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Showing 7937–7952 of 9492 results
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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.
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The Perils of Geography
$14.00In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don’t be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, “all angles and confidence.” Light falls slant across them. She maps “what surrounds not what’s made still” – “the moving line.” The line she traces connects the pull of memory and moment, open roads and winter aconite, transcendental basements and ornamental shrubbery. In “Singing to the Bees,” the ten poem sequence which makes up the second of three sections in Perils, she slips inside folk wisdoms, wears them with an easy grace, all flesh and wit and possibility: dancing shoes, gifted pigs, swarming bees, airplane nuns and spectre ships. These poems make superstition delicious.
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the pet radish, shrunken
$18.00In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board.
the pet radish, shrunken, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true Pirie style, this fresh, quirky, and clear-seeing collection speaks in a range of styles and voices: From a military convoy of turtles, to a Kafkaesque conversation with a housefly, to the dissection of a fruit machine, Pirie offers oulipo found speech as it integrates and disintegrates, plays with and tumbles through language.
Earning comparisons to Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak and Leigh Kostilidis’s Hypotheticals for their shared sense of linguistic playfulness and curiosity, the pet radish, shrunken will appeal to exploring minds who are ready to question language, society, and self while not minding a taint of grief and comedy that necessarily creeps in around the edges.
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The Philosopher Stories
$22.95The dozen stories in this collection chronicle the life of Karl Pringle, a wannabe philosopher who had once been enrolled in the graduate Philosophy program at the University of Toronto where he imagined himself as an Ubermensch, a Superman derived from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. But he was summarily dismissed from the program after punching out his academic supervisor. Now Karl lives in a decrepit apartment above a butcher shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market, is unemployed and very much rootless. The stories in The Philosopher Stories follow Karl as he moves from one strange episode to another, none of which end well. Although Karl likes to think of himself as an Ubermensch, in the bleakest moments following his many mishaps, he seems to know better, that perhaps he is only fooling himself with his grandiose dreams. That he is nothing more than one of life’s rejects, an out-and-out failure. Nuanced and multilayered, funny and yet achingly sad, these stories depict a young man grappling with life’s big questions, including love, finding a place for oneself in an uncaring world, morality, success, and fate.
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The Philosophy of Gardening
$21.95For philosophizing gardeners and anyone who likes to pick up a spade and get their hands dirty
Gardeners discover a new world every year—whether they’re cultivating heirloom vegetables, foraging for wild herbs, creating a small permaculture garden on a city balcony, or maintaining a plot for self-sufficiency.
But why garden at all? These personal essays by writers, designers, and master gardeners dig into gardening’s philosophical dimensions and tend to the aesthetic, cultural, political, and sociological implications of gardens and the people who keep them.
Originally published in German, this delightful volume addresses gardening’s most deep-rooted questions and highlights the magic that, year after year, makes us pick up a shovel and get back into the garden.
Awarded the German Garden Book Prize in the Best Garden Prose Category
“What is remarkable is that the publication project is something very individual… the spectrum ranges from the ‘plea for weeds’ to the ‘metaphysics’ of the garden to urban gardening and garden shows, and the realization that gardens are ‘hopelessly ambivalent’—all in all a very interesting volume.” – Jury Citation
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The Photographer’s Last Picture
$29.95Sean Howard has written twenty poems inspired by photographs he discovered in a tattered copy of Collier’s Photographic History of the European War (1916), although ‘inspired’ is hardly an adequate word for it. For Howard, each photograph introduces a cascade of associations and ideas about history and memory, about the events and implications of the First World War, and about our ongoing relationship with global conflict. The resulting poems have the economy and energy of a stark, high-contrast print, yet what is perhaps most striking about the book is the way Howard’s prose passages chronicle the development of each photograph into a poem, like images slowly taking form in the chemistry of a darkroom tray. Following a method that is “precariously dependent on attentiveness, memory and chance encounters, personal and cultural associations followed as broadly, deeply, and unsystematically as possible,” The Photographer’s Last Picture assembles observation, description, quotation and amplification into an episodic text capable of transmitting a range of uncertain truths unavailable to conventional History.
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The Physics of Relationships
$20.00A highly readable, intimate story about loss, aging, female friendship, family, and renewal…told with grit and humor.
Lexi is a sixty-year-old widow whose solitary life is thrown into turmoil when a desperate young woman moves in with her, soon followed by the unexpected arrival of her best friend, who has separated from her husband of forty years. The mix of these three very different personalities – a powerful omnivore seeking to live life to the fullest; a sweet, self-denying vegan; and Lexi, a thoughtful, still grieving widow – leads to some surprising (sometimes humorous) situations that force Lexi to re-examine her life. In the physics of relationships, Lexi observes that nature abhors a vacuum. She begins to wonder if she herself has somehow manipulated her circumstances to fill that vacuum…simply to imitate the life she had before the death of her husband.
“[The Physics of Relationships] was a joy to read. I loved the flow of the writing, the profundity of the observations, and the humor. You have truly sketched a very accurate, forgiving, and endearing picture of a woman at this stage of life. Thank you for writing this book.” -Kaiya Cade Smith Blackburn
“You did an amazing job writing so truly in the voice of an older woman…. I found Lexi’s character appealing from the first page, and her consistent voice made her a very sympathetic, fully realized character. I particularly enjoyed her reflections on all she observed about human nature and the realities and absurdities of aging. She is kind, funny, curious, thoughtful, eager to puzzle out relationships. …. I enjoyed the twists and turns and tensions of the plot, three women living together, and the extra complication of Tasha [her daughter], and romantic partners, and the suspense of whether a myriad of small/large issues will get resolved.” – Rosalyn Art
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The Pierre Bonga Loops
$22.00A documentary poem that lays bare the black presence in the northwest, it is also about fathers and sons, now and then. Born in the 1780’s Bonga was the son of freed slaves who worked for J. Sayer & Co. in 1795 at Fond du Lac. He was employed by the North West Co., the South West Co. & the American Fur Co. in their Fond du Lac Departments. Using images and text from documentary sources including the Hudson’s Bay Company Archive Bailey has constructed an important, innovative and exciting book.
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The Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper
$32.95Drawing from the various facets of Stephen Harper’s life, Lloyd Mackey provides indicators on what to expect from a Harper prime ministership. It takes into account the kinds of strategies he will be required to adopt, depending on whether his Liberal opponent in the next election is the aging Paul Martin or someone else — perhaps more similar in age or demeanor.
Stephen Harper would be the first economist to serve as a prime minister. Those who mentored him on his way see his strong grasp of economic issues as pivotal to a truly conservative approach to Canadian freedom, prosperity, and social wellness.
Any look at Harper and the new Conservative party he leads requires an examination of the substantive evangelical Christian legacies coming out of both the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties. Harper handles this legacy both gingerly and thoughtfully. The writings of such religious icons as C. S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge have helped shape his world view. The measure of his success in handling this legacy will be determined by the respective roles that the social and progressive conservatives play in any government he leads.
Laureen Teskey, his wife, and their two children, Benjamin and Rachel, have turned Harper into a warmer and more compassionate human being. Teskey is a strong figure not only in her own right, but also as a sounding board and a reminder of reality. They are a strong partnership in most ways, at once complementary and contrasting.
The viewpoints in this book will provide a few clues to whether Harper’s carefully-crafted conservatism can carry the day in the 21st century’s third federal election.
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The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa
$17.95Here is the diary of a court lady of Japan from the golden age of Nara, more than a thousand years ago. The Naran age, characterized by hierarchy, rigid adherence to tradition and the performance of ritual, was a sophisticated urban society as different from ours as can be imagined. But what is The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa? Is it a legitimate historical document or a flight of invention by a melancholy archaeologist, fatally infected by his own sad past? Either way, The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa strays painfully, touchingly close to the source of its own artifice. In his first novel, Barrie Sherwood weaves a lyrical mystery of two times, making a history that is transformed by fiction but which is no less real for the invention. Either way, The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa strays painfully, touchingly close to the source of its own artifice. In his first novel, Barrie Sherwood weaves a lyrical mystery of two times, making a history that is transformed by fiction but which is no less real for the invention.