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Showing 7889–7904 of 9492 results
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The Nothing Club
$19.95Four delinquent teens are inadvertently pulled into a criminal investigation that challenges their deepest values and misconceptions.
Poor choices land four outlier teens in summer-time mandatory community service. Deemed good-for-nothing by those who judge, they label themselves The Nothing Club. After inadvertently setting a grass fire with fireworks, Grady is the first to arrive for community service, followed by the walled and tattooed Margaret, the genius Nikki, and the animal-loving Free Throw, who subsequently meet the I-wish-I-were-invisible concession girl, Catherine.
The teens are supervised by the philanthropic and diabetic widow Mrs. Stafford and her maintenance man, Reg – a non-judgmental mentor with an unconventional approach to rehabilitation. But when a small child and Catherine go missing Reg is the prime suspect. The teens are determined to exonerate him and find their missing friend but their well-meaning efforts lead them further into the activities similar to those that landed them in community service in the first place.
Fast-paced and energetic, the novel is told from 15-year-old Grady’s humorous, often self-deprecating and sometimes-insightful, perspective.
The teens’ experiences pave the way for their personal transformations and unlikely, yet profound, friendships. The novel explores the relationship between trauma and self-forgiveness and the multiple ways that people engage in faith and spirituality. -
The Nothing That Is
$20.00Rather than making “something” out of “nothing,” what follows is an endeavour to express the potential of language and thought to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined.
In The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud gathers essays about the very concept of “nothing.” Addressing a broad range of topics—including false atrocity tales, so-called fake news, high-wire acts, and telepathy, as well as responses to works by John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and more—these essays seek to decentre our relationship to both the “givenness” of history and to a predictive or probable model of the future.
The Nothing That Is explores ways in which poetic language can activate the possibilities replete within our every moment. Skibsrud reveals that within every encounter between a speaking “I” and what exceeds subjectivity, there is a listening “Other,” be it community or the objective world.
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The November Optimist
$24.95The November Optimist is almost a love story. Combining fiction, observation and anecdote, its male narrator conjures a dialogue with a womanhis imagined counterpart, his willing or unwilling muse who sometimes lends insight, sometimes remains contrary and elusive. Full of jaunty humanity and black humour, our narrator registers ironies in a light-hearted manner when bemusements arise from his fully engaged citizen-walkabouts and caffeine fantasies. Ordinary events (driving and parking, walking and watching) are transformed by minute representation into something of almost surreal importance. The conversation extends beyond the woman to the city itself, to rain and seasonal change, to books and the escape they offer, the ways they inform what is possible and what is daily. Clouds and quays, neighbours and strangers absorb our narrator, as does fast time in both his city and in himself in this flâneur’s look around.
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The Nuttalls
$16.95Living in relative seclusion, Ev and Ec rely on the kindness of strangers as they struggle with their own internal and external problems. Ev not only suffers from agoraphobia, she believes she is dying from a fatal degenerative disease. Ec, who is obsessed with his eleventh toe (which he has named Toto), is grieving over his estranged fiancée who left him at the altar. Although Ev declares that hell hath no fury like a mother’s love, the Nuttalls prove that sometimes family can be your worst enemy.
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The Obese Christ
$14.95Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonstrating a powerful mastery of suspense.
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The Obituary
$23.95Shortlisted for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal
Rosine is surrounded by ghosts. Ghosts of family. Ghosts of past lovers. Ghosts of an old Montreal and its politics. Ghosts of the Montreal quarry workers who, in the 1880s, frequented the Crystal Palace gardens, upon whose ruins her Mile-End triplex sits. Her dead maternal family is there, too, with their restlessness, their stories, their forgotten indigenous ancestry, their little crimes and glories. There’s even the ghost of an ancient Parisian gendarme lurking in the dark stairwell, peering through her keyhole.
Rosine herself may be a ghost, her voice splintered – sometimes a prurient fly buzzing over the action, sometimes a politically correct historian, a woman perpetually travelling on a bus or lying in bed – and so too is our understanding of narrative. In offering up a kaleidoscopic view of Rosine and her city, The Obituary fractures our expectations of what a novel should be ‐ allowing the history of assimilation, so violent in the West and so often sidelined by the French–English conflicts of Montreal, to burble up and infect the very language we use.
Though a mystery, possibly involving murder, The Obituary is less a whodunnit than an investigation of who speaks when we speak.
‘A beautiful, challenging poetic novel that is absolutely stunning.’
– Vallum
‘Even the understatements are compelling … though [Scott] balks at being called experimental, this ain’t your grandmother’s etcetera.’
– Globe and Mail
‘The Obituary pushes narrative into uncharted territory. The text possesses a brilliant essence of time, place and flight that pulls the reader in, holds them close and urges them to read between the lines, the impressions, the moments.’
– Matrix Magazine
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The Obvious Flap
$18.00what if the rain
referred to something else?
and bowling
and shoes
were done with the mouth?Sometimes language, thoughts, and emotions are a fixed structure like a warehouse. Sometimes they are fog, waves, light, or music. This is LSE: Language as a second English. English as a grammar of ghosts. Words as the snowfall of ideas.
The Obvious Flap is a musical, poetic flux of recurring and recursive images exploring language’s luminous fringes of language. The text weaves a variety of thematic threads of humour, literary allusions, and narrative into a fabric that spreads into an open, proprioceptive linguistic environment. Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts have concocted a collaborative jam session for multiple larynxes and have made an obvious flap as they have fallen through the mirror into Plunderland.
not everyone is a poet
my dog for instance. -
The Occidental Hotel
$20.00“Mays’s passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys.” –Quill and Quire
A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called “Jupp”. The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys, and the photos in the novel are photos of the performances by the controversial Beuys. At once echoing the moody worlds of W. G. Sebald and incorporating outrageous elements of pulp fiction, this novel of dark romanticism is not for optimists seeking redemption, but for those willing to take a look into a searing heart of darkness.
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The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution
$22.95The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution is about a couple experiencing a mid-life crisis. The husband loses his job as editor of a financial magazine. Neither are happy with their aging bodies. He seems to have gotten by with charm and frozen emotions. The wife has no idea how angry she is with him for his detachment. It is her idea to sell the house and just travel. But he is not coping well with retirement, so he simply walks off a ferry in Australia and leaves her. He steals a cat (well, he steals an expensive SUV that happens to have a cat onboard) and he flees Sydney, ending up in Apollo Bay, a few hours south-west of Melbourne, where he falls in with a group of anarchists and punk rockers in a tattoo parlour, planning revolution. Meanwhile, the wife sits tight in Sydney with no idea of where her husband might be or what happened. She moves into the red-light Kings Cross area, befriending the owner of the hostel, a seventy-year-old ex-cop drag queen from Saint John, New Brunswick, and waits to hear from her husband. When she learns that her husband is fine, consumed by wrath, she invokes the angry spirit of an evil nurse, a key player in the terrible Chelmsworth sleep therapy in which many patients died (historical fact). While Lyndon gets in touch with his original career ambition to become an artist and wrestles with anarchism and capitalism, Margaux gets in touch with her rage and meets people who can help her deal with it. A serio-comedic thriller about a post-retirement couple who embark on an unintentionally life-changing around-the-world adventure, The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist’s Solution is about the meaning of life, healing from old wounds, romantic love at all ages, and how with love and passion, we can make a difference, at any age.
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The Occupation of Heather Rose
$16.95Two epigraphs that frame The Occupation of Heather Rose, one from Alice in Wonderland and the other from Heart of Darkness, prepare the audience for the nightmare of dislocation and alienation this one-woman show evokes.
Young, naïve, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as she wings her way north in a bush plane, to land in an isolated and remote northern/Native community, carrying her Canada Food Guides, plans for fitness classes and community social activities with her.
She is met, when she lands, with what she initially perceives as a careless disrespect for anything she has understood to date of culture and civilization. The destitute, wretched and alienated Native population she has been sent to “move forward” meet her bright imperial gaze with the blank stares that arise from relentless years of exploitation and broken promises.
Nine months later Heather Rose is “bushed”—utterly disillusioned by the growing horror of her new-found realization that what her culture has to offer this community: the alcohol bootlegged in by the charming bush pilot; the unsuitable clothing sold by the thoughtless proprietor of the general store; the gasoline used as much by the youth of the community to get high as to afford them access to what has become the tractless wilderness they inhabit; she finally understands is less than nothing—total dependency. She returns, compelled, like Marlowe in Heart of Darkness to tell her story to others—like her missing supervisor, whose empty office she “occupies” on her return, illustrating her monologue of despair on a blackboard to an absent colonial authority for which the audience stands in as its silent and complicit witness.
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The Ocean in the Well
$20.00Stefano falls madly in love with Milena, leaves the seminary and his religious vocation, mesmerized by the beauty and the charm of the girl. But, as often happens in life, reality does not follow the schemes designed by humans: fate, perfidy and destiny, hinder the path established by the two lovers. The people of the town, who had seen the vocation of the young man as a collective good, receive the news of Stefano abandoning the seminary with disappointment and dismay. To escape the hostility, Stefano leaves for America with a promise to come back in a year, when he and Milena would get married and then both would go back to America together. However, once in New York Stefano faces loneliness, hard work, and the criminal underworld.
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The Odious Child
$21.95What would you do if your child was a furry feral creature or your new love interest a potential serial killer (or worse, a fictitious cliché)? In The Odious Child, Carolyn Black invents her own blend of urban fantasy, crafting a unique storyscape that she populates with a series of mostly nameless figures who are trapped in social roles that they anxiously try to fulfill – and sometimes manage to escape. With a refreshingly clear voice and dark, offbeat sense of humour, Black tempers her incisive examination of contemporary frustration and loneliness with wry optimism and wit.
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The Odyssey
$20.00Fifty years ago, in July 1969, human beings embarked on an epic journey to land on the moon. Now, in July 2019, poet Ken Hunt utilizes NASA’s Apollo 11 voice transcription document, a chronicle of the first six days of that mission, to create The Odyssey, an erasure poem of star charts carved from the technical jargon and offhand remarks found in that transmission. The resulting text is both a progressive investigation and a commemorative homage to a major historic event; it will transport you from the surface of our planet to the eerie territory of outer space, a realm populated by the disembodied voices of ghosts, gods, and lost explorers.
The Odyssey compares the astronauts of the 20th and 21st centuries to seafarers of ancient Greek literature, mythic figures who devoted their lives to endeavours of discovery and understanding.
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The Only Way Is the Steady Way
$19.95Essays about baseball’s past, present, and future—and the wisdom of Ichiro Suzuki
The Only Way Is the Steady Way is a baseball memoir in scorecards and baseball cards, a recollection of the game’s biggest stars and outlandish personalities, and introspective letters to a legendary player. These essays examine the meaning of baseball across international borders and at all levels of the game—from Little League diamonds to big league ballparks. Parents learn unexpected lessons at t-ball, cheap souvenirs reveal their hidden significance, and baseball’s beating heart is exposed through sharply beautiful observations about the history of the game. Forbes locates peace, reassurance, and a way to measure the passage of time with home run bonanzas, old games on YouTube, and especially in the unique career of beloved outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.
Just as he did in The Utility of Boredom, Forbes shows us how a summertime distraction might help us to make sense of the world, and how a certain enigmatic Japanese superstar offers a surprising ethos for living.
“Andrew Forbes’s essays are cool and clear and may well slake the thirst of any thinking baseball fan.”—Rob Neyer, author of Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game
“Transcendent prose.”—Shelf Awareness
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The Opium Lady
$19.95JoAnne Soper-Cook is such a spell-binding storyteller that she can lead her willing captives almost anywhere. In her new story collection, The Opium Lady, she draws her readers into the far corners of human yearning.
The Opium Lady resembles a photo album of an extensive family, with a picture at the beginning of each story. The snapshots were taken between perhaps 1910 and 1955, and most of the events in the stories are contemporary with the snapshots, but a curious atmosphere of the present day hovers over all and finds its way into the narrator’s voice.
Soon shadowy connections appear, and it becomes clear that in some way the narrator herself is implicated. Among the motley cast are rich people and poor people, men, women, and children, the scandalizers and the scandalized, housewives and farmers, tradesmen, charlatans, and ne’er-do-wells. It’s clear that there are connections and that all of the pieces fit together, but Soper-Cook hands over the missing link only at the end of this fascinating book, once the narrator’s identity and secret are revealed.
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The Optimistic Environmentalist
$19.95A hopeful, inspiring, and honest take on the environment
Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.
The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.
Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen. A bright green future is not only possible, it’s within our grasp.