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All Books in this Collection
Showing 7793–7808 of 9492 results
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The Material Sublime
$18.95The title of Carleton Wilson’s debut poetry book, The Material Sublime, contains an apparent contradiction that is central to the collection’s aim–to investigate how the intangible, spiritual sphere of existence is connected with the material world of nature and human society. With finely honed, immaculate craftsmanship and an extraordinary ability to observe and interpret minute details, Wilson brings to light the essential truth captured in this paradox.Opening and closing the book with sequences based on The Junction district of Toronto where Wilson lives, he instills the collection with a sense of place and stillness, grounding other poems ranging across space and time, subject and form–including musings on the magic of the natural world, childhood recollections, references to Bob Dylan’s music and Hard Core Logo, and a series of romantically themed poems.The considerable challenge Wilson undertakes in this collection is perfectly suited to his poetic abilities–to articulate the nearly inexpressible meanings imbued in the most subtle, fleeting moments, and to do so with simplicity and elegance.
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The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy
$39.95The idea of a free gift economy has become important in the movement for alternative economics, however the connection with women and especially with mothers has not been widely understood. The conference “The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy,” held in Rome in 2015, brought together women and men from around the world to discuss this important issue.In a moment when the values of Patriarchy and the market seem to have triumphed, the values of mothering and care are more sorely needed than ever. This book explores many aspects of the gift paradigm from a variety of points of view, taking into account theory and practice, activism and spirituality, as well as the experience of Indigenous societies North and South where maternal values are still at the centre for both women and men. Readers will find abundant evidence of ways of thinking and being that are possible beyond the Patriarchal Capitalism that is now threatening the existence of life on Mother Earth. The book is divided into four sections: Theory, Practice, Practice in Non-Western Realites and Spiritualities. Articles are by well-known scholars and activists from around the world and include: Luciana Percovich, Mariam Irene Tazi-Preve, Erella Shadmi, Simone Woerer, Susan Petrilli, Kaarina Kailo, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Barbara Alice Mann, Coumba Touré, Diem LaFortune, Vicky Noble, and many more.
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The Matryoshka Memoirs
$24.95“[Colby] breathes new life into well-trodden WWII tropes, building a vivid, novelistic narrative focused on memory and family.” — Publishers Weekly“The writing is vivid and lyrical, the narratives are arresting, and the women are unforgettable.” — Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at MānoaA remarkable story of strength and resilience in the crucible of Nazi GermanyIrina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada.Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina’s rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.”This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina’s life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us.
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The Matter of Sylvie
$19.95On a Wednesday in July 1961, Jacqueline Burrows begins her day perched on the cool concrete of her front steps, smoking. Jacqueline is the mother of three children, including her sweet, difficult daughter, Sylvie. It’s only 7:00 AM, but Jacqueline’s children are awake and tearing through the neighborhood.
In a story that deals with the extraordinary challenges of raising a child with severe special needs, The Matter of Sylvie traces the course of Jacqueline’s Wednesday, a life-shifting day. The mother’s impulses, combined with the stress of her other young children and the absence of her police officer husband, culminate in an event that echoes into the next two decades. A familial triptych: as the fate of one child resounds in the individual, pivotal Wednesdays of both Jacqueline’s husband, Lloyd, in February of 1973, and her adult daughter, Lesa, in October of 1987.
Three Wednesdays, three decades, three narrators whose lives are intricately woven in this novel of dark and light. The Matter of Sylvie explores the depths of mother, father and daughter-and ultimately, the matter of Sylvie herself.
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The Meadowlands
$24.95In a near future dominated by institutions, technology, and government control, children are raised in state homes and have no concept of family, with the exception of Terran and his younger sister, Brooke. Together with their friends, Taylor and Simon, they often steal from the local market to subsidize their diet.
Running from the authorities after a raid goes wrong and looking for a place to hide, Terran is drawn to a vibrant green glow behind a crumbling city wall. It?s an archway with a small opening that has fallen away, like a window into a different worldthe world of the Beigfur. The Beigfur once shared the earth with humans, but now exist in a parallel universe where they have learned to live in harmony with nature.
Centuries before, the Beigfur used the last of their technology to place a glamour between the worlds to protect themselves from the destructive ways of Man. Climbing through the archway, Terran, Brooke, Taylor, and Simon inadvertently tumble into The Meadowlands, where an unexpected, life-changing adventure begins.
Speaking to the confusion of the modern era, The Meadowlands explores society?s impact on nature and the environment, the importance of family, and the challenges of coming of age in a world of technology and isolation.
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The Meaning of Metallica
$22.95A serious look at the lyrics of metal’s biggest band, disentangling double meanings, explaining stories, uncovering sources, and illuminating themes such as hope, despair, rage, resilience, power, liberty, justice, love, death, and insanity.
More than 40 years since their formation, and 125 million album sales later, Metallica is as relevant as ever. Much has been written about the band, but The Meaning of Metallica is the first book to focus exclusively on their lyrics.
Their mighty guitar riffs and pounding drums are legendary, but Metallica’s words match the intensity of their tunes. Lead singer James Hetfield writes rock poetry dealing with death, war, addiction, alienation, corruption, freedom, religion, and other weighty topics. Painting a rainbow of emotions with a deft palette, subtle but not obscure, Hetfield’s lyrics deserve careful attention. A master of narrative, Metallica makes listeners care about a vast array of characters, from a vengeful God, to a suicidal teenager, to a man in mid-life crisis.
The Meaning of Metallica is like a riveting conversation with a close friend. A thematic tour de force that traces Hetfield’s lyrical development across the decades, this companion examines everything from deep cuts like “Confusion” to megahits like “Enter Sandman.” Sure to spark debate and discussion, The Meaning of Metallica provides a close reading of lyrics dense with details and rich with allusions.
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The Mechanics of Submission
$14.95The Mechanics of Submission is poet Phil Tabakow’s visionary guidebook to middle class North American life. Sometimes dark as their rust-belt settings, these are poems with a scouring, ruthless humour, courtesy of a muse with attitude that won’t be trained. Examine these as small exploding diagrams, graphing the boundaries between the self and the world, behind which lie our deepest fears and desires.
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The Medusa Head
$17.95For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The Medusa Head comes from the third woman—the autobiographer, who works hard to uncover the truth about that year. The story begins when Marie-Claire meets Andrée at a literary event in Paris. They fall in love; and when Mary meets Andrée, she falls in love, too. The three of them move to La Salle in Brittany, where Mary and Marie-Claire discover that the beguiling Andrée is emotionally complex. In her happy, contented state, Andrée is irresistible: intelligent, witty, charming. But Andrée is also given to sudden and unexpected mood shifts, the most terrifying of which is her transformation into the “Medusa Head”—a furious, irrational, overpowering figure who must be placated at all costs. Thus, Mary and Marie-Claire are drawn into Andrée’s emotional labyrinth, from which they find it increasingly difficult to escape.
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The Melville Boys
$16.95A relaxing weekend trip full of fishing, football, and beer is on the agenda for the Melville brothers. Unfortunately, so is confronting eldest brother Lee’s terminal illness. But weekend plans are suddenly thrown for a loop when the boys meet two attractive sisters, who inadvertently change more than just their agenda. In this modern Canadian classic, Norm Foster offers a lighthearted comedy full of vigour about brotherhood and the unexpected.
A favourite among Norm Foster’s classics, The Melville Boys is “…a wonderfully witty script” (Kamloops News).
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The Men
$16.00The Men is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read Lisa Robertson. As a poet Robertson has received unrivaled praise for her uncompromising intelligence and style. The Men will not only compliment her previous work, but will add a new layer as a far more personal and lyrical book than anything she has yet published. Who are the men? The Men are a riddle. What do they want? Their troubles become lyric. The Men explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch’s Sonnets, Cavalcanti, Dante’s works on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey—a subjectivity that honours all the ambivalence, doubt, and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance. It is this troubled texture of identification that she examines in The Men. How does a woman of the present century see herself, in men’s lyric texts of the renaissance, in the tradition of the philosophy of the male subject, as well as in the men that surround her, obfuscating, dear, idiotic and gorgeous as they often seem? What if “she” wrote “his” poems? At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, The Men seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what men are.
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The Merchant of Venice (Retried)
$19.95Whether you’ve encountered his celebrated verse-dramas (such as Whylah Falls or Québécité) or the lush, animated language of his poetry, it is not difficult to recognize George Elliott Clarke’s affinity for the genius of William Shakespeare. In this new work, Clarke borrows brazenly from and rewrites (The Bard’s very own working method) one of Shakespeare’s most contentious comedies, The Merchant of Venice, reinvigorating a play that on many points seems “retrograde politically and retarding dramatically”. The result is a spectacle of swinging lyricism that casts Jewish Shylock not as the villain, but as the victim of the ingrained bigotry of the Venetian State.
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The Merry Widow Murders
$24.95It’s the latter half of the Roaring Twenties and Lady Lucy Revelstoke, the unconventional widow of a young British lord, is once more crossing the Atlantic on a state-of-the-art ocean liner. Rubbing elbows with the era’s elite, Lucy has come a long way from her roots as the daughter of a Canadian mobster.
But when a dead man turns up in her stateroom on the first night of the voyage, Lucy wonders if her past has come back to haunt her. Who is this dead man? Is someone from her past trying to send her a message? Lucy doesn’t wait to find out. With her chivalrous friend Lord Tony, and Elf, her pickpocket-turned-maid, she endeavours to throw the body overboard. It does not go as planned.
When the body is discovered by authorities on the ship, Lucy must do everything in her power to find the murderer before they look too deeply into her past.
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The Metamorphosis
$24.95Winner, Best Atlantic Published Book Award
Shortlisted, Canadian Regional Design Awardmet-a-mor-pho-sis: a complete change of form, structure, or substance, as transformation by magic or witchcraft.
In May of 1896, a young magician from New York City joined the cast of the Marco Magic Company and embarked on a summer-long tour of eastern Canada, including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It was during this excursion that Handcuff Harry AKA Harry Houdini first showcased the talent that transformed him from a small-time conjurer, who performed for pennies in dime museums, into the world’s most celebrated escape artist. When he wasn’t performing on stage, Houdini was barnstorming through the streets of every town and city he visited, astounding onlookers in police stations, hardware stores and hospitals by freeing himself from the clutches of every restraining device strapped or wrapped around him.
In this absorbing book, enriched by rare, period photographs, Bruce MacNab recounts a fascinating but shockingly untold chapter in the career of the man whose name is still synonymous with the word magic.
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The Midnight Games
$12.00In the gritty steel town of Hamilton, Nate Silva has grown up with the familiar racket of football games from nearby Ivor Wynne Stadium. But now strange noises and music are coming from the stadium late at night, and the air throbs with the chanting of excited crowds. When Nate sneaks into one of these midnight games, he comes face to face with the fanatical followers of the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods, who are using mind control and human sacrifice in an attempt to summon the Great Old Ones who ruled the planet aeons ago. Nate tries to navigate this dangerous new world, but soon he’s pursued by members of the Resurrection Church and is targeted by the murderous Hounds of Tindalos. With the help of the Lovecraft Underground, an outspoken librarian and a being from across the boundaries Nate struggles to keep the old gods away from his city, whatever the cost.
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The Midnight Project
$24.00When enigmatic billionaire Burton Sykes walks into Re-Gene-eration, a bespoke reproduction assistance clinic run by Raina and Cedric, two disgraced genetic engineers struggling to get by, they know they have a very unusual client. When Sykes asks them to genetically engineer a way for humanity to survive the coming ecological apocalypse, Raina is tempted. Bees are dying, crops are failing, and she knows her research is partly to blame. Could she help in some way? Though troubled, Cedric agrees to take part when it becomes clear their benefactor will do this with or without them. How else can he be sure their work won’t fall into the wrong hands? But can they really trust Mr. Sykes?
In this near-future science fiction thriller, Christy Climenhage has created a frighteningly real world on the verge of collapse. As disaster strikes, the two friends need to decide whether to cling to their old life or to let go and embrace a new path for humanity.
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The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories
$20.00The Midwife of Torment and Other Stories is a collection of sudden fiction that compresses its narrative to deliver a variety of stories that alternate the flavour of a philosophical reflection with the whimsical enchantment of a fable with a twist. These stories also often dwell on the strange–and the horror–found in our mundane lives. Stories that, on occasion, also leap as far as speculative fiction or swirl in a lyrical exploration of prose narratives. Divided into six sections, Midwife explores human and non-human voices through narrative weighing at less than one thousand words, and the vast majority weighing at less than five hundred. Included are a series of black and white lithograph-like original drawings commissioned specifically for this manuscript from the Portuguese visual artist, João Ventura.