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Showing 7889–7904 of 9481 results
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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.
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The Orange Grove
$17.95Nominated for the 2017 White Pine Award
Nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award
In an unnamed and war-torn country, twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the sanctuary of the family’s orange grove. But when a bomb comes from “the other side of the mountain” and kills their grandparents, their father must choose how to best avenge his parents’ death, with tragic and unforseen consequences.
Morally complex and completely unforgettable, Larry Tremblay’s best-selling The Orange Grove offers up a tragic fable about the absurd logic of terrorism, the power of brotherly love, and the hope for peace in a broken world.
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The Orange Notebooks
$23.95Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, this is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning.
The siesta hour, France. Bees fly in lavender bushes. Anna has just come home, but something is wrong. She fears nothing will ever be right again.
Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: fragments and tales about her London childhood, the story of her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, Anna’s consequent obsession with the English Channel, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead.
In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.
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The Origin of Feces
$16.95The Origin of Feces takes an important subject out of locker-rooms, potty-training manuals, and bio-solids management boardrooms into the fresh air of everyone’s lives. With insight and wit, David Waltner-Toews explores what has been too often ignored and makes a compelling argument for a deeper understanding of human and animal waste. Approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives — evolutionary, ecological, and cultural — The Origin of Feces shows us how integral excrement is to biodiversity, agriculture, public health, food production and distribution, and global ecosystems. From the primordial ooze to dung beetles, from bug frass, cat scats, and flush toilets to global trade, pandemics, and energy, this is the awesome, troubled, unexpurgated story of feces.
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The Original Face
$19.95A novel about the gig economy.
Twenty-nine-year-old Daniel is an under-employed internet artist who’s struggling as much with money and inspiration as he is in his relationship with Grace. Against a backdrop of a digital economy that rewards online platforms instead of content creators, with climate-change anxiety hanging in the air, the resolutely contemporary Morissette immerses readers into a year of modern love, as Daniel and Grace navigate their aspirations, insecurities and ambitions amidst a culture obsessed with selfies and identity.
A fresh and imaginative critical examination of work and life in the 21st century by the author of the “cultishly popular” New Tab.
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The Originals
$17.95The Originals
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The Orphan of Chao
$18.95“An astonishing feat of compelling, economical storytelling.” —Toronto Star
The Kingdom of Jin, 612 BCE. The ruthless court minister Tu-An Ku orchestrates the annihilation of his rival, Chao Tun, and nine generations of his family. Only one survives: Chao Tun’s newborn grandson, smuggled to safety by the doctor Cheng Ying. When the state decrees the execution of every infant until the orphan of Chao is found, Cheng Ying makes an unthinkable sacrifice to save the sole descendant and deceive Tu-An Ku into raising the boy as his own. Years later, the orphan must confront the truth of his lineage to avenge his family’s bloodline.
Based on the thirteenth-century Chinese opera The Great Revenge of the Zhao Orphan by Ji Junxiang 紀君祥, Michael Man boldly adapts this legendary five-act revenge tale into a gripping, action-packed one-act with urgent contemporary resonance. Often called the “Chinese Hamlet,” The Orphan of Chao is a timeless story of survival, sacrifice, and the cost of preserving one’s values in the face of eradication.
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The Orphanage
$12.95The story of a public personality—the possible future mayor of Montreal—this memoir recounts how Richard Bergeron and his four brothers lived in an orphanage for five years in the 1960s. Set in a small city in Northern Quebec, surrounded by bush and industry, this account describes the five floors of dormitories with 50 children on each floor, the daily routine, and the nuns who ran the orphanage. This short and moving story of how Richard began the rest of his life will take the reader to another time and place.