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Showing 769–784 of 9248 results
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Atlas of Roots
$18.00Within us all are questions of identity, belonging, and connection. Beth Kope’s third poetry collection, Atlas of Roots, is a work of the heart that uncovers the many facets of adoption. In poems that both witness and question, Kope shares her own quest to uncover family history and answers—finding her adoption records, questioning her parent’s choices, and the truth of her own conception. Moving beyond the personal, Atlas of Roots shares other stories of adoption through the voices of other adoptees and parents of both relinquished and adopted children. In seeking a name and one’s own story, Kope has written a striking and courageous narrative of adoption.
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Atli’s Tale
$16.95Set in England, this is the story of Atli, a lonely Icelandic Canadian man who meets Rose. As their love affair is played out, Atli wonders if it is only his imagination and recurring dreams, or time travel and a past life that connect him to the 8th century Viking invasion of England and the Stanley Mine Disaster of 1909. Atli’s relationship with Rose conceals terrible secrets that ultimately unlock the mystery of his own past.
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Atomic Road
$20.00Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction.
Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althusser, who escaped prosecution for strangling his wife in France on an insanity plea. Althusser is heading to a Saskatchewan hospital for LSD therapy.
Pursuing them is Jean Claude Piche, a veteran of the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, contracted to execute Althusser for the unpunished murder.
The 1950s were Greenberg’s decade. Yet by 1962, everywhere Greenberg looks he is bedevilled by Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans, just as everywhere Althusser looks he sees capitalist decay.
Jean Claude catches Greenberg and Althusser at Niagara Falls. The enigmatic arch patriot Swen catches all three in North Dakota. Convinced that they are communist subversives, Swen imprisons and interrogates them even as, hour by hour, minute by minute, Khrushchev and Kennedy threaten to launch World War III.
An absurdist romp, Atomic Road charts its own course between historical veracity, fictional invention, and the unfettered egotism of two mad intellectuals.
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Atomic Storybook
$20.00Atomic Storybook is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls “the space pricks.” These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives – one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward with Albert Einstein’s son, Eduard, in the Burghölzli mental hospital.
Through all of this, and his lengthy existential conversations with physics professor, Chesley Keeping, Owen comes to doubt the nature of everything around him – all that stuff most of us like to call “reality.”
Atomic Storybook is a new novel from the author of Spat the Dummy. It’s about the early years of Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who feel like they are living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui and physics, Atomic Storybook is also about living and dying in what is, undeniably, an illusion.
Praise for Atomic Storybook:
“Macdonald does an excellent job through multiple perspectives of keeping the reader on edge as to what is real and what is not. … It’s a barometer of excellent writing when a novel can get you to stop reading, causing you to daydream and get lost in one magnificently imagined scene.” (The Winnipeg Review)
“The humour in Spat was dark, bloody, and laugh-out-loud funny and Storybook is even better. It is also a more thoughtful and emotionally nuanced book and makes the reader experience Macdonald’s stated goal as an author to ‘feel the shock of the future as it splashes over me like a bucket of ice water on a sunburn.’ ” (Cape Breton Post)
Praise for Ed’s previous novel, Spat the Dummy::
“This novel is unforgettable both for its subject matter and its form of narration. The style is electrifying and there are images that will burn in the reader’s mind forever. Ed Macdonald is a gripping writer.” (Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
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Attack of the Lonely Hearts
$18.00Everything is just a little more difficult for poor thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. “Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte,” her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it’s good advice because it’s while working at Frank’s coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a NYC modern dance company.
Margaret is stuck in a jack-in-the-box, and author Mark Wagstaff expertly mans the crank, turning the lever over and over, letting eerie circus music slowly fill your head. Will she find what she’s looking for? Is it hiding in the strangely lit aisles of her downstairs grocery store? Maybe it’s avoiding her calls, holed up with a new girlfriend, the cognitive psychology graduate, in a condo in Phoenix. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s coffee-stained and unexpectedly expected.
In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they’re attached to even lonelier bodies.
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Attemptations
$18.95Imagine you’re given the startling news that your body is only capable of having six more orgasms. “It’s either buck up or fuck up,” decides Mel in “Six Degrees of Altered Sensation,” adding this new restraint to the perplexity of single life with progressive Multiple Sclerosis. In “Flickering,” Francis becomes a pyromaniac in order to give her grown sons the opportunity to become heroes. Mundane directions for propane use parallel a brief sizzling affair in “Dick & Jane & the Barbecue and No, It’s Not a Love Story.”
Altered and twisted realities make the impossible possible for Clark’s characters. Lillian, an arthritic senior in “Solitaire,” discovers the rejuvenating properties of the bones of her lively, young new neighbour. Looming dementia is replaced by ravenous desire. In “Split Ends” a woman finds a book that contains her own memories, but it is written by a stranger with the same name; in “No U’s,” a woman slips away through the mail slot to escape her stagnant life.
Ranging from micro-fiction to near maxi-fiction, the stories in Attemptations are peopled by women, often physically challenged women — darkly humorous, feisty, sexy, manic, persevering, observant, contemplative women. These characters will snag you and hold you there ’til they’re good and done.
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Attention All Typewriters
$17.95Lewis Carrol meets Allen Ginsberg…. This is poetry about an angel-poet, wings paper-clipped, seeking spiritual food in the modern office cubicle. He pecks away at office-machinery (à la Dilbert) and dreams among his fellow stick men and women of being a Wordsworthian visionary – or at least an ‘action figureen’. Jason Camlot is a scholar of Victorian nonsense and humorous verse and these poems are a “howl” amidst the “slithy borogroves” sort of affair, a wild, brilliantly refitted variety theater act. Other pieces, equally wan, hilarious, noir, plumb nineteen thirties Hollywood (and present day movieland) hijinks, Hemingway’s war-with-booze style, and the dark obsessions of Important Men. The writer and his writing is “past” conscious, but completely versed in contemporary Canadian and American poetry. This is an immensely funny, witty, up-to-date collection – zany, zippy, and zine-y!
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Audrey Thomas and Her Works
$9.95A biography and review of the works of Audrey Thomas up to 1989, a novelist and short story writer who lives on Galiano Island. BC.
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August
$4.95A suite of fourteen poems that explore the joy and chaos of marriage, organized around traditional anniversary gifts.
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Augustine in Carthage
$16.95Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems is the daring new collection of poetry from Alessandro Porco
Equally crude and charming, locker-room macho and sensitive, these poems are always singularly marked by formal ingenuity and stylistic élan. A poetry that gleefully articulates the possibilities of a 21st century balls-deep masculinity, Porco’s new collections begins with its most important work, “Augustine in Carthage,” a trans-historical re-imagining of Book III of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which includes (among other things) philosophizing strippers, Tampico bombers, rabbit holes, coprology, and comic-book heroism. But for all its bombast “Augustine in Carthage” examines, quite seriously, ideas related to the experience of experience, the morality of poetry, and the hypocrisy of spiritual conversion. The book ends with an equally significant suite of depraved yet learned limericks: Porco’s perverse star shines in this unprecedented contribution to Canadian letters, exploring myriad filthy matters of heart. Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems also includes translations of Italian poetry, re-mixes of classic English poems, performance pieces, tender love poems, and — if you would believe — even a short pornographic novel. Reminding readers that through Tradition the strange and new emerges, this is a deeply-felt and original collection, a work that understands (as its epigraph, in the words of Diderot, insists) “there is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.”
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Aurora
$15.95Loved and admired by readers for the grace of her language and the humanity of her vision, Sharon Thesen is one of Canada’s finest and most respected poets. Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully transformed into visions of grace.
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Aurora’s Journey
$16.00Aurora is a brave and resourceful Inuk girl. When her family goes missing while on a hunting trip, she embarks on a perilous mission to find them. In her travels Aurora must face both the harsh Arctic elements and her own fears, but she does not do so alone: she finds allies in a mother polar bear, Mama Nanuk, and her cubs. Once she is home and reunited with her parents, Aurora’s story of grit and determination becomes an inspiration to the people in her village. Beautifully illustrated by the author, Aurora’s Journey is a celebration of individual resilience in the face of tough times.
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Austin 3:16
$14.95316 facts about WWE legend Stone Cold Steve Austin.
What’s “3:16 Day”? It’s a day when someone gives you a load of crap, and you give it back with a certain one-fingered gesture. “3:16 Day” is a day when you can open up a can of whoop-ass on anybody you want. A day when four-letter words are acceptable and the speed limit is only a suggestion.
“3:16 Day” is a day that epitomizes Stone Cold Steve Austin, the toughest S.O.B. ever to lace up a pair of boots. Austin launched WWE’s Attitude Era the moment he won the 1996 King of the Ring Tournament and quoted iconic scripture on his bible-thumping opponent: “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!”
Austin 3:16 celebrates the WWE legend’s finest moments in the ring, on the microphone, and behind the wheel of a beer truck, a Zamboni, and a cement mixer. This book collects 316 Stone Cold facts, figures, and catchphrases that uncover little known facets about sports entertainment’s Texas Rattlesnake, including how he conceived the “Stone Cold” moniker, what he really thinks of adversaries Mr. McMahon, The Rock, and Bret “Hit Man” Hart, and why he has the WWE Universe shouting “What?” all the time.
Bottom line? Austin 3:16 says it all, ’cause Stone Cold said so!
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Austin C. Clarke
$14.95Austin Clark grew up “poor and black” in Barbados, and immigrated to Canada to attend the University of Toronto. Stella Algoo-Baksh, herself a native of the Caribbean, charts the growth of this significant writer, and also discusses his experiences as a Canadian immigrant, his ongoing connection with the West Indies, and the practical day-to-day issues of history, gender, class, and race. Based on extensive interviews and with detailed examinations of the Clarke archives at McMaster University, this biography maintains a careful balance between Clarke’s personal and public life.
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Autant
$19.95“If heaven is full of angels like me, hell must be empty.” So begins Autant, a tale woven over the course of four days and fifty-four years, based on the relationship between bees and one Franco-Albertan family, the Garances, of Autant, Alberta. Tension emerges in the balance of power between siblings, between seen and unseen forces of good and evil, between perception and reality, between loyalty and traitors, and between what we are taught and what we actually learn.
Poised between an ever-practical God and a quixotically old Coyote, it is a tale told to explain the disappearance of bees in northern Alberta and becomes a sometimes not-so-subtle exploration of how old and young, male and female, humans and non-humans perceive love.
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Authenticity is a Feeling
$20.00Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART is a compelling hybrid of history, memoir, and performance theory. It tells the story of the interdisciplinary performance group PME-ART and their ongoing endeavour to make a new kind of highly collaborative theatre dedicated to the fragile but essential act of “being yourself in a performance situation.”
Written, among other things, to celebrate PME-ART’s twentieth anniversary, the book begins when Jacob Wren meets Sylvie Lachance and Richard Ducharme, moves from Toronto to Montreal to make just one project, but instead ends up spending the next twenty years creating an eccentric, often bilingual, art. It is a book about being unable to learn French yet nonetheless remaining Co-Artistic Director of a French-speaking performance group, about the Spinal Tap-like adventures of being continuously on tour, about the rewards and difficulties of intensive collaborations, about making performances that break the mold and confronting the repercussions of doing so. A book that aims to change the rules for how interdisciplinary performance can be written about today.
When Jacob finished a first draft of the book he sent it to many of those who had co-created or worked on PME-ART projects asking for their comments. Therefore, the book also features contributions from: Caroline Dubois, Richard Ducharme, Claudia Fancello, Marie Claire Forté, Adam Kinner, Sylvie Lachance, Nadia Ross, Yves Sheriff, Kathrin Tiedemann and Ashlea Watkin.