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Showing 7921–7936 of 9492 results
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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.
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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.”