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All Books in this Collection

Showing 65–80 of 9005 results

  • 1949: The Twilight Before the Dawn

    1949: The Twilight Before the Dawn

    $19.95

    1949 is an historic, non-fictional account of the role one man played in breaking the shackles that kept Britain’s oldest colony in a state of permanent poverty and who led its people to a knock-down, drag ’em out battle into Confederation and the 20th century—Joseph R. Smallwood.

  • 1979

    1979

    $17.95

    A fast-paced political comedy from Michael Healey, the critically acclaimed author of The Drawer Boy and Proud, that examines the space between ideals and political reality during a monumental moment in Prime Minister Joe Clark’s career.

    It’s December 1979 and Clark’s minority Progressive Conservative government is under threat of dissolution before it has a chance to accomplish anything — even pass a budget. But Clark is young and idealistic, resolute on making his mark in office. When he steals a moment at his desk to make a crucial decision, his colleagues, including Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau, take the opportunity to steer him in different directions.

  • 1979, by Ray Robertson

    1979, by Ray Robertson

    $19.95

    It’s 1979 and Tom Buzby is thirteen years old and living in the small working- class city of Chatham, Ontario. So far, so normal. Except that Tom’s dad is the local tattoo artist, his mother is a born-again former stripper who’s run off with the minister from the church where the pet store used to be, and his sister can’t wait to leave town for good. And everyone along his daily newspaper route looks at him a little differently, this boy who’s come back from the dead, who just might be the only one who understands the miraculous, heart-breaking mystery that is their lives.

    Set in the year that real newspaper headlines told of North America’s hard turn to the right, 1979 offers a smalltown take on the buried lives of those who almost never make the news, and one boy’s attempt to make sense of it all.

  • 2 Trans, 2 Furious

    2 Trans, 2 Furious

    $21.95

    2 TRANS 2 FURIOUS is a Lambda Literary Award-winning LGBTQ anthology of Fast & Furious content made by trans writers and artists. Created in the noble tradition of the fanzine, this book features 40+ personal essays, short stories, comics, games, poems, illustrations, and other works created by a wide array of transgender and nonbinary contributors. Read on to discover: an electrifying new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin; the scoop on the franchise’s little-known canonically nonbinary character; a demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene; an essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut; instructions for a Fast & Furious-themed tabletop roleplaying game; a poem written by the US/Mexico border, allegedly; bingo cards; a walking tour; acrostic poetry; classic zine collages; and so much more…

  • 2000

    2000

    $16.95

    According to Joan MacLeod, her play 2000 grew out of a story she read about a cougar that had wandered into a sports arena in Vancouver, BC: “I was intrigued by the notion of the wild invading the city and the city invading the wild, by the idea of things being not quite right in nature and the approach of the millennium.”

    In the play, the cougar appears to embody the precarious and increasingly circumscribed state of nature. Each character relates to nature in a different way, whether it be with distrust, cynicism, awe or longing. The figure of the “Mountain Man,” who has abandoned all of his civilized ways, even speech, to live among the animals of the forest, provides a meeting ground between humanity and nature. Like the cougar, increasingly crowded by a rapidly encroaching civilization, he scavenges what precious little remains of the beautiful animal in all of us.

    Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

  • 21 Black Futures

    21 Black Futures

    $34.95

    What is the future of Blackness? Obsidian Theatre presents twenty-one versions of it.

    In 2021, Obsidian Theatre engaged twenty-one writers to create twenty-one new stories about imagined Black futures. Twenty-one to celebrate Obsidian’s twenty-first anniversary in 2021. Each playwright was tasked with scripting a ten-minute monodrama in response to the question “What is the future of Blackness?” To counter the intense early-pandemic isolation and the trauma of witnessing heightened violence toward Black bodies, Obsidian’s goal was to give as many opportunities to as many diverse Black artists as possible and to bring new voices together from both theatre and film. It was a grand experiment to create a rich tapestry of possibilities and to uplift Black artists in the process.

    A radical offering in unprecedented times, newly appointed Obsidian artistic director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s curatorial aim was joyful, aspirational, and empowering: come together in this moment and create something communal, unapologetically Black, and with the Black gaze at its centre—art as the architecture for creating those futures. Includes plays by Amanda Parris, Cheryl Foggo, Shauntay Grant, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, Lawrence Hill, Djanet Sears, and many others.

  • 21 Days in October

    21 Days in October

    $14.95

    This work of historical fiction deals with the occupation of Quebec by the Canadian Army and the massive imprisonment of French-speaking Canadian artists and trade unionists, based on the pretext of two political kidnappings.
     
    In October 1970, 21 days was the legal limit, under the War Measures Act, during which the Canadian government could hold prisoners incommunicado without charging them or justifying their arrest. Gaetan is 16. He has quit school, works in a factory in Montreal?s Saint-Henri district, and finds himself embroiled in a political conflict. His good friend is arrested for taking part in a union meeting, his father, for speaking out too loudly about city elections held during the crisis. By chance, Gaetan meets Louise, a young college student who, although she is from a different background and is involved with radical friends, takes a keen interest in him. In this troubled period of Quebec?s and Canada?s history, young people are confronted with unrelenting factory work, unemployment, harsh police and military action, and imprisonment, but also, hope, political commitment and first love.

  • 21 Journeys

    21 Journeys

    $19.99

    21 Journeys is a Shuster award nominated, 250-page anthology centered around the theme of travel. These stories take the reader to all points of the globe, from wartime Germany to modern Uganda, from the tip of the Matterhorn to deep beneath the Gulf Stream, from the other side of the world to just down the street. You meet students, soldiers, and scientists; businessmen, teachers, and priests; people from every imaginable profession, each following their own path.

  • 2113

    2113

    $18.95

    Eighteen exhilarating journeys into Rush-inspired worlds

    The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, and thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, bestselling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio that is Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.

    Enduring stark dystopian struggles or testing the limits of the human spirit, the characters populating 2113 find strength while searching for hope in a world that is repressive, dangerous, or just debilitatingly bland. Most of these tales are science fiction, but some are fantasies, thrillers, even edgy mainstream. Many of Rush’s big hits are represented, as well as deeper cuts . . . with wonderful results. This anthology also includes the seminal stories that inspired the Rush classics “Red Barchetta” and “Roll the Bones,” as well as Kevin J. Anderson’s novella sequel to the groundbreaking Rush album 2112.

    2113 contains stories by New York Times bestselling authors Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Z. Williamson, David Mack, David Farland, Dayton Ward, and Mercedes Lackey; award winners Fritz Leiber, Steven Savile, Brad R. Torgersen, Ron Collins, David Niall Wilson, and Brian Hodge, as well as many other authors with imaginations on fire.

  • 25

    25

    $18.00

    Richard Harrison’s The Hero of the Play has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, with a tenth anniversary edition released in 2004. 25 is a celebration of this fact, as well as a meditation on twenty-five years of hockey poetry. This collection is a cataloguing of the way the game has woven itself into the life of the Governor General’s Award–winning poet, from childhood to fatherhood to death. It is a reflection on how the game has become such a large part of Canadian identity, shifting and changing with the times. In 25 Harrison captures the grace of the player in fluid lines, sketches the arc of the play and delivers the myth of the frozen pond to our human reality.

  • 26 Knots

    26 Knots

    $19.95

    A CBC Best Book of 2019

    A crackling debut, 26 Knots starts with a fire and never stops smouldering.

    Grand in scope, spare in execution, and lush in language, 26 Knots is a fable-like tale of love, obsession, and everything in between. Araceli loves Adrien. Adrien loves Pénélope. Pénélope marries Gabriel, who is tormented by the search for the father he never knew. Set in Montreal, but spiralling out across Canada, Bindu Suresh’s debut novel deftly reveals the devastating consequences of betrayal and commitment, of grief and hope.

    “Such a good read. Fast. And rich and dark and passionate. SO MANY FEELS.”—Jael Richardson, CBC Radio’s Q Book Columnist

    “One of the most striking Canadian literary debuts of the year.”Montreal Gazette

  • 29 leads to love

    29 leads to love

    $18.95

    In a world barely beginning to recognize itself as dazzlingly multihued, the erupting ecocide is teaching that while no accounting of complexity is complete, change is true and the sky, singular.

    We are of parts fundamentally interconnected and overlapping.

    If we choose it, this overlapping can become a continuum. A continuum of movement combined with still-ness, individuality reaching for the whole, loss and surrender, abandon and opening.

    And of falling: an ever-falling, toward the intensive care that is love.

  • 2Instruction Manual for Swallowing

    2Instruction Manual for Swallowing

    $14.95

    An engaging new voice in absurdist fiction

    A new North American edition of an acclaimed short story collection, Instruction Manual for Swallowing explores what happens when ordinary people collide with bizarre, fantastical situations. A man discovers he has testicular cancer on the day that a Godzilla-like monster attacks the city he lives in; a kitchen-hand is put under terrible peer pressure in a restaurant for zombies; a husband and wife discover they are pregnant with 37 babies; and a man travels into the engine room of his own body to discover Busta Rhymes at the controls. The 14 stories are grotesque, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. No matter how outrageous the subject matter of the stories, they have at their heart genuine human experiences that are common to us all.

    Bonus BackLit materials will include two new stories and an interview with the author.

  • 3 Summers

    3 Summers

    $18.95

    A grappling with time, form and embodiment.

    Recite your poem to your aunt.
    I threw myself to the ground.
    Where were you in the night?
    In a school among the pines.
    What was the meaning of the dream?

    Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form’s time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body’s mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices – Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras – in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems’ landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time – embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences – can tell.

    ‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy … Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt … She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’

    The New York Times

    ‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’

    The Village Voice

  • 3,000 Miles

    3,000 Miles

    $17.95

    Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain could not have envisioned what his death would mean to Generation X — or that he would influence one young man from small-town Quebec to take his own life…

    3,000 Miles is the story of Andre, a man entering his twenties with very little going for him. The only stabilizing influence in his life is music, but the news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide finally pushes him over the edge. He leaves town and joins his friends Richard and Stephane in Quebec City to sell drugs. Eventually, the reserves of his self-centred nihilism run dry, and this prompts him to devise a plan: the trio will embark on a journey across North America. When they reach the end—Seattle—they’ll sacrifice themselves.

    Andre’s problem, of course, is convincing his friends to join him, but they decide to call his bluff. Their own young lives are in constant turmoil, and a road trip seems like the perfect distraction. But things quickly move from bad to worse when Andre’s spurned girlfriend, Sylvie, makes her own cross-country journey in a last-ditch attempt to prove her love.

    If Kerouac’s On The Road mapped the landscape of a new America, 3,000 Miles explores its ultimate dead end.

  • 305 Lost Buildings of Canada

    305 Lost Buildings of Canada

    $22.95

    Winner, AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers and Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Second Prize (Prose Illustrated)
    A National Bestseller

    The legacies of theaters, hotels, fire stations, flour mills, and more — torn down, burned down, and otherwise lost — are uncovered in this bittersweet collection. Using archival photographs, blueprints, and written reports, Raymond Biesinger has rendered a selection of Canada’s most iconic lost buildings in his signature minimalist style.

    Accompanying Biesinger’s illustrations are Alex Bozikovic’s descriptions which capture each building’s historical, cultural, and architectural significance. Bozikovic draws on local histories, archived building permits and his own extensive knowledge of the Canadian urban architectural landscape and its history — from the letters passed through Kelowna’s unlikely art deco post office to the destruction of a home in Halifax’s Africville — to offer fascinating, sometimes forgotten stories about each building and its significance.

    An impossible architectural walking tour, 305 Lost Buildings of Canada spans the country, its cities and countryside, and its history. Cities change, buildings come and go, but in this fact-filed compendium, you’ll find the lost wonders of Canada’s architecture.