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Showing 7921–7936 of 9481 results
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The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat
$17.95In this sensuously defiant collection of new poems, the winner of the 2004 Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal expands and deepens a poetic ruse. In his critically acclaimed collections Saracen Island and Companion, David Solway took on the voice of a fictitious Greek poet named Andreas Karavis. The poems of these earlier two books were so artful and refreshingly immediate that many readers were convinced that they were authentic translations from the Greek.
For The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, a new book of ostensible translations, Solway adopts the persona of Karavis’s spurned lover, Turkish Cypriot poet Nesmine Rifat and explores the aftermath of one of Karavis’s love affairs. Lushly sexual and sparkling with wit and intelligence, these passionate lyrics take the form of undelivered letters, written by Rifat in the wake of Karavis’s desertion and his eventual marriage to her rival Anna Zoumi.
Solway portrays, with subtlety and sensitivity, a powerful woman and gifted poet undergoing a turbulent emotional journey. Moving from wrath and arrogant disdain, through bitterness and grief, to an acceptance of the love she cannot subdue, his female poet grows in both strength and art. As an intimate record of one woman’s anguish, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat is a remarkable achievement — even more so when one recalls that the author is actually a man.
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The Panic Room
$18.95Preoccupied with the complexities of identity and selfhood, memory, embodiment, loss, and family, Rebecca Păpucaru carefully examines details that make up one’s lived experience.“Lobster Dinner” describes a happy childhood memory of eating an entire lobster with an admiring father as her audience. “Take It or Leave It” is the casual and quotidian, yet heartbreaking, failure of a daughter and her mother to find an emotional connection during an art gallery outing. “Your Women Are Beautiful” betrays the dreamy excitement of travelling in an unfamiliar place, juxtaposed with the blunt reality of arriving home again.The Panic Room is about the giants that loom over us, too. A second-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrant, Păpucaru attempts to grapple with connecting with her family’s past as well as the distinct feeling of being disconnected. In “On Watching an Eastern Bloc Comedy” she writes, “I’m one generation apart from all this, / and ashamed. Of my father, before his / refrigerator, mourning age spots on lettuce.”Păpucaru offers unabashed honesty: the sort of reflections you’d only tell your dearest friend.
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The Parallel Project
$29.95The Parallel Project is a groundbreaking collection of monologues written by and for IBPOC (Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour) and racialized artists. Emerging from an innovative monologue-writing initiative, this vital resource brings together original commissioned works designed to reflect a diverse range of voices, lived experiences, and cultural perspectives.
Presented in versatile texts coined as “monologue clusters,” each piece is fully customizable—allowing artists to tailor excerpts for optimal use in classes, auditions, and performances. Spanning themes such as identity, community, grief, queerness, language, immigration, family, and more, The Parallel Project is a lighthouse, forging a path for under-represented voices to take centre stage.
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The Partition Principle
$9.95The close result of the October ’95 referendum in Quebec has more people than ever asking: if Canada is divisible, why not Quebec? The question of partition is one of those rare issues that could really change the political and geographic landscapes of Quebec. This straightforward account of the history and future of the idea of partition will be an invaluable resource for those who want to understand the pros, cons, and various possibilities of the partition option. McAlpine argues that Quebec cannot separate from Canada and expect to retain its present borders. The Partition Principle is not an analysis of the Quebec separation movement, nor does it explore what, if any, modifications are needed to the Canadian constitution or governmental administrative arrangements to “renew federalism.” In exploring the partition option, McAlpine neither seeks to legitimize brinkmanship games nor puts forth a call to arms. He simply examines partition as a strategy to be enacted only if all other strategies to unite Canada fail. He maps out the specifics of how Quebec might be partitioned in the event of separation, and devotes special attention to aboriginal land claims and the status of Montreal.
The merits of the partition principle must be debated now, while we still have the time and energy to do so. As McAlpine says, the eve of a referendum or an election is a poor time to explore options for the future of this country.
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The Party & The Candidate
$20.95In these two entwined, fast-paced plays, the hilarious goings-on behind the scenes of a controversial election chaotically unfold first at the fundraiser that will decide the party’s nominee and then months later at a debate the night before the election.
The top candidates for the Left are Bill Biszy, a gay Black man who’s also the star of the Sharkman film franchise, and Heather Straughan, the tough woman who’s still hampered by the public knowledge that her husband cheated on her many years ago. Both are the guests of honour at Butch Buchanan’s fundraiser—whomever he decides to donate to will get the party’s nomination, and will run against his brother, the leader of the Right. But so many things stand in Bill and Heather’s way before the night ends. Many months later, when the final debate ends in the need for extreme damage control, it’s clearly the worst time for everyone’s secrets to be revealed, but what fun would it be without some election-day drama?
With a large cast of frenzied characters and piercing dialogue, The Party & The Candidate will make sure you never look at politics the same way again.
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The Party Wall
$19.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 GILLER PRIZE
SELECTED FOR INDIES INTRODUCE SUMMER/FALL 2016
WINNER OF THE PRESTIGIOUS FRANCE-QUEBEC PRIZE
NOMINATED FOR THE QUEBEC BOOKSELLER’S PRIZE
Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall shifts between and ties together stories about pairs joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she may not be the biological mother of her own son despite having given birth to him; a brother and sister unite, as their mother dies, to search for their long-lost father; two young sisters take a detour home, unaware of the tragedy that awaits; and a political couple—when the husband accedes to power in a post-apocalyptic future state—is shaken by the revelation of their own shared, if equally unknown, history.
Lyrical, intelligent, and profound, The Party Wall is luminously human, a surreally unforgettable journey through the barriers that can both separate us and bring us together.
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The Party without Bosses
$10.95The former metalworker and trade union leader Lúis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva-known to everyone as Lula-was elected president of Brazil in late 2002 in his fourth attempt since founding the Workers’ Party in 1980. The Party Without Bosses features a discussion between Lula and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari that took place in the heady days after the birth of the Workers’ Party. At the time, the optimism and radicalism of the 1970s in South America was beginning to fade in the face of Reaganism’s gathering momentum, and the Left had entered a protracted period of frustration and defeat.The discussion is introduced by leading Guattari scholar Gary Genosko and in addition contains his lively diaristic essay on the 2002 campaign.
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The Passenger Seat
$22.95A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness
Two teenagers leave their small town on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness, with little more than canned food, second-hand camping gear, and the rifle they buy for reasons neither can articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents and peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the less their actions—and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play—are bound by the usual constraints. When one decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the encounter leads them down a road from which there’s no coming back.
A searing examination of male friendship and masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness, The Passenger Seat introduces Vijay Khurana as an extraordinary new voice.
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The Path of Loneliness
$18.95The Path of Loneliness explores separateness and the many facets of love, desire, grief and loss that we experience during our life journey. Although we walk with others, some closely, some casually, ultimately, we all walk alone. Love makes the path less lonely and comes in many forms, real and surreal, requited and unrequited ghostly and mysterious. Though lovers walk love’s pathway together, there is always a small loneliness nestled inside each heart and soul that remains separate. This book opens up the secret world of emotion and spirit sequestered inside us, hidden to our outer selves. The book coaxes the reader to delve into those hidden areas and revisit old secrets, some forgotten and some remembered, allowing us to come away with a truer knowledge of our place in life as we walk our own “Path of Loneliness.”
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The Path of the Jaguar
$19.95As The Path of the Jaguar opens in 1997, Guatemala is emerging from thirty-six years of civil war. Amparo Ajuix, a determined young married woman who lives in a Mayan village with her non-Mayan Guatemalan husband, is optimistic about the future. She is pregnant with her second child. With the help of an American NGO, she runs a savings club for the women in her village with the goal of being able to offer micro-credit loans. Eager to take advantage of Guatemala’s new democracy to strengthen the culture of the Mayan people, she campaigns to switch the language of instruction in the village’s primary school from Spanish to the local Mayan language of Cakchiquel.
But Amparo’s life is wracked with tensions. Dona María, an older woman who is a powerful figure in the village market where Amparo sells her handicrafts, is jealous of Amparo’s savings club. Amparo’s best friend, Raquel, is a born-again Protestant who disdains Amparo’s devout Catholicism. The youngest of Amparo’s nine siblings, Yolanda, a pretty seventeen-year-old girl, flirts with foreign men in the nearby tourist town of Antigua. Most seriously of all, Amparo’s husband, Eusebio, suspects that he is not the father of Amparo’s second child. Even though his suspicions are groundless, the erosion of complicity between them poisons their marriage.
The second part of the novel opens in 2003. Amparo is working as a teacher in a language school for tourists in Antigua. Most of the students are Americans who want to learn Spanish, but the school’s owner phones Amparo with a special request: a man who manages programs for foreign students in Guatemala wishes to study her native Cakchiquel Mayan language. The experience of teaching this man, whom she calls Ricardo, confronts her with the in-between nature of her own culture: she does not speak Cakchiquel perfectly, as her parents do, yet as a Native person she cannot be completely accepted into Spanish-speaking Guatemalan society; her Catholicism is mixed with beliefs in traditional Mayan gods. Her crisis about what to preserve and what to discard from her culture is accentuated when her son, Pablito, a sickly, enigmatic boy whom she struggles to understand, falls ill.
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The Path To Ardroe
$19.95The Path to Ardroe is an exploration of friendship and its limits, life changes, and the challenges and aspirations of writers.
Peter Chisholm wrestles with his craft just as his writer friend Rick Connelly does; so too does the novice Melissa, the daughter of their friends Ronnie and Carol.
Trapped by his own deceptions, Peter finds himself at forty-two without direction and so it seemed an eerie coincidence to him that unplanned events had conspired to place him in Lochinver, Scotland, developing his next novel and seeking out his former lover.
He has gone there to seek a solution to his restlessness and his self-imposed fakery, but he has no idea of the fearful ghosts he will conjure.
In various states of introspection Peter’s friends are also coming to terms with their own life-changing moments.
For emerging writer Melissa Picard, on a six-month trip to Strasbourg, France, it will be her struggle with the past criticisms of her writing.
Through a budding friendship with a celebrated writer and a transformative affair with an artist, she begins to understand that her challenges are not unique, and that to write with a simple purity, the way Derain painted, she must finally listen to her own voice.Rick Connelly is also at a creative crossroads of self and meaning.
Struggling with the control of his writing voice and intently floundering in his need to show what his father meant to him, he seeks the solitude of nature to reshape his instincts about himself and the life path he has chosen.
Finally there is Tania, who lost her mother too young and whose immigrant roots shape her in ways that she is only beginning to understand.
Faced with her own immanent death from pancreatic cancer, she is stripping her life bare of all pretense while taking stock of the people and events who have made her who she really is.
But it will be Peter Chisholm at the novel’s end, who in a profound epiphany, will discover the fulcrum that balances private compromises with the artistic quandaries of the literary life, and it will not be the revelation he assumed. -
The Peace Thieves
$24.95This compelling and ambitious novel is about the search for peace during a civil war and through its long, complicated aftermath.
Thirty years after his tour as a peacekeeper in Croatia in 1993, Francis is getting by — though only just — but when Viva arrives in Hamilton searching for the father she never knew, Francis’ world tilts, upsetting the burden of his wartime memories. This powerful and compassionate novel alternates between the voices of Francis and Viva, delving into the secrets we hold, the hurts we try to hide, and the simple human connections that bind us.
In war-torn Croatia, Francis meets Lorina, a local woman whose father had just been killed in the conflict; he does his best to protect her in the face of overwhelming resistance and absurdity as he struggles to work alongside the impossibly difficult Master Corporal Mackey. Toward the end of his tour, Francis bears witness firsthand to the devastating aftermath of ethnic cleansing — and then, when a careless moment results in a life-altering injury, he is sent home.
Viva first encounters Francis serving breakfast to the homeless outside the bar he runs — where soldiers like him come to try to forget what they’ve seen and what they?ve done. The young woman is angry and resentful, spoiling for confrontation wherever she turns, but in time finds that Francis is not a villain, but someone she just might need to have in her life.
The Peace Thieves has the courage to ask tough questions about the true costs of war, not only to the citizens of the country where the conflict occurs, but to the people who attempt to help and protect them.
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The Pemmican Eaters
$18.95A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada’s preeminent Métis poets
With a title derived from John A. Macdonald’s moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont’s sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel.
Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont’s ancestors. In Dumont’s The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture.
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The People and Josh Wilson
$24.00Josh Wilson’s grade nine history project leads him stumbling into a parallel world where Native American people have not been displaced by colonists. Instead, the People thrive in a powerful domain and co-exist with small colonies in Massachusetts and New York. Josh has only a few days to find his way back to his own world. His journey among leaders of the colonists and the Mahican people is an action packed trip through an alternate history that inspires readers to question the past and rethink the present.
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The Perfect Circle
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The Perfect System
$17.95By the time he was 30, Syd Kessler was a millionaire many times over, the epitome of the poor kid making good. But inside him, a hollowness was taking hold, and later, in middle age, he fell seriously ill. In the dark days of a long recovery, Kessler explored the Kabbalah and the discoveries of quantum physics, developing a system of moral principles from the truths of how the universe began and operates. His set of principles ? from Big Bang to Moral Cause and Effect to Selfless Selfishness to Closure and Energy ? are revolutionary. They will heighten your sense of self and purpose and transform your relationships in every part of your life.