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Showing 7649–7664 of 9481 results
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The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard
$16.95The compelling plot of Nancy Bauer’s fifth novel, The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, winds through Cornwall, Quebec City, and the Eastern Townships, New England, and the Fredericton area of New Brunswick. Full of vivid description and eccentric characters, the story brings to life the strange relationships between Arlene, her daughter Alice, and her “found” daughter Andrea, on one side, and their benefactor, James, and the mysterious Mr. Gerard, on the other. The startling dénouement at last fits all the mysterious pieces together.
At another level, The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard integrates the delicate complexity of Tao philosophy with matriarchal mythology, the disorientation of the picaresque, the character-substitution games of classical comedy, and the heightened detail of magic realism. Bauer’s post-modern blend leads the reader through a story full of intrigue into the world of the spirit.
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The Island
$12.95An island off the coast of another island is home to a small community; life is rich with joy and challenges, and the people who live there love their island home. One day they learn that the government will move them off the island, to new homes with modern conveniences like electricity. Life will be simpler, but will it be better?
In gentle and spare prose, and with her unique folk-art illustrations, Lori Doody tells the story of resettlement in Newfoundland?it is a deeply personal tale, but it is also the story of anyone who must leave a loved home to start anew and who carries their old home still in their heart.
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The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief
$25.00Samson Grief, a reclusive painter in PEI struggling with a creative block, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to bethe new Promised Land and also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amidst increasingly bizarre obstacles.
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The Island of Books
$19.95A rich portrait of the beauty of words – painted by a 15th-century illiterate scribe.
A 15th-century portrait painter, grieving the sudden death of his lover, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until a monk assigns him the task of copying a manuscript – though he is illiterate. His work slowly heals him and continues the tradition that had, centuries earlier, grown the monastery’s library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press.
‘Dominique Fortier has a gift for making insightful connections between seemingly distant ideas, creating patterns that, at the end of the novel, leave you with the impression that everything is connected, both logically and supernaturally.
Set in an improbable fortress in the middle of the sea, her fourth novel explores the to and fro of love and creation. With writing that is both graceful and honed, The Island of Books gives love, maternity and particularly books the mystery that is their due.’—Jean-Marc ValleÌ�*e
‘Throughout these emotional rescues in the high seas, Dominique Fortier’s writing is carried on a rich, beautiful and evocative language. The recurrent use of words from old French adds a patina that is appropriate for this journey filled with touching, illuminating moments … Dominique Fortier plunges into the depths of human paradox and emerges with a love of books that she shares with grace and generosity.’
– La Presse (translated from the French)
‘Dominique Fortier’s writing is at once sensitive and interesting, moving and spare. It reveals a man blinded by pain who tells us his story of love, his distress and the light of the smile of a young woman. A book written in quiet emotionthat makes for good reading as the wind makes the autumn leaves rustle.’
– Au fil des pages (translated from the French)
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The Jane Loop
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The Jill Kelly Poems
$16.95Adult-film diva Jill Kelly, in all her splendid forms (performer, producer, writer, and director), serves as the ultimate 21st century icon in Alessandro Porco’s The Jill Kelly Poems.
This debut collection presents a poetry of surfaces that, at once, cherishes its Bacchus-like existence and comes to terms with its very impossibility through intelligent, irreverent, and formally sophisticated poems: an ode to Christina Aguilera; a love-sonnet for Rambo; and an epitaph in memory of Sharon Tate.
Porco’s climactic sequence dramatizes, in gonzo fashion, the union of language and forms of poetry — a consummation that erupts from the page, leaving readers feeling a little bit dirrty (that’s right, with two r’s) but, undeniably, wanting more. Ample double entendres and sexual punning; lewd bar-room balladeering; comic revisionist histories that expound, for example, on the origins of the thong; libidinal utopias filled with D-cup superheroes and militant villains — it’s all in the name of good ol’ fashioned silicone fun!
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The Jokes
$18.00We sit, hunched over the words that appear on our smartphone screens, altogether unaware of the story of our lives that is going on around us, even as we focus on the minutiae of our social media “friends’” daily activities. These are the stories that draw our undivided attention, and these are the types of deftly observed, wholly engrossing narratives that make up Stephen Thomas’s debut flash-fiction collection, The Jokes.
Presented in the form of a most common present-tense–as a series of moments in a social-media-like ‘feed’–this collection of very short stories riffs on the form of ‘the joke,’ but as this might be understood by the best culture-critical comedians of our time: Andy Kaufman, Stephen Wright, Norm McDonald, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor. And much like those stand-up artists who sanctified the joke-form, these stories deal with sometimes-intense subjects, yet with a kind of SSRI-like placidity that allows readers to cling to each word as the narratives unfold.
In drawing comparisons to Lydia Davis’s creatively detached but inventively curious writing, Thomas’s The Jokes is a book for thinkers; sad and funny, hopeful and determined, nostalgic and cerebral, these vignettes offer a very personal, yet amazingly relatable entry-point into big ideas that trouble our times–religion, sexuality, life and death, and ways of being in the world–all while coloured by touches of weird otherworldliness that living in someone else’s social-media feed can bring.
Fans of metafiction and philosophy, ‘alt lit,’ artist and academics (particularly students of art history and theory), readers interested in experimental and somewhat cerebral fiction in the vein of Ben Marcus, Lily Hoang, or Maggie Nelson, as well as audiences interested in the uses and abuses of Internet and social media, will connect with Thomas’s particular take on worlds within worlds.
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The Jonas Variations
$24.00The Jonas Variations: A Literary Séance is a one-of-a-kind collection: free translations, imitations, variations, reverberations, and refutations of poems in other languages that inspired its author—poet, writer and journalist George Jonas—to words in English.
The poets span centuries; the languages include Latin, Arabic, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Spanish. A thumbnail portrait of each poet in the context of his times precedes Jonas’s versions and re-visionings: poets as well known as Catullus, Dante, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Heine, and Rilke rub shoulders with names much less familiar to most readers. Jonas conjures up the spirits of his poets, dialogues with them, and in doing so gives them new life. This romp through multilingual literary history is at once a very personal project and an inspiring example of oneman’s lifetime engagement with poetry. -
The Josephine Knot
$17.95After Samantha’s baba dies, her fractured family is summoned to pick through the house full of belongings and trash, leaving taped notes on whatever they want to take. Between old napkins, a closet full of ketchup packets, and a freezer full of rotting meat are gems like a grandfather clock and plastic deer statuettes that hold more sentiment. While her father David sifts through his own memories, all Samantha wants is to find a simple object that could represent her place in the family. When other family members arrive, tug of wars and passive-aggressive conversations commence. In a house full of junk and sadness, it comes down to Samantha and David to find a new way to fit together.
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The Joyful Child
$24.94In his third novel, Norman Ravvin writes about a father and his young son, and the companionship they develop at home and on the road. Returning to the wanderlust of his travelogue Hidden Canada and to the European Jewish past that often underwrites his characters’ lives, Ravvin follows the interconnections of urban living, the experience of travel and abandonment, and a man’s love of neighbourhoods, of jazz and old cars
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The Junction
$24.95In his third book, The Junction, John Schreiber invites us to join him on a journey into the hidden corners of BC’s Cariboo Chilcotin, where he observes and describes a land of mountains and old trails, coyotes and bighorn sheep, Indigenous Peoples, homesteaders, ranchers and the stories of long ago.
Driven by his love of this land, Schreiber wanders the hills, mountains and valleys visiting old-time characters and old friends. He wakes to the sound of coyotes howling next to his tent, witnesses a mother bear fussing over her four cubs and is inspired by the spectacle of thousands of Sandhill cranes circling high out of sight as they migrate north. With the mastery of an experienced guide, he takes us to wild places, valleys, rivers and mountains of immeasurable beauty and power, and in so doing he acknowledges and underlines the essential importance and meaning of such places in our lives.
John Schreiber encourages us to take time to pay attention to where we live, and to be alert to the lively mythologies and stories, old and new, which present themselves as we increase our familiarity with the living natural world around us. There is no detail that, when closely examined, is not lively and fully alive.
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The Jungle
$18.95Can Jack and Veronyka ever get ahead? In this all-too-relatable love story in a city suffocating under late-stage capitalism, a young couple is pitted against odd after odd in a way that isn’t about testing one’s character anymore—it’s simply reality.
Jack, a second-generation Chinese Canadian cab driver meets Veronyka, an undocumented factory worker and waitress from Moldova, as he’s bringing her from one job to the other. Their chance encounter blooms into an unlikely romance, stolen in moments between shifts, and then a hasty marriage, which solves migration issues but brings the pair even deeper into the challenges of providing for themselves and their families. The painful death of both of Jack’s parents and the sense of helplessness that has dogged both of their families leads Jack and Veronkya to desperate measures to escape. Some hard work mixed with some political blackmail brings them to a new life, but at what cost?
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The Just
$17.95Camus’s The Just is based on the true story of a group of Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. This new translation by Bobby Theodore comes at a time when the play is more relevant than ever and provokes a troubling yet vital question: Do the ends justify the means?
Cast of 4 men and 1 woman.
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The Kaizen of Poker
$24.95Whatever your poker level — beginning, intermediate, or expert — you can always improve!
In The Kaizen of Poker, Sheree Bykofsky will help you take your game to the next level — and to the level after that. By learning how to identify and focus on the skills and strategies you need to improve most, you will find yourself raking in more pots and leaving the game a winner far more often. Do you play too many hands? Bluff too little or ineffectively? Not know how to read the other players’ strategies and cards? Take the “Morning After Challenge” and start outplaying the opponents you want to emulate. Expanding on Secrets the Pros Won’t Tell You About Winning Hold’Em Poker by Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky, here she takes the Japanese concept of “Kaizen” — continuous improvement — and applies it to the card game we all love best.
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The Kayak
$12.95An accident leaves a teen in a wheelchair and her only freedom comes with kayaking. Meeting a wind surfer who she has saved triggers feelings of wanting to belong and be accepted, and her life begins to change as she starts to look at herself not just as a victim in a wheelchair.
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The Keening
$32.95The murdered body of Sorcha the prophetess is discovered following a lavish banquet at the Maguire castle in 16th-century Ireland. In the present day, a dig commences on the land, and not only is a body discovered, but a sheaf of prophecies. Who killed Sorcha?
There has been a guesthouse on the Tierney land in County Fermanagh for hundreds of years. Now Tierney’s Hotel is faced with a development that will block the hotel’s best feature, its view of Enniskillen Castle. But the project can be stopped if there are important historical artifacts buried on the property. Enter the archaeologists.
Mick’s ancestor, Brigid Tierney, ran the guesthouse in the late 1500s. We see Brigid and Shane and their children at a lavish banquet at the castle, home of the ruling family, the Maguires. The wine and ale flow freely, the harpist plays, the bard recites the Maguires’ heroic deeds. But one woman has a sense of foreboding. Sorcha the prophetess sees harrowing times ahead. The Tudors of England are determined to complete their brutal conquest of Ireland.
The morning after the banquet, Sorcha is found dead on a bed of oak leaves. And Shane is accused of the killing. His lawyer, Terence, conducts his defence on the hilltop that constitutes the court in 1595.
Ireland has had a complex and at times woeful history, and we see that history being played out in the lives of the Tierneys, past and present.
In 2018, the dig commences on Mick Tierney’s land. Historical artifacts? Yes. But also a sheaf of prophecies. And a body ― a bogman ― four hundred years old.