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Showing 7985–8000 of 9481 results
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The Puffin Problem
$12.95In the follow-up to her charming Capelin Weather, with wit and whimsy, Doody depicts the difficulties that arise when Newfoundland and Labrador’s official bird heads for the bright city lights. Puffins keep popping up everywhere: they are underfoot and overhead; they tie up traffic and are bad for business. It isn’t pretty, but it is pretty funny.
Such a peculiar problem calls for an imaginative solution. It takes a smart, small person to come up with the just the trick to send those pesky puffins packing back out to sea.
Young readers will have great fun finding all the puffins hiding in Doody’s lovely illustrations. Older readers will enjoy how the illustrations also play with the province’s already playful language. The book includes some fun and interesting puffin facts as well.
With something for readers of every age on every page, The Puffin Problem is sure to be a family favorite.
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The Pugilist and the Sailor
$24.95The Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins’ physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie’s sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of “The Reuben Beast,” though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents’ deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor.
A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world. -
The Pull of the Moon
$19.95Winner of the 2015 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
A Globe and Mail top 100 pick for 2014
Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze MedalTwelve short stories that examine what happens in the lives of characters who discover shocking truths about the people they thought they knew best.
Whether set in a cottage or a Montreal market, a graveyard or a backyard, these stories transport you into the lives of people you’ll recognize. Your neighbours may not want to make squirrels into pets or sell you a piece of the moon. Your son may not be asked to donate sperm to his girlfriend’s mother. Your sister may not want you to bring a dead cat across the border. You may not have an imaginary husband, a secret brother, or a friend who has turned to murder in a custody battle. But in each of these stories, people are trying to figure out how to live in a world that doesn’t always seem hospitable.
With her keen poet’s eye, Julie Paul examines human nature and animal instinct, as the characters in The Pull of the Moon try to negotiate their impulses and desires. Ultimately, they want what most of us want: connection, belonging, love, and forgiveness.
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The Punishing Journey of Arthur Delaney
$22.95For readers of Paulette Jiles and Gil Adamson, a 19th-century tale of a father’s greatest regret and path to redemption
Devastated at his wife’s death and stricken at raising two girls and a boy on his own, Arthur Delaney places his children in a Halifax orphanage and runs off to join the Union Army in the American Civil War. The trauma of battle and three years in a disease-ridden prisoner-of-war prison changes his perspective on life and family.
After the war, Delaney odd-jobs his way up the American east coast and catches a schooner to Halifax. There he discovers the orphanage has relocated to a farm in rural Nova Scotia. His children are not there. They and others had been sold and resold as farm workers and house servants through the Maritime provinces, as well as Quebec and Ontario. Their whereabouts is unknown. Arthur Delaney sets out on a punishing 20-year journey across Canada to find them.
This is a heartbreaking, beautifully told story of a father’s attempt to reconnect with his children
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The Punishment
$21.95the tales are of loss and forgivenessand they fill the roomThe Punishment is the latest addition to the oeuvre of prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand, whose stunning previous collection, The East Side of It All, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.In The Punishment, Joseph Dandurand’s now-familiar storyteller’s voice wrangles trauma, grief, forgiveness and love. His poems illustrate the poet’s solitary existence. With scenes of residential school, the psych ward, the streets and the river, Dandurand reveals an arduous journey: one poet’s need to both understand his life and find ways to escape it. Through poetry, he shares with us all his lovers. He shares the streets. He shares what he sees: the great eagles and small birds; his culture and teachings; the East Side; self-pity; the deception of love; the deception of hate; sasquatches; spirits; and his people, the Kwantlen.At root, The Punishment is about survival. Dandurand’s poems will show you disease. They’ll show you cedar. They’ll show you music. They’ll show you shadows. They’ll show you forgiveness, and they’ll show you punishment.
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The Pup
$12.99Spring seems like the perfect time for something new, so Jenny decides to adopt a pet. When she comes upon a stray pup, she happily takes her home. But this pup knows a trick or two, and has some very unexpected friends. Acclaimed picture book maker Lori Doody is back with a charming and quirky story about finding the perfect pet and making it welcome.
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The Pursuit of Perfection
$36.00Born into a working-class family in 1921, Celia Franca, though a capable dancer, was an unlikely candidate for ballet greatness. But Celia possessed a drive that was almost unrivalled, and went on to become one of the most important figures inCanadian ballet in the twentieth century.
Franca grew up in London, England, and started dancing when she was four, ultimately becoming a star performer with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
When a group from Toronto was hopeful of establishing a major ballet, they brought Celia across the Atlantic to be the founder. Celia went on to build the company, the National Ballet of Canada, into a major cultural force in Canada.
Commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the National Ballet of Canada, The Pursuit of Perfection tells of the battles, the heartbreaks, the successes, and the accolades Celia and the Ballet shared.
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The Pursuit of Perfection
$22.95Born into a working-class family in 1921, Celia Franca, though a capable dancer, was an unlikely candidate for ballet greatness. But Celia possessed a drive that was almost unrivalled, and went on to become one of the most important figures inCanadian ballet in the twentieth century.
Franca grew up in London, England, and started dancing when she was four, ultimately becoming a star performer with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.
When a group from Toronto was hopeful of establishing a major ballet, they brought Celia across the Atlantic to be the founder. Celia went on to build the company, the National Ballet of Canada, into a major cultural force in Canada.
Commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the National Ballet of Canada, The Pursuit of Perfection tells of the battles, the heartbreaks, the successes, and the accolades Celia and the Ballet shared.
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The Push & the Pull
$21.95Andrew Day embarks on a bicycle trip from Halifax to Kingston, his childhood home. As he goes, the dual narratives of Andrew’s life emerge: the slow, painful death of his father and the disappearance of Betty, who may be lost to him forever. He contemplates, too, the nature of desire.
En route, Andrew sloughs off his fears, material goods, and attachments. In episodes of intensifying violence, he leaves the highway and rides the back roads under the cover of night. By the time he arrives home, an epiphany greets him.
Darryl Whetter writes with compelling intensity of athleticism and degeneration, isolation and community, the weight of desire and the joy and anguish present in all things.
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The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness
$20.00To fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn in her arsonist brother, a failed writer whose fictional character suddenly comes to life, an unhappy insurance examiner who discovers a fallen angel and decides to cash in on his find, or a successful, middle-class man who pines for the poet he once was, nothing is sacred in this collection of stories. Myth and imagination hold equal weight, authenticity and fable go hand-in-hand, and the lines between reality and illusion blur. The stories reveal the plight of outsiders to readers in a way that make them feel part of the inner circle. Characters find themselves trapped, or at least, incapable of restoring their humanity. It may be sobering to observe such forays into darkness but underlying their failures is a tacit suggestion that perhaps they could have won out with more imagination, more strength, or simply with some encouragement. And some do; amidst the carnage of those who fail and disappear emerge some who acquire new strength to reconnect with the world.
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The Queen of Paradise’s Garden
$14.95Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, not in your time, indeed not in my time, but in olden times, when quart bottles held half a gallon and houses were papered with pancakes and pigs run about with forks stuck in their backs seeing who wanted a slice o’ ham, there were two old people and they never had no children, and they figured they were too old to ever have any.
So begins The Queen of Paradise’s Garden, a wonderful adaptation of a traditional Newfoundland tale, and the first in an ongoing series that combines the telling wit and resonant language of acclaimed Newfoundland actor, writer and comedian Andy Jones with the charming illustrations of Slovenian-born puppeteer and artist Darka Erdelji.
Of course, it’s clear from the story’s beginning that there are children on the way, and one of those children is Jack, the delightful, mischievous, big-hearted hero of so many Newfoundland tales. Told with the humor, warmth and sly wit that have made Jones one of the Island’s finest and best-loved storytellers, The Queen of Paradise’s Garden follows Jack on his way to the land of the Queen of Paradise, three miles this side of the end of the world, where he searches for a magic fruit to make his parents young again, and finds quite a few other handy things as well.
The story is a free adaptation of a tale told by Albert Heber Keeping of Grand Bank, which he got from Billy Quann of Sagona Island; Keeping’s version was published in Herbert Halpert and John Widdowson’s seminal collection, Folktales of Newfoundland.
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The Queen of Queen Street
$14.95Bertha Rand, Winnipeg’s Cat Lady, was a familiar figure in the news; many knew her as the mad woman who lived in squalour with over fifty felines. In her tiny house on Queen Street, Bertha took in sick and abandoned cats, battling her neighbours and city hall to save them, taking her cause to the media. In The Queen of Queen Street, Maureen Hunter delves into Bertha Rand’s tragic life of poverty and deprivation to bring us a richly layered drama of one woman’s will to survive, and a universal story of hope and strength.
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The Queens
$15.95London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting passions and ambitions of six women drawn from Shakespeare’s theatre and portray them here in the timelessness of their quest. As Ernst Kantorowicz has said so clearly in The King’s Two Bodies, all royal personae exist in two worlds: the private world of their needs and desires; and the public world where they become the emblematic icon of the realm. It is on the ritualized ground between these two worlds where the human drama is seen most clearly in all of its comic and tragic, visceral and political, temporal and metaphysical astonishments. Yet this traditionally male ground has rarely been explored with women characters, and has even less frequently been presented in the context of the primal mystery it ultimately is—the vision of public majesty in the instant before the death of the private body.
The Queens, first published in an English translation by Coach House Press in 1992, is presented here in a new edition, containing the latest revisions by the author and the translator.
Cast of six women.
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The Quest for a ‘National’ Nationalism
$14.95In his 2018 Pratt Lecture, The Quest for a ‘National’ Nationalism, renowned author and critic George Elliott Clarke investigates E.J. Pratt’s poetic attempt to become the epic poet of Canada. And while Pratt’s epic poems, such as Brebeuf and His Brethren and Towards the Last Spike, stand as lofty poetic achievements, the poet is never able to escape his own identity and speak convincingly for all Canadians. Unable to speak for Francophones, Indigenous peoples, and People of Colour, Pratt becomes the epic poet of the establishment, but never truly of the people.The PRATT LECTURES were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E.J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted a litany of world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, and Dionne Brand. -
The Quiet is Loud
$23.95Shortlisted for the 2022 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
The perfect marriage of literary and speculative fiction for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and NK Jemisin.
When Freya Tanangco was ten, she dreamed of her mother’s death right before it happened. That’s when she realized she was a veker, someone with enhanced mental abilities and who is scorned as a result. Freya’s adult life has been spent in hiding: from the troubled literary legacy created by her author father, and from the scrutiny of a society in which vekers often meet with violence.
When her prophetic dreams take a dangerous turn, Freya finds herself increasingly forced to sacrifice her own anonymity—and the fragile safety that comes with it—in order to protect those around her.
Interwoven with themes of Filipino Canadian and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, The Quiet Is Loud is an intergenerational tale of familial love and betrayal, and what happens when we refuse to let others tell our stories for us.
“Garner wears her spec fic, geek, and SF influences on her sleeve, and The Quiet Is Loud is a warm welcome to the more literary part of that universe.”—Understorey Magazine
“A deeply thoughtful book about identity and the quest for true acceptance.”—Stacey May Fowles
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The QWERTY Institute
$25.00Prepare to be alphabetized! Ever wonder what goes on in the secret lives of letters? Surely they don’t just huddle quietly under the covers waiting to be read. This collection of “visual fictions” gives you a rare opportunity to come out of the lexical bushes, drop your quarter into the slot, and watch the typographical peepshow unfold. You’ll be tickled ink as an e reinvents himself with an accent aigu toupee; you’ll be on the edge of your seat as a renowned typographical naturalist hunts an elusive species of giant sea-dwelling fonts; you’ll be heartbroken to discover the sadness of an experimental archivist who is literally reduced to the bureaucratic file that documents his life; yes, you’ll experience a rollercoaster of emotions as the typographical escapades unfurl. The QWERTY Institute: alphabetic antics at their finest.