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Showing 7761–7776 of 9492 results
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The Lucky Ones
$19.95“What a lucky girl!” Everybody who has adopted a daughter from China has heard that one. And every parent has said, or thought, in reply: “No, we’re the lucky ones.” This anthology sets out to explain why people who have adopted children from China feel as though they’ve won the lottery.
Since the late 1980s, as many as 7,000 Chinese-born girls have been adopted annually and now live in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. They are officially orphans, victims of a rigorous birth control policy limiting most families to one child. These thousands of girls have formed an international Diaspora, a human wave with no exact parallel and yet numerous points of comparison — sharing issues with war orphans from Vietnam or even with Chinese workers who built the New World’s railroads.
The memoirs collected in The Lucky Ones are organized beginning with infertility, moving to acceptance of a multiracial family, anticipating the adoption, reflecting during the trip to China and, at last, grappling with an odd destiny — turning terrible beginnings into happy endings.
The story of these girls is compelling as a narrative of hope and optimism but it may also become a story of dislocation and crisis of identity. These baby immigrants add unusual texture to the lives of the families they join — they come here not by choice but by someone else’s design.
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The Luminous Sea
$19.95*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD*FINALIST – THE 2019 BMO WINTERSET AWARD*WINNER – 2019 IPPY AWARD FOR FICTION (CANADA EAST)*FINALIST – 2019 NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS (BEST COVER DESIGN)*WINNER – GEORGIAN BAY READS 2019*FINALIST – NL READS 2019*LONGLISTED FOR THE MiRAMICHI READER’S VERY BEST BOOK AWARDS (BEST FIRST BOOK)*NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR BOOK AWARDS FICTION AWARD FINALISTA team of researchers from a nearby university have set up a research station in a fictional outport in Newfoundland, studying the strange emergence of phosphorescent tides. And Vivienne, a young assistant, accidentally captures a creature unknown to science: a kind of fish, both sentient and distinctly female. As the project supervisor and lead researcher attempt to exploit the discovery, the creature begins to waste away, and Vivian must endanger herself to save them both. -
The Lunatic
$22.95For fans of Patrick Dewitt and Henry David Thoreau comes The Lunatic—the debut literary novel from the author of two previous non-fiction books, Michelle B. Slater, PhD.
Set during the height of the Occupy Movement of 2011, 28-year-old Nell Harding starts an experiment—alongside her faithful animal companion Argos—with the goal of crafting a different kind of life for herself. Despite Nell being a rare books librarian, she’s not immune to the lures of digital distraction, and she wonders if it’s possible to create a meaningful life off the seductive digital grid.
Using herself as a test subject, Nell unplugs to see what will happen, leaving New York City to return to the Berkshire Hills of her childhood. What she finds is a life far more challenging, surprising, and—ultimately—rewarding than she could have possibly envisioned.
Drawing from Slater’s background as a scholar of comparative literature and lover of conservationism, the novel engages with the work of poets, novelists, and philosophers, including Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Emerson, Musil, Broch, and more. Nature lovers and modern-day philosophers won’t be able to resist the tempting question—is absorption possible in the age of distraction?
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The Luskville Reductions
$18.00The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an “us.” The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen — and therefore sacred.
The problem with daylilies
is the usual contemporary twaddle: how is it
we know anything
now that you’re gone.What do you mean
now that you’re gone?
What do you mean
daylilies? -
The Lynching of Peter Wheeler
$19.95At 2:21 am on September 8, 1896, authorities in Nova Scotia killed an innocent man. Peter Wheeler — a “coloured” man accused of murdering a white girl — was strung up with a slipknot noose. The hanging was state-sanctioned but it was a lynching all the same. Now, a re-examination of his case using modern forensic science reveals one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Canadian history.
On the night of January 27, 1896, 14-year-old Annie Kempton found herself home alone in the picturesque village of Bear River, Nova Scotia. She did not live to see the morning. Shortly after midnight, Annie was assaulted and bludgeoned with a piece of firewood. Her killer slit her throat three times with a kitchen knife then coldly sat and ate a jar of homemade jam before fleeing into the night. The senseless and brutal slaying devastated the town and plunged her parents into a near-suicidal abyss of guilt and grief. At trial, the prosecution’s case focused on the inconsistencies in Wheeler’s statements, the testimony of two children who placed Peter near the house on the night in question, and the detective’s novel analysis of the physical evidence.
It was one of the first trials in Canada to use forensic science, albeit poorly. Wheeler’s defense team called no witnesses and did little to challenge the evidence presented. The jury deliberated less than two hours before declaring Peter Wheeler guilty of murder.
The trial itself was a media sensation; every word was front page news. Several papers each ran their own version of “Wheeler’s confession,” an admission of guilt supposedly authored by the condemned man. Each rendition tried and failed to make sense of the conflicting timeline. With every new iteration, it became clearer that the case against Wheeler was not as airtight as the detective in charge, Nick Power, and the media had proclaimed.
The Lynching of Peter Wheeler is a story of one town’s rush to judgment. It is a tale of bigotry and incompetence, arrogance and pseudoscience, fear and misguided vengeance. It is a case study in media distortion, illustrating how the print media can manipulate the truth, destroy reputations, and so thoroughly taint a jury pool, that the notion of a fair trial becomes a statistical impossibility. At the height of the Victorian era, the media created a super villain in the mold of Jack the Ripper, the perfect foil for its other creation, super-sleuth Nick Power. The masterfully constructed narrative was perfect, save for one glaring detail: Peter Wheeler did not kill Annie Kempton.
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The M Poems
$7.95Sparse and elegant poems by the author of Songs and Dances. A subtle rhythmic sense and distaste for redundancies characterize this volume, which will appeal to readers who appreciate lucid effects and metaphorical economy.
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The Madonna List
$24.95Rome, 1221. On the death of Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Dominican Friars, a list of three names is locked away with the depositions attesting to Dominic’s beatification, and a copy is sealed in an icon of the Virgin Mary that is eventually carried to New France.
This list is the thread that binds the fates of ordinary people caught up in the grand sweep of historical events. The Madonna List traces the lives of two nineteenth-century men across three continents, where each finds himself intertwined with a woman who has been visited by the Virgin Mary.
Bernad Birous is an ambitious and arrogant young Genoan of the merchant class who desires to use the power of the Church to serve his worldly aims, and who comes to believe that he is the chosen of God. Martin Goyette is a young artist from the rural parishes of Lower Canada who becomes enmeshed in the doomed Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838. Their very different lives are drawn together in a penal colony in New South Wales (Australia), where fortune, ambition, and faith determine their fates. A web of mystery, violence, love, betrayal, and tragedy finally leaves one man standing and one broken when the shattering secret of The Madonna List is revealed.
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The Madonna of the St. Denis Bar-BQ
$15.95The Madonna of the St. Denis Bar-BQ is a true account of a parent-child relationship, beginning with the details of the death of the author’s mother, Belle-Moue, and tracing her history back, chapter by chapter, to her birth some decades earlier. It reads like modern-day fiction, scored with factual information. The theme is universal. Authors from different cultural backgrounds have written about the life and death of a parent: Simone de Beauvoir and Michael Ignatieff, among others, have recounted the mother-to-daughter, mother-to-son legacy. The setting for the book is regional: it is the life story of a Québécoise, in la belle province, from 1988 back to 1909. The plot includes a distinct dimension – the veritable influence of religion and government on 20th century French Canada and on women in particular – a subject about which Huguette O’Neil writes with convincing authority. An award-winning author, she is also a journalist and served as Director of Information for the Quebec Council on the Status of Women.
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The Madonna Painter
$16.95At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish ?u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four local women all named Mary, a model for his work. The presence of the foreign artist, his choice of a local virgin to serve as a model and the frighteningly strange nature of his work will upset the lives and change the fate of the entire community. The town’s doctor, meanwhile, has his own prescription for what is ailing the villagers. As superstition collides with desire, The Madonna Painter unmasks a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.
Loosely inspired by the events surrounding the creation of the fresco that still adorns the nave of the church in Saint-Coeur de Marie, the author’s native village, the language of the play is not that of its current inhabitants. Bouchard’s characters simply echo the medieval beliefs that coloured the imagination and shaped the destiny of all Québécois, especially those living in its many rural townships until very recently, and inspire this story with their gossip about their neighbours, foreigners and the mythical marital spats between God and Satan. That fresco depicting the Virgin Mary’s ascension was the author’s ?rst encounter with art, with a foreigner and with lies, and Michel Marc Bouchard has said: “In order to portray that fresco, I became a liar and the people from my village became saints and martyrs, artists and models, lovers and misanthropes. I presented their legends the way a ?ea market hawker displays sacred objects that have been stolen and disguised for resale.”
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The Madrigal
$22.95The child Frederick and his mother both have secrets. She sings alone in their desultory kitchen; he sneaks out of the house to sing for spare change in front of city bars and nightclubs, his vast repertoire learned from his mother’s lyrical midnight music. His six older brothers run wild, and the sensitive and musically gifted Frederick and his struggling mother are very sure he is not like them at all.
In mid-life, Frederick is deliverer of Canada Post mail; teacher of Voice; keeper of even bigger secrets; caretaker of his demented mother; lousy with dates. Still, it appears that everything is more or less satisfactory and under control…until it becomes obvious that he can’t get away from his past after all. The Madrigal explores the experience of solitude, the deep longing for elusive connection, the meaning of extraordinary talent, and the role of memories–either involuntarily forgotten or intentionally suppressed–throughout our lives. As each week Frederick steadfastly visits his mother in her nursing home, he brings a unique twist to a timeless journey of self-forgiveness.
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The Magic Dogs of San Vicente
$20.00The Magic Dogs of San Vicente is set in the aftermath of the war in El Salvador (1980-1992), a war in which the two Flores brothers were arrested and savagely tortured, but a war that they ultimately survived. On a heat-soaked morning in El Salvador’s wild countryside, the Flores brothers encounter something — part vision, part phantasm, part shuddering echo of their past — that almost frightens them out of their wits. What follows is a magical, dream-like and picaresque journey, as the Flores brothers try to find what will set them free from the thing that they have witnessed and from the tragedies of their past.
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The Magnificent Voyage of Emiy Carr
$16.95Emily Carr lived in a magical place that she had christened The House of All Sorts. In this House which is open to all that is vital on Earth, Emily Carr, with all her greatness and her imperfections, receives visitors from her planet: Lizzie, her sister, is greeted with war whoops and rebuffs, for Lizzie is the adversary, as is all Victorian society; Sophie, her Amerindian friend, who brings messages, reminders and lessons from life; Lawren Harris, her young painter friend from the Group of Seven, who wants to free painting from dogma and revolutionize art in Canada; the Soul Tuner, who hears her cry and vibrates to her thoughts of adoration and compassion … and D’Sonoqua, the Goddess-Mother on her phosphorescent pedestal, who beckons to Emily from the old world of legends.
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The Magpie
$19.95Craig Forrester is newly returned to Winnipeg following World War I, and he has returned to a city and a country mired in social upheaval. Will he choose the complacency of upward mobility or his personal, more socially conscious ethical code? Originally published in 1923, The Magpie is a social commentary turned novel about post-war disillusionment. Set against the backdrop of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, The Magpie offers an articulate and perceptive examination of the greed, hypocrisy, and intolerance of the “decent” classes, the agrarian myth, the role of women in post-war society, the role of art in social critique, and the evolution of moral codes in settler-Canadian society.
“Distinctly striking.”—Canadian Bookman, 1924
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The Magpie’s Library
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The Making of St. Jerome
$17.95When Jason De Jesus discovers his younger brother Jerome was the victim of a senseless shooting, his world is filled with questions surrounding Jerome’s death. Was his brother a threat or a casualty of racial profiling? Was he an innocent bystander or someone other than his family’s shining star? Internalizing his survivor’s guilt while reflecting on their strained relationship, Jason’s quest for truth and justice is tainted as he discovers there are no simple answers.
Inspired by the shooting of a Filipino Canadian teenager by a police officer in Toronto, The Making of St. Jerome is a poignant look at the aftermath of an untimely death, the media’s role in the truth, and one family’s attempt to reconcile a haunting reality.
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The Making of the Potterverse
$16.95Experience the magic again with this chronicle of the young wizard who took the world by storm!
From the moment that J. K. Rowling conceived the idea of Harry Potter during a train ride, until the 1997 UK publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Making of the Potterverse tells the history of one of today’s most beloved sagas — in print, on screen, and in real life as waves of Pottermania swept fans young and old.
Covering the phenomenon through the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, this book covers all of the major and minor news events centering on the world of Harry Potter, interweaving quotes from the films’ cast and crew members — among them Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint; directors Chris Columbus (The Sorcerer’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets), Alfonso Cuarón (The Prisoner of Azkaban), and Mike Newell (The Goblet of Fire); producer David Heyman; and behind-the-scenes personnel who brought the magic to life.