweeping coming-of-age novel gifted young classical pianist Lila Rys finds herself in New York City studying under famed teacher George Vrubel. The move from Toronto to the American city is terrifying, but Lila is determined to bring music back to the Rys family, where the story of her grandmother refusing to play Soviet music after their tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 is family lore. Accompanied by her brother, Lucas, who is studying at NYU, Lila struggles to navigate the classical musical world and become the successful performer she’s expected to be. But in New York she has a romantic encounter with a renegade pianist and everything she knows about herself is turned upside down, until her brother discovers dissident literature that holds the stories her grandmother had not passed on, and Lila learns how to set her love for her family, and her music, free.