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Showing 7905–7920 of 9481 results
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The Other Mrs. Smith
$22.95This novel traces the life experiences of a once highly successful woman who falls prey to electroshock and subsequently struggles to piece back together her life. Naomi suffers enormous memory loss; additionally, an estrangement from her family of origin that she has no way to wrap her mind around. The novel begins with her wandering the corridor of St. Patricks-St Andrews Mental Health Centre (St. Pukes) faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of coming to terms with the damage done her, as well uncovering the hidden details of her life. It moves back and forth between a relatively happy childhood in the legendary north-end Winnipeg of the mid-1900s and post-ECT adulthood in Toronto. An exceptionally kind man named Ger who befriends Naomi comes to suspect that important pieces of the puzzle of what befell her lurk beneath the surface of writing in a binder of hers, which comes to be known as Black Binder Number Three. What Naomi progressively comes to do, often with Ger’s help and just as often with the help of a very different and eerily similar sister named Rose, is find ways to do justice to her life and to the various people in it. Filled with a vast array of colourful and insightful characters from a variety of communities–Toronto¹s Kensington Market of the 1970s, the 1970’s trans community, north-end Winnipeg Jewry, and the ingenious and frequently hilarious mad community–this novel sensitizes us to the horror of electroshock, takes us to new levels in our understanding of what it means to be human, and, in the process, leads us to question the very concept of normalcy.
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The Other Plays
$29.95The published version of George Ryga’s hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada’s best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga’s very reputation as a dramatist is an anomaly. This anthology, then, is a challenge, even a provocation, to examine Ryga in light of the other plays that constitute his substantial dramatic oeuvre. How was it that one of Canada’s pioneering playwrights became an outsider to the very theatre he had been instrumental in creating?
As a self-proclaimed figure of exile, as an “artist in resistance,” Ryga criticized issues of Canadian culture in numerous instances—particularly its colonized nature, even turning on the very theatre that had earlier nourished him. Employing disruptive elements such as flashbacks/forwards, poetic speeches, songs, sound motifs and changes of setting and weather, Ryga gives his plays a sense of restless movement, even a loss of control. His characters may be physically and spiritually trapped by their colonial uncertainties, but they have great capacity to envision a different tomorrow. It was a vision of tomorrow that, with the sole exception of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the theatre of Ryga’s day had no wish to share.
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The Other Side of Midnight
$19.95The first St. John’s taxi stand started up in the early-20th Century and greatly expanded prior to the Second World War. There are now almost four hundred taxis operating within the city limits. The Other Side of Midnight: Taxi Cab Stories is not a traditional history of taxi cabs in St. John’s. It describes the commonly shared experiences of an underwritten portion of Newfoundland’s working class while presenting St. John’s from the front seat of a taxi cab. It will explore the working lives of its subjects, as well as their thoughts and feelings about their choice of career and their clients. Every segment of our society utilizes their services, from the social elite to the social obsolete: businessmen, drug pushers, prostitutes and forlorn lovers. They are witnesses to the best and worst in all of us. They are trained listeners to troubled people, as well as cheerleaders and goodwill ambassadors. Individuals will emerge, as well as equally unique understandings of their working lives. Comical, absurd and often dramatic, many of their reminiscences will be of long hours and years on the job, their hopes and decayed dreams.
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The Ottawa City Project
$20.00Working in the tradition of such previous poetry collections as Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (1972), George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (1986), Joe Blades’ River Suite (1998) and, closer to home, William Hawkins’ own Ottawa Poems (1966), rob mclennan’s thirteenth trade poetry collection The Ottawa City Project reads like a love song to a city caught between competing identities of local and national. The poems in this collection work to not only reflect the more conservative, even bureaucratic aspects of the city, but the myths of the city, and work through references and concerns that go completely against those myths, into their own stories, and into the realities of the city itself.
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The Outlines of Our Warm Bodies
$9.95Pat Jasper collects memories, peels off their labels, gives them a good wash, and transforms them into insights. She focuses on the “small close spaces” of the family — on domestic relationships, crises, and patterns, on coming to terms with time and its power to destroy and to heal. Whether inspired by incidents or by objects infused with emotion, Jasper demonstrates a remarkably strong narrative voice, excelling as a storyteller who carefully unravels the yarn of a woman’s life.
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The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion
$16.95Suffering the aftermath of the war and foreseeing the dawning of new ones, the Oxford Roof Climbers, the Benevolent Order of, lay siege to a sleepy university town. A stand against stands, a dare to end all daring, a doing that protests doings; the two haunted men—armed with a talent for practical jokes—grasp at love and dare to imagine a new world. The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion, despite its harmless beginnings, brings the Arab Revolt dangerously close to the heart of the Empire.
Winner of the 2007 CAA Carol Bolt Award -
The Oysters I Bring to Banquets
$20.00Gary Geddes’s new collection of lyrics and poem-sequences ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to the struggle of characters in classical legends to cope with the interference of close relatives and extended family, the gods. And poems about Yukon adventures and the wonders and plight of monarch butterflies in Mexican highlands. It’s also a diverse gathering of elegies for friends, literary luminaries, creatures and natural habitats in a world under siege, but also a series of hymns to art, beauty, human dignity and endurance.
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The P-Town Murders
$20.00In a place that’s ‘to die for’, no one expects to die for real.
So muses undercover detective Bradford Fairfax after an anonymous caller tells him that his ex-boyfriend, party boy Ross Pretty, has died from an accidental overdose of ecstasy in “the gayest place on earth”: Provincetown, Massachusetts. Brad becomes convinced that Ross’s death is no accident, and his intention to bury his former lover suddenly turns into a full-scale investigation.
Brad quickly pins the murder on Ross’s ex-employer, the malevolent Hayden Rosengarten, owner of a high-end sex resort catering to a rich and famous clientele for whom discretion is everything. But when Rosengarten also turns up dead, the list of suspects suddenly grows: could it be Cinder Lindquist, the flamboyant female-impersonator? Or Johnny K., one of Rosengarten’s merciless henchmen? What about Big Ruby, the lesbian café owner with a big heart, but an even bigger gun? And why does everyone in P-Town seem to be a Buddhist? On top of it all, Brad finds himself falling in love with Zach, a blue-haired twink from his past.
Within this colourful cast of characters, it seems everyone has a secret to hide. Jeffrey Round has created a deliciously camp, sexy thriller with an unforgettable new breed of hero — one who always gets his man.
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The Pagan Nuptials of Julia and Other Stories
$17.95The Pagan Nuptials of Julia chronicles the lives of ordinary English-speaking Quebeckers who “did not go the other way” down the 401, a neglected Canadian minority that saw its treasured world sacrificed by statist deceit and disowned with “stricken, evasive looks” even by its own kind. With a vivid, contrarian insight, Keith Henderson shows us that not all change is even-handed or mending, and that when it embodies “refinement and ‘necessary humanity,” the Past merits passionate preservation. Contemplating these at times gothic, always superbly crafted tales, alert readers will find themselves querying their fashionable complacencies while they ponder a vision conservative in the very best of senses – one that revives the classical faith in human bonds and meaning, and prompts us to remember that we are “born into the arms of love.” Reminiscent of the works of Hawthorne, Mansfield, Mann, and Sinclair Ross, Keith Henderson’s The Pagan Nuptials of Julia presents the brilliant, interrogative creations of one of Canada’s finest “journalists of the soul.”
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The Pagan Wall
$24.95Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by a master storyteller. What appears on the surface as a murder mystery set in Alsatia and the Rhineland, involving international arms dealers, dangerous liaisons, and every other known mystery novel archetype, The Pagan Wall unfolds into layer upon layer of meanings, reversals, historical shifts, philosophical conundrums and linguistic puzzles. Filled with police inspectors quoting Lacan, the appearance of Martin Heidegger as a character, and whole passages of translated epistemology woven into the dialogue, Arnason’s narrative disguises are so seamlessly accomplished that all readers, whether ardent mystery genre fans or exotic deconstructionists, will believe this story to be specifically written for them.
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The Pages of the Sea
$24.95Shortlisted for the 2025 RSL Christopher Bland Prize • Shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.
When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?
A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.
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The Pain Tree
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The Painted House of Maud Lewis
$22.95For many years, Maud Lewis was one of Nova Scotia’s best-loved folk painters. In the 1990s she was embraced by the rest of the country when the landmark exhibition of her work The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis travelled across Canada. By the time the tour was over, half a million people had become acquainted with her delightful work.
Between 1938, when she married Everett Lewis, until her death in 1970, Maud Lewis lived in a tiny one-room house near Digby, Nova Scotia. Over the years, she painted the doors inside and out, the windowpanes, the walls and cupboards, the wallpaper, the little staircase to the sleeping loft, the woodstove, the breadbox, the dustpan, almost everything her hand touched. Her house was a joy to behold, and it became a magnet for tourists as well as a focal point in her village. In 1979, after Everett Lewis died, the Maud Lewis Painted House Society worked diligently to raise funds to acquire, preserve, and display the house as part of the cultural heritage of the area as well as a memorial to their beloved artist.
In 1984, the house and its contents were purchased by the Province of Nova Scotia for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In The Painted House of Maud Lewis, Laurie Hamilton, the conservator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, shows how all the different parts of the house — the building itself, the painted household items, even the wallpaper — were catalogued, conserved, and prepared for exhibition. The preliminary stages of conservation treatment began in 1996 in a most unusual location: the Sunnyside Mall in Bedford, just outside Halifax, where conservators worked in full view of the public. The conservators used established techniques and invented new ones to complete their unique project and documented every stage of the restoration photographically.
The book also features more than sixty-five colour photos including several taken by noted photographer Bob Brooks in 1965 for the Star Weekly. Today, anyone can visit the tiny house that has become a folk art phenomenon. The restoration story spans two decades, but the story of the Painted House continues as each new visitor to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia finds delight and inspiration in Maud Lewis’s joyous vision.
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The Painter’s Craft
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The Painter’s Wife
$18.95Evelyn is an extraordinary product of a childhood tyrannized by her emotionally frigid and abusive mother, whose life centres on her pretentiously formal weekly bridge games and her banner-bearing role in the local Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, even though her ancestors fought on the side of the American Revolution against England.
Enraptured by a deep affinity for the arts, the young Evelyn is determined to escape her oppressive and dysfunctional family in the Town of Mount Royal near Montreal through her work in the fashion industry. Feeling trapped in the stifling confines of her petit bourgeois 1940s existence, she runs away to New York just before Pearl Harbor, destined to become a rich and famous fashion illustrator in the United States and France. There, in Central Park, she falls helplessly in love with René, a talented and tormented painter who is both constantly seeking and rejecting recognition and success.
Having been raised on the traditional virtues of prudishness and saintly images of a poor family from the French-Canadian working-class district of St-Henri in Montreal, René could not possibly be more foreign to the society darling that Evelyn has become.
A novel about art and passion, The Painter’s Wife takes us on a journey through Paris, London, Provence and Ireland; through New York, Toronto, San Francisco and along the luminous shores of the St. Lawrence River. Inspired by the lives of two great artists who are as yet relatively unknown in Canada—Evelyn Rowat and René Marcil—The Painter’s Wife is written in a language as brilliant and intense as the mercurial lives of its completely contradictory characters.
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The Painting On Auerperg’s Wall
$22.95The novel revolves around the forced sale of a painting in Nazi-occupied Vienna. Zoltan Nagy, the legitimate heir, is pressured by his daughter to go to court and recoup his parents’ possessions. But Zoltan is in love with the present owner of the painting. What if winning the court case means losing her? And thereby hangs a tale with several twists and turns: secrets, assumptions and slippery identities are the ingredients the author has used to create a page-turner. Zoltan’s daughter, Cereta, claims the painting was sold under duress. But is the work what it appears to be, or is it an expert forgery? And is Cereta the woman she claims to be? Or is her real name Laura? David, an art historian, who falls in love with her, cannot get at the truth. He is caught in a web of illusions and postmodernist doubts. Zoltan holds the key to the puzzle, but he is hard to read. The hardships he suffered in childhood have made him a man of a thousand disguises, a man hiding even from himself.When the dispute over the painting threatens Zoltan’s relationship with the people he loves, he realizes that it’s time to tell who is who and what is what.
The story of the Nagy family and the disputed painting is told in five parts, narrated respectively by David, Laura/Cereta, Zoltan and Nancy, his lover. It spans the decades from the forties to the new millennium, as we follow Zoltan from Vienna to Budapest and on to Los Angeles. It probes the soul-destroying effects of brutal regimes and the search for the truth in a world that challenges us to tell fact from fiction.