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Showing 8081–8096 of 9492 results
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The Scent of Eucalyptus
$24.95The fair-haired child of Canadian missionary parents, Daniel Coleman grew up with an ambivalent relationship to the country of his birth. He was clearly different from his Ethiopian playmates, but because he was born in Ethiopia and knew no other home, he was not completely foreign. Like the eucalyptus, a tree imported to Ethiopia from Australia in the late 19th century to solve a firewood shortage, he and his missionary family were naturalized transplants. As ferenjie, they endlessly negotiated between the culture they brought with them and the culture in which they lived.
In The Scent of Eucalyptus, Coleman reflects on his experience of “in-between-ness” amid Ethiopia’s violent political upheavals. His intelligent and finely crafted memoir begins in the early 1960s, during the reign of Haile Selassie. It spans the king’s dramatic fall from power in 1974, the devastating famines of the mid-1970s and early 1980s, and Mengistu Haile Mariam’s brutal 20-year dictatorship.
Through memoir and reflection, The Scent of Eucalyptus gives a richly textured view of missionary culture that doesn’t yield to black-and-white analysis.
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The Scent of Light
$25.95Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars—available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume
“Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic… rigorous yet passionate…these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since.” – Kazim Ali, from the introduction
From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator.
It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life’s big questions remain beautifully unanswered.
The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars’ most lauded novella.
Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator’s father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father’s illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings.;
The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence.
The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen.
Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life’s (and love’s) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself.
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The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories
$19.95The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories about strong female characters dealing with difficult life-changing situations. The turmoil that they face is, often, the result of a social structure that discriminates against women. Through these powerful women characters, the stories reflect attitudes and ways of life in a village in India, and in modern day Mumbai; they highlight the values of an older generation, and the dreams of a new one. Beneath all their differences, The Scent of Mogra and Other Stories illuminate the quality of women’s lives, exposing the pain, the injustices, as well as the triumphs that make up their existence.
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The School of the Haunted River
$24.99On a two-week outdoor winter snowshoeing trip in northern Saskatchewan with her niece Dilly, outdoor adventurer Jay tells stories as they hike and camp. Some are true – her outdoor training in Wyoming, her early life on the farm – and some are stories within stories within stories. A faux diamond necklace that mysteriously appears and disappears, Jay’s youthful encounters with the mysterious Cowboy, an inspiring series of books that she read on her long-ago canoe trip alone – all are underscored by Jay’s love and respect for the wild. In The School of the Haunted River, the late Colleen Gerwing fashioned a novel based on her own life as an outdoorswoman, a novel about the natural world that will haunt and enchant even as it educates you.
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The Science of Orphan Black
$22.95An official guide to the crazy science of Orphan Black
Delve deeper into the scientific terms and theories at the core of the Peabody-winning, cult favourite show. With exclusive insights from the show’s co-creator Graeme Manson and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Black takes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution. Authors Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth decode the mysteries of Orphan Black — from the history of cloning, epigenetics, synthetic biology, chimerism, the real diseases on which the clone disease is based, and the transhumanist philosophies of Neolution, to what exactly happens when a projectile pencil is shot through a person’s eye and into their brain.
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The Science of Shakespeare
$29.95William Shakespeare lived at a time when the medieval world — a world of magic, astrology, witchcraft, and superstition of all kinds — was just beginning to give way to more modern ways of thinking. Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, and new ideas about the human body, the earth, and the universe at large were just starting to transform Western thought. Shakespeare was not a scientist — the word did not even exist in Elizabethan times — but a handful of scholars are now examining Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time: what he knew, when he knew it, and how he incorporated that knowledge into his work.
His plays, poems, and sonnets were not “about” science — but they often reflect scientific ideas, and the more carefully we look at those ideas the better we can appreciate the scope of Shakespeare’s achievement. A close reading of Shakespeare’s works reveals the depth of his interest in the natural world.
Falk examines the world that the playwright and poet lived in, taking a close look at the science of his day — exploring where and how that knowledge is reflected in Shakespeare’s work. He also delves into how other writers and artists of the period were influenced by the revolution in science unfolding around them — a subject that has received little attention beyond specialized academic works.
Throughout the book Falk stops to ask what Shakespeare knew, and how it may have influenced his work. Obviously, Shakespeare was not the Carl Sagan of the Elizabethan Age — his first commitment was to his stagecraft, not to philosophy or science. However, Falk argues that a close reading of Shakespeare’s works reveals the depth of his interest in the natural world, and shows that he was more conscious of the changing conception of the cosmos than we usually imagine. Shakespeare’s writing often reflects the scientific ideas of his time — and the philosophical problems they were raising — and the more carefully we look at those ideas the better we can appreciate the scope of his achievement. This book is aimed squarely at the lay reader — those who enjoy Shakespeare’s plays and poems for the joy of it, and armchair astronomers and historians who enjoy a trip back in time.
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The Science of Shakespeare
$22.95William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time. New ideas were transforming European thought as the medieval gave way to the modern. Astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo, philosophers like Montaigne, and even playwrights such as Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky, were hinting at the brave new world to come.
A synthesis of science, history, and literature, The Science of Shakespeare introduces readers to a colourful cast of Renaissance scientists and thinkers, exploring how together they changed the world forever.
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The Sea-Wave
$20.00A flash fiction novel, The Sea-Wave details the aftermath of the kidnapping by an elderly and emotionally damaged man of a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound, unusually bright, depressive 12-year-old girl incapable of speech. The novel consists of the girl’s entries in her diary-like memorandum book, entries which relate her own, surprising thoughts on her kidnapping, family, and disabilities, in addition to her verbatim transcriptions of the old man’s monologues, which appear to reveal, in fragments, the details of a very specific and unusual period in his life.
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The Seagull
$16.95David French’s brilliant translation of The Seagull, in collaboration with Russian scholar, Donna Orwin, is at one and the same time a revitalization of a Russian theatre classic, and French’s personal tribute to one of the greatest playwrights of all time.
Cast of 5 women and 8 men.
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The Seaside Café Metropolis
$24.95In this comic Cold War novel, Canadian restaurateur Emmet Argentine is trapped in Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, under the tyranny of two equally formidable forces: the Soviet Union, and his staunchly socialist mother.
Raised in the kitchens of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, Emmet’s got a talent for hospitality that catches the attention of a high-ranking architect, who hires him to helm a magnificent new restaurant. Under Emmet’s direction, the Seaside Café Metropolis, though located neither by the sea nor in a major metropolitan area, attracts a colourful cast of bohemian artists, writers, and philosophers, including a visit from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — all while kgb operatives listen in from the basement via microphones in the bread baskets.
Through guile, wit, and charm, Emmet, his staff, and other restaurant regulars strive to make rich lives for themselves in the heart of the repressive Soviet regime, drawing warmth from good food, good humour, and even better company.
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The Second Detective
$16.00Winner of the 40th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest!
If faced with reincarnation, would you want to come back as a dog, an eagle, a plant? Most poison ivy is reincarnated ivy. You can see the complexity of second lives, the intrepid narrator-detective declares. For those yet reincarnated, devotion can become muddled. And as the characters in The Second Detective learn, you can’t fight the universe and regret is terrible company.
The Second Detective is a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests. Aging beauty Lilah walks into the narrator’s office with a photo of Babe Ruth, a story about a sketchy reincarnation plan, and the hope of finding her husband Glen. Despite misgivings, the narrator takes on her case and soon the two are galloping headfirst into gorgons, contraband blood and villainous brothers, with a sideways trip to the zoo.
There are two things you need to know: Every action is a choice that tells you something more, unless it means nothing at all.
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The Second Substance
$21.95Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel.
A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is “not a sideline” but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand.
Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of “normal life” and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society.
With a character borrowed from Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyer’s writings, Anne Lardeux’s highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature.
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The Secret Annex
$15.95Anne Frank has survived the war, and at age 25, she’s ready to start a new chapter in New York City. Eager to publish a memoir of her time in hiding, Anne is sure it will launch her career as a writer. But when the only interested publisher suggests drastic rewrites, Anne is unsure of what to do. Everyone around her seems to be able to move on and recover from the war, but her inability to make her voice heard forces Anne to question the meaning of her new life. Why did she survive, if not to share stories?
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The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie
$19.95An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.
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The Secret Life of Glenn Gould
$28.95Long after his death, Glenn Gould still lures new listeners to his piano, connecting with them on a haunting, personal level. “He feels and you feel,” says young New York writer Nicole Spectre. “I can feel his pain and joy — it touches me. He speaks directly to me.”
But when he was known as the world’s greatest pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, just who was Gould playing for? His audience? Himself? His demanding mother? All are likely true, but he was also richly inspired by — and bared his soul at the keyboard to — a secret society of women, the girlfriends who stirred his hard-to-fetch emotions: Franny Batchen, Verna Sandercock, Cornelia Foss, Roxolana Roslak, and Monica Gaylord.
Of the eighteen books and nineteen documentaries by or about the most compelling virtuoso of the twentieth century, none have contained details about Gould’s many love affairs and how they affected his life, his music, and his filmmaking. Until now, biographers have tried to explain what came out of the music box, not the engine that drove it. The vault to his private life has remained locked since his untimely death in 1982 because of his obsessions with privacy and controlling his image, the loyalty of his carefully chosen friends and lovers, and the choice that biographers made to focus safely on his music and eccentricities.
The Secret Life of Glenn Gould will be the first true exposé of Gould, who until now has been assumed to be asexual, lonely, and egocentric, by examining his love and soul-mate relationships. His music was twelve-tonal and his documentaries “contrapuntal” — both were filled with overlapping voices — and so was his private life.
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The Secret of Bowring Park
$12.95Every child who has ever visited the Peter Pan statue in Bowring Park, St. John’s, swears it is magic. They know that the mice, squirrels, rabbits, and fairies are never in the same place as the last time they visited. Some say they’ve seen Peter wink at them, and others believe they’ve heard the soft whispering sounds of a flute. Are the stories true? Is the Peter Pan statue really magic? Or are the tales just childhood fantasies? The Secret of Bowring Park is a story of magic, a celebration of eternal childhood, and a heartwarming tale of the bond between sisters.Join sisters Elizabeth and Natalie on their adventure at the Peter Pan statue and learn the real secret of Bowing Park.