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Showing 8001–8016 of 9492 results
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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.
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The Rage Room
$22.95What if you made the worst mistake of your life and got the chance to fix it? Only you made it so much worse? From the incomparable crafter of nine cross-genre works of fiction, Lisa deNikolits expands her horizons to pen a grab-you-by-the-throat, feminist speculative-fiction thriller in the style of Groundhog Day meets The Matrix.
The perfect father kills his family on Christmas Eve, and tries to undo his actions by jumping back in time. The result is murder and mayhem in dystopia. Set in 2055, the world is run by robots and virtual data, while the weather is controlled by satellite dishes. Arts and culture are no more than distant memories. People are angry, placated by prescribed visits to rage rooms to vent their boredom, fury, and discontent. Beneath the sunny skies and behind the garbage-free suburban McMansions live deeply disturbed, materialistic families.
During his time travels and increasingly desperate attempts to reserve his colossal mistake, Sharps Barkley meets the leader of the Eden Collective, a feminist army determined tosave the Earth by removing all artificial intelligence and letting the Earth restore itself–if necessary, at the expense of mankind. The Eden Collective uses data gathered from the rage rooms to analyze and predict the potential and actions needed for the Earth to reset andthey need to prove that time travel is an effective tool. If Sharps can go back and save his children, then there is hope for the future. Sharps is the 49th experiment and his success is pivotal. Can love prevail over anger?
The Rage Room has a multi-layered plot that is fueled by a feminist-driven courage to take charge and save the world as it exposes the effects of an increasingly digital age on our lives and, ultimately, our humanity.
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The Raids
$19.95It’s spring, 1963 in the “Nickel Capital of the World.” Nineteen-year-old Jake McCool is about to undergo a rite of passage—his first shift underground in a hard rock mine. But the Cold War is at its height, and Jake is also about to become a reluctant participant in a bitter interunion battle fueled by the global struggle between two ideologies in the wake of the Second World War. So is his girlfriend, Jo Ann Winters. Together the couple are swept up in a web of intrigue; at its center is a terrible secret that will haunt their relationship for the rest of their lives, as their hometown becomes not only one of the world’s greatest hard rock mining centers, but also the epicenter of the Cold War in North America. In this fast-paced novel set against the little-known historical backdrop of a true-life battle that included vicious beatings, riots, and worse, author Mick Lowe posits a provocative premise: that the U.S. government sponsored a ruthless covert operation to destabilize a strategic community in the heartland of its closest ally, Canada.
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The Rain Barrel
$24.95Here are twenty-one user-friendly tales, set in the Okanagan Valley, Austria, Washington, Nanaimo, the Yukon, Iceland, Germany, the future — and Daphne’s Lunch Diner. The Rain Barrel is George Bowering’s first collection of short stories since 1983. Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the details of his craft and his enormous sympathy for the increasingly precarious predicament of the twentieth-century reader.
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The Range Rules
$24.95When Ryan and Shawn Sullivan’s socially ambitious father enrolls them in the prestigious Novato Towne School for Boys, the brothers unwittingly uncover the strange legacy of Charles Steven Kaye, a student who, expelled two decades prior for “lewd and disgusting acts,” became the notorious and universally reviled queer pornographer John Dark. Obsessed with the enigmatic figure of Dark, Shawn rejects the stifling expectations of his upper-class upbringing, leaving his affluent family home and disappearing into the underground queer scene in California. Ryan follows his older brother into this hidden world, seeking to capture Shawn’s life on film and make sense of his unravelling.
Set against the backdrop of a parole house, to which Ryan was released after three years in jail, The Range Rules is a daring, defiant, and darkly wondrous exploration of transgressive queer pornography, prison culture, twelve-step recovery, and a search for redemption, connection, and compassion in spite of the invisible laws that govern our lives.
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The Rap Canterbury Tales
$24.95The ambition that inspired rapper and MC Baba Brinkman to transpose his performance piece “The Rap Canterbury Tales” to the printed page was his desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum into visible and audible contemporary forms that would once again delight and edify both live listening audiences and readers—a rebirth of what poetry should be in its essence, and once was. Since Chaucer has become an unassailable icon of print culture, and hip-hop is an unassailable icon of contemporary digital cool, he saw this radical new fusion of content and style as the perfect medium to deliver Chaucer’s astonishingly timeless message to a younger generation growing indifferent to the delights of “archaic” literary forms.
This fusion has produced, with both texts reproduced here on facing pages, one of the most exciting and extraordinarily fertile literary documents of our age.
The raps are presented here—along with Chaucer’s original Middle English, Brinkman’s explanatory introductions, and his brother and stage manager Erik’s illustrations—as the best possible way of telling the story of how these stories came about, and what they were meant to do.
A hugely successful hit at the Edinburgh Festival, Brinkman has worked with the London and Cambridge school systems, rekindling an interest among both performance-poetry fans and students in the work of “the father of the English language.”
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The Rat Trap Murders
$18.95This intricate, sinister thriller takes place in a private geriatric hospital, where nurses and patients begin disappearing only to turn up in the local sewage system. Tense and dramatic, Maureen Foss’s narrative joins a unique cast of characters with an unforgettable plot of murder, mystery, suspense – and rats.When the hospital caretaker is found dead at the bottom of the sixth floor stairwell, Eugene Starbuck comes to the rescue – and to apply for the dead man’s job. The unsuspecting triplet brothers who own the facility are only too happy to have him: he works for next to nothing, lives in the furnace room where he can be on constant duty, and doesn’t mind emptying the rat traps stationed all over the hospital.Was Eugene’s sudden appearance completely coincidental, or was it all part of a gruesome and twisted plan? Some nurses and patients die, and circumstances point to Eugene. But catching him may be a trial in itself, as those who confront him mysteriously end up missing.
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The Ravine
$14.95Artist Julia Warner left life in the big city to avoid reminders of her little sister’s disappearance. Now teaching in a smalltown public school, memories of that tragedy flood back when one of her young students, Deborah Hurst, is assaulted. Not six months later, a second student is assaulted and killed–but this time, Julia gets a fleeting look at the perpetrator. Greg Malcolm, the doctor treating Deborah, wants to work with Julia in brining the murderer to justice, but the art teacher has plans of her own.
First published in 1962 under the pseudonym “Kendal Young,” The Ravine was the author’s only thriller. It was adapted for the screen and released as Assault (1971), starring Suzy Kendall. This new edition is the first in 48 years.
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The Raw Light of Morning
$22.95***2022 BMO WINTERSET AWARD – WINNER***
The Raw Light of Morning is a powerful debut novel about women and children finding humour and love in the aftermath of domestic violence.
Fourteen-year-old Laurel Long does something unimaginable. In a house at the back end of Woods Road, she commits an act of violence that alters the course of her life. Laurel finds herself living in Stephenville, a small town on Newfoundland’s west coast, trapped in a system of poverty and generational neglect, haunted by trauma. Laurel needs a fresh start, and education is her ticket out, but when her past starts to catch up with her, she must decide how far she will go to protect herself and the ones she loves.
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The Razor’s Edge
$18.95`Unwillingly, I’ve become part of the story. Questions lie when reconstructing incomplete facts, half-truths, enigmas. What remains is incompletion, interruption. Only the dead know what happened.’
In The Razor’s Edge, Karl Jirgens presents a collection of interlinked fictions that inhabit halfway worlds between past and present, dream and actuality, science and divination. Ordinary daily activities and events lead to unexpected slides into lucid dreams and flirtations with the edge of madness. Drawing on literature and pop culture (from Cinderella and Hamlet to Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anthony Bourdain) as well as the history of twentieth-century genocides (including the Holocaust and the Gulag), these complex, magic realist stories suggest that what seems separate is really interconnected, that the distinction between past, present and future is illusion, and that we might all die of the truth if the truth were truly known.