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Showing 7713–7728 of 9492 results
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The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent
$20.00For over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario’s deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright’s most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded “Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner,” the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright’s work by scholar Alessandro Porco.
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The Legacy
$36.95From the Arthur Ellis Award–winning Grand Master of Crime Writers comes the next installment in the Joanne Kilbourn seriesWhen Joanne Shreve’s former student, Val Masluk, writes the biography of acclaimed novelist Steven Brooks, Val once again becomes part of Joanne’s life. The biography is already raising troubling questions about Brooks’s past, and the wedding of Brooks’s daughter and Joanne’s son is scheduled for the day before the biography is published.Both Joanne and her former student are haunted by memories of the seminar that led to the deaths of two people and the murder conviction of a third. The publication of the Brooks biography poses a threat not only to the future of the man and woman about to be married but also to the futures of those who love them. Joanne is certain that the threat is rooted in either her past or in that of Steven Brooks. The collateral damage caused by exposing that link will bring pain to both families, but life has taught Joanne that the only thing worse than knowing is not knowing.
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The Legend of Baraffo
$23.00In Baraffo, a town gripped by revolutionary fervour, a boy named Mazzu grapples to understand the motivations of Babello, a man imprisoned for an act of arson. When Babello begins a hunger strike and another building is set ablaze, tensions mount among the citizens and Mazzu considers a risky solution.
Within an extraordinary world, this sweeping and mythical story asks prescient questions about the nature of social change: is it better accelerated by those who seek total transformation or attained by those trying to work within the system?
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The Legend of Sarah
$24.95She could almost see the people gathered around a fire listening with rapt attention while the storyteller’s rich voice recounted the love tale of Sarah a legend in her own time…
At fourteen Sarah is an accomplished pickpocket who knows all the back streets and boltholes of the town of Monn. She steers clear of Brother Parker and his Church of True Faith, knows better than to enter the Inn of The Honest Keeper, and avoids the attentions of Butch, the Miller’s son, as best she can.
The one bright spot in Sarah’s day is listening to the storyteller’s tales of the magically easy lives of the Old People–and if, as darkness falls, one of the wealthier listeners happens to be so intent on the storyteller’s voice that he becomes careless of his own purse, well, so much the better. Inspired by the storyteller’s narratives Sarah often imagines her own life as the stuff of legend for some future troubadour.
But even such daydreams can’t prepare her for becoming embroiled with a witchy Phile–an agent of the devil, come in search of the Old People’s hidden secrets. How could Sarah have known that picking the wrong pocket would strand her in the middle of a power struggle among Brother Parker, the Governor, and the encroaching Phile spies?
A new edition of Leslie Gadallah’s classic science fiction novel, originally published by Del Rey Books as The Loremasters.
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The Leisure Society
$15.95Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western economic growth: make more, earn more, have more.
Bringing a child into this frightening world fuelled by instant gratification; wanting to have some time and space for themselves so they can continue to grow and develop; or dedicating time to deepen the bonds between their friends; all seem like colossal tasks. Even worse, they seem like acts of resistance—one could even say betrayal—against a system that requires everyone to be active, productive and consuming.
But in this dark and thoroughly contemporary comedy echoing The Wastemakers of the 1950s, is it too late for such unthinkable acts of defiance?
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The Letters of John Sutherland, 1942-1956
$25.00From the beginning, John Sutherland recognized that his literary gifts lay in criticism rather than in poetry. His independence from the academy and his largely autodidactic training gave him a unique perspective as a critic of Canadian literature. What these letters document, beyond a purely personal struggle, is a period (1942–1956) of great importance in the development of Canadian poetry, and it is above all the nuts and bolts of that development that they bring into keen relief: the economics of publishing books and literary magazines in the days before The Canada Council, and the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of trying wholly to live a life in literature at that time.
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The Library Cosmic
$24.00The child lies in the snowy north, where the halls of essays are heavy with the thoughts of poets and politicians and philosophers. There are no flowers for her. There is only a gathering of found family, who stand uncertain in the Librarian’s shadow.
In this fabulous and moving collection of short stories Ben Berman Ghan traverses time, space and the written word to consider the mysteries of life. From ghosts to golems to far future AIs these stories ask the big questions: What is consciousness? What gives a being its soul? What are the boundaries of love? And, perhaps most importantly, how will libraries save us all?
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The Life and Times of Captain N.
$17.99Douglas Glover’s acclaimed novel The Life and Times of Captain N. is now available in a GLE Library edition. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart, the novel was acclaimed by the most respected critics in Canada and the US, and compelled The Toronto Star‘s Philip Marchand to call Glover “one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation."
Set on the Niagara frontier in the final days of the American Revolution, The Life and Times of Captain N. sees the revolutionary new world order from the standpoint of the losers. Hendrick Nellis, a Tory guerrilla, has also been a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. His son Oskar finds himself sometimes allied with the Indians, sometimes at war with them. Hendrick kidnaps Oskar for King George’s army, and Oskar, haunted by dreams and by books, is the teller of the tale. The book he intends to write is sketched out in his letters to George Washington and in the signs tattooed on his skin as mementos of his personal Indian wars.
The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the no-man’s-land where the delirium of combat drives races, genders, languages, and ideas into a primeval frenzy. Master of the psyche’s primitive depths, Douglas Glover draws the reader into a violent and erotic emotional whirlpool. Some of the incidents in The Life and Times of Captain N. are based on the lives of the real Hendrick Nellis and his family, and, says Glover, “I have no doubt their descendents and relatives on both sides of the border will find much to complain of.”
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The Life-Writer
$19.95A New York Times Notable Book 2016
An October Indie Next List “Great Reads” Pick
Following the final illness and death of her husband Eric, Katrin—a writer of brief lives of minor figures of European Romanticism—decides to fight against his absence by writing the story of his life. Desperate to know Eric as he had been before she loved him, to fetch his early years into those that she must now face without him—Think of me then, Katrin, Eric told her on his deathbed, never forget me then, that lad gaily assuming the land and its roads and traffic would never be anything but kind—she begins, through letters and diaries and conversations with his childhood friends, to reconstruct a pivotal period of his life, uncovering an early affair Eric had with a Parisian artist. As the young couple’s increasingly impossible love rushes toward its devastating conclusion, past and present intermesh in unexpected ways and Katrin begins to understand how that period of Eric’s youth impacted Katrin’s love for him and the marriage the two of them shared. Passionate, profoundly moving, and lyrically written, The Life-Writer offers up an unforgettably heartbreaking portrait of a brilliant woman who grieves for her beloved by writing what others wouldn’t dare: the story of his first true love.
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The Light Through the Trees
$24.95The Light Through the Trees is a remarkable and deeply wise reflection on land, farming, a sense of place, connecting with nature and what it means to live on this earth. As a third-generation farmer, the author’s roots go deep into the land but her work also captures her thoughts on such current issues as the environment, environmental identity, and animal ethics. Her writing is poetic, lyrical, and engaging. Part farmer, part poet, part activist, Armstrong engages her readers through her fascination and close involvement with both the natural and the human worlds.
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The Lightning Field
$27.95Set against the backdrop of Cold War Toronto, The Lightning Field follows the lives of Peter and Lucy Jacobs from their post-war courtship through marriage and child-rearing in the suburbs. Though spanning four decades, the book pivots on the events of a single day: October 4, 1957. On this day, the Russians launch Sputnik into orbit, the Avro Arrowthe most advanced jet plane of its time, whose wings Peter Jacobs has engineeredrolls out onto the tarmac to great ceremony, and, in a nearby field, Lucy Jacobs is struck by lightning on her way to the event. In the aftermath of that day, Peter struggles with his wife’s hospitalization and recovery, the care of their children, and, eventually, the loss of his job when the Arrow project is suddenly terminated. Their childrenKier, Andy and Rosegrow up in the sheltered cul-de-sacs of their Toronto suburb, troubled by the disappointments of their parents’ world, yet drawn to the infinite possibilities inspired by Laika the space dog and the mysteries of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. If so much of what their parents hoped for in life seemed ultimately out of reach, how will this next generation of dreamers find their way? The Lightning Field is about loss and unexpected offerings, personal dismantling and reassembly.
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The Lightning of Possible Storms
$20.00Winner of the 2021 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Aleya’s world starts to unravel after a café customer leaves behind a collection of short stories. Surprised and disturbed to discover that it has been dedicated to her, Aleya delves into the strange book…
A mad scientist seeks to steal his son’s dreams. A struggling writer, skilled only at destruction, finds himself courted by Hollywood. A woman seeks to escape her body and live inside her dreams. Citizens panic when a new city block manifests out of nowhere. The personification of capitalism strives to impress his cutthroat boss.
The more Aleya reads, the deeper she sinks into the mysterious writer’s work, and the less real the world around her seems. Soon, she’s overwhelmed as a new, more terrifying existence takes hold.
Jonathan Ball’s first collection of short fiction blends humour and horror, doom, and daylight, offering myriad possible storms.
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The Lil’wat World of Charlie Mack
$24.95Early in their ethnographic work, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy were privileged to meet Charlie Mack. Born on the Mount Currie Reserve in 1899, he was a fascinating character and a font of wisdom, exemplifying by his way of life, his skills in trapping and canoe-making, and his knowledge of the history of his people, the living world of the Lil’wat, which the young ethnologists were able to record on tape and in their notes and photographs. Most important among what Charlie Mack gave them was a wide corpus of stories; he was a master storyteller, holding his listeners spellbound with his animated and dramatic delivery in both Lil’wat and English.
Charlie Mack’s stories were originally recorded in his native language as part of a systematic government-sponsored effort to create public awareness of the threatened indigenous languages of British Columbia and Washington State, and were eventually published as a highly popular translated and edited collection, Lillooet Stories (1977), by the British Columbia Archives.
More time spent with Charlie Mack before his death in 1990 revealed to Kennedy and Bouchard that his worldview embedded a moral code, information about the environment and the self-evident truths of his world not easily comprehended out of context: an interweaving of myth, history and experience invoked in daily conversation and deeply rooted in a sense of place. Now, two decades after Charlie Mack’s passing, the authors present a selection of his English renditions of some of these stories, drawing on their transcribed interviews, correspondence and ?eld notes to re-contextualize the narratives he wanted to share, and guide the reader to a more holistic understanding of this Lil’wat elder’s world.
This book is a tribute to a long friendship; the result of the authors reflecting on a lifetime of listening to a man who had something to say.
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The Lillian Lectures
$19.95Hide under your bed! Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret meets South Park in The Lillian Lectures, a collection of short poems and cheerfully nasty illustrations that will turn your universe on its head.
Remember how strange you thought sex and God were when you were little? Six-year-old Melanie is weirder and naughtier than you ever were, and now she’s passing her wealth of wacky wisdom on to her little sister, Lillian. Your mom would never let you play with them, but you sure would have wanted to; Melanie is the ultimate bad influence.
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The Lily Pad and the Spider
$18.00You’re afraid of spiders, heights, sickness, and the way other people look at you. Afraid you’ll be betrayed, abandoned, and that the fortune-teller’s predictions will come true. You stop smoking, you avoid insects and medical advice, you stop going on stage, taking the airplane, falling in love, leaning over the balcony rail. You don’t take your driving test and you start reading novels from the end, as if putting on a chastity belt. You think you are well protected, you will never be caught off-guard, nothing will surprise you. Then a butterfly is discovered in your chest, and you feel its wings beating. It is too late to ignore the sensation.
An autobiographical essay on fear, The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar et l’araignée) explores the symptoms, sources, and genesis of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary kind. Using short chapters that are fragments of her life, Claire Legendre breaks down the psychological, physical, and social mechanisms associated with that emotion. Her style is lively, often funny, sometimes dark though never complacent, and the story traces a unique path between France and Canada and the Czech Republic, casting a defiant yet vulnerable gaze upon the world.
The Lily Pad and the Spider (Le nénuphar at l’araignée) was a finalist for the 2016 Quebec Booksellers’ Prize in the Quebec novel category.
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The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X
$14.95A calculus formula, a calculating boy, a young woman who is intelligent but unwise — the ingredients for a gripping story and the thematic fulcrum for The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X, a rivetting new collection of stories by Halifax writer Richard Cumyn.
In this idiosyncratic collection of stories, Cumyn explores the surface tension between men and women and those rare moments of insight that often accompany loss. Casting his imagination over the territory extending from adolescence to middle-age, Cumyn finds plenty to contemplate and lots to laugh about as the men and women of his stories brushup against each other, sometimes violently, and often humorously.