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Showing 8113–8128 of 9481 results
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The Silence of Horses
$16.95We need no longer hide behind concepts of alienation or the language of clever linguistics while the poor are dying we need the silence of our horses.
In Lorne Dufour’s third book of poetry, The Silence of Horses, he shares this insight: It is our past, present and future and how we are all tied together in this tiny thread we call life that defines the importance of our existence. In poems such as “Inebriation” he asks us to occasionally pause for a moment in this busy world to look between the spaces. To remember that in the stillness we find the spirit of life.
But Dufour moves beyond simple reflection in this inspiring new book, as he tackles difficult and contentious political issues such as poverty, racism and devastating resource development–“Once we find reverse, let’s stick to that method until the world slows down, let’s celebrate horse speed…, till we meet Henry Ford living on Capitol Hill, until we precede slavery, …Let’s drive in reverse, so much that the world will breathe a sigh of relief.”
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The Silent Film Star Murders
$24.95Embarking on another transatlantic crossing in 1928, merry widow Lady Lucy Revelstoke welcomes new guests aboard the Victoriana, including Renata Harwood, star of the silver screen, and Stella Burke, her bitter protégée-turned-rival. Everyone expects these leading ladies to serve up delicious drama over dinner, but true tragedy strikes when a young woman goes missing. Has she been seduced by a cad? Are they hiding in second class, or has the poor girl thrown herself overboard?
Then a crew member is brutally murdered, and questions arise about just who the intended victim may have been.
Lucy and her pickpocket-turned-maid Elf set out to investigate intricate relationships and scandalous shared histories, determined to uncover if and how a theatrical rivalry can explode into sensational murder.
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The Silent Partner
$16.95Corry Quinn starts off on the wrong foot. When he’s very small, his mother dies. Then his feckless father, heading down the road from his Miramichi village to Toronto, deposits Corry with his Uncle Kid. Now, this is a pretty good arrangement: Kid knows full well that Corry’s father will never come back to Silver Rapids, and he and Corry get along fine. But Corry is a sad young fellow.
One winter day, angry and miserable, he sticks his tongue to an icy railroad spike. By the time the infection clears up and he gets out of hospital, half his tongue is gone, and he will never talk properly again. Strangely enough, his accident improves his life. He and Kid understand each other well, Kid talking, Corry writing notes. Kid is an ageing hippie with a heart of gold and a shed full of home-grown weed. This, not Kid’s tiny fishing gear shop, supports the two of them. Eventually, after many tragicomic adventures involving girls, fish, and the elusive eastern cougar, both Kid and Corry grow up. Together they find simple yet cunning ways to turn their chub hole into a magical salmon pool, the shed into a sporting camp, Kid into an outfitter, and Corry into a man with a voice.
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The Singer’s Broken Throat
$15.95The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes; each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart; each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his extensive film and theatre work: the voices here are always dramatic and present, not passive and absent, even when the poems are elegiac in form and substance, even when their subject is historic. These poems disclose the fragility and wonderment of relationships, as well as remind us that we are all alive to each other, inextricable from our frames in both time and space.
Walsh’s ancestors, who crossed the cold grey Atlantic from the rock of Ireland to the rock of Newfoundland, clamour to be seen and heard by the living in these poems, to remain visible in the fabric created by the often frozen, often trembling, often grasping, sometimes gentle hands of the living.
There is no attempt to create an artificially poetic voice here; there is no attempt to impose an exclusivity of language, purged of things unpoetic. These poems tell the truth, unabashedly, mystically and sometimes in a way that is violently Catholic. That in itself is reason to celebrate.
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The Singularity
$23.00Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting contemporary novelists.
In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.
Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory.
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The Sink House
$14.95Home is where the heart is, or, in the case of The Sink House, home is what the heart is. Sequestered on a sleepy street in a dry Calgary suburb, our heroine, the House, finds herself embroiled in a stalled love affair with an elusive and alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. In a series of self-contained poems both prosy and lyrical, we follow this curious and engaging affair, which mysteriously coincides with a slow and gradual flood.
Everything succumbs to the persistent rise of water: the street becomes a creek bed, wallpaper comes away in the night, sandbags melt, kitchen utensils become silt. Here, the furniture floats, flowers become fish that feed in the garden on vegetables that explode with damp. Through it all, our lovers persist, salvaging soap boats and flushing toilets for amusement. Intelligent, enigmatic, sometimes humorous, and always enticing, The Sink House is a long, eccentric love poem that will immerse you in the flood of its own desire.
‘If only the imagination were real. Story seems to think so. And so does Julia Williams. Here, image (hear the image) beautifully choreographs the story into a readable imagination that is a measure of syllabic and rhythmic particulars, a language, thankfully, balanced, open and with surprise. In other words, a poetry that makes seeming so.’ – Fred Wah
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The Siren in the Twelfth House
$21.95“Truthfully I can only tell you what’s missing” writes the heartbroken protagonist at the beginning of Victoria Mbabazi’s The Siren in the Twelfth House. But this isn’t a book that succumbs to grief. Mbabazi’s poems are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. Prepare to slow dance through this profound and powerful debut.
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The Skeleton Dance
$18.00The Skeleton Dance takes place on the mean, formerly clean streets of Toronto before the century ticked over into the new millennium. This graphic novel artfully depicts the human casualties and debris piled up around the downtown bank towers.
Wiped out in the rush of the thousand-eyed crowd hurrying to beehive office cubicles, and unhinged by the death of a close friend, musician turned ad copywriter Robert Walker drifts into a hallucinogenic, violent world of drugs, pornography, and murder. His oldest and closest friend, the successful criminal lawyer Klin Abrams, greases his descent by betraying him to the Diamondbacks, a motorcycle gang trying to control the Toronto drug trade.
The story moves relentlessly forward with the quick pacing of a crime novel but the reader occupies a unique place, seeing the events unfold through the eyes of the potential victim.
Time’s dogs are ready to bury Robert Walker’s bones, diamondback rattlers writhe through his dreams, and the 21st century is about to be born.
Praise for The Skeleton Dance:
“Robert Walker, the novel’s protagonist, is a drug-addicted ad writer who always seems to be on the verge of intensified trouble. You could call him down and out, it would be a fair assessment. The reader is close to all the dirty-doings through and through, whether or not one can sympathize with the circumstances depicted in the pages of the book doesn’t really matter, it’s all happening at hyper-speed, death-obsessed narration, with barbed dialogue and characters pitted against one another with the calculating cruelty of a brutal war.” (Broken Pencil, The Magazine of Zine Culture and the Independent Arts)
“The terrain of The Skeleton Dance is marked by violation and futility which Quinn renders with finesse from a ‘black hole’ Parkdale crack house to a Forest Hill ‘situation where it’s like Fellini; crazy high-priced whores and society cunts and their admirers’ to the ‘aching guts, the water soap lather blood’ of the Don Jail.
“But what’s most interesting about the novel is its examination of masculinity and sexuality – in particular, Robert’s ambivalence about desire, his convoluted ‘queer knot’, and the suggestive fissures through which he and Klin interact. At its heart, The Skeleton Dance is a love story, but one from which ‘beauty’s long gone.’” (Quill & Quire)
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The Sky Manifest
$18.95A dark and riveting journey of one man in a broken world
With nothing left to lose, Nathan Soderquist is moving west; his wife is dead, his infant daughter too, all because of a kiss and a snowstorm and his failure to prevent distant consequences. In his desperate isolation, he commits acts of violence, cowardice, nobility, and bravery as he passes through vacant landscapes and encounters beguiling characters. A road accident leaves his body broken, and his convalescence plumbs the depths of addiction. Relentless in his need to bridge epic distances, his journey moves from car to bicycle to foot as his anger grows, spurring a desire for revenge. Ultimately, a midnight confrontation spirals out of control, and from its extraordinary violence Nathan is presented with two final paths: one ends in destruction; the other could lead to redemption.
Written in taut, muscular prose and punctuated by brief poetic journal entries that document the ever-changing sky, Panhuyzen’s debut novel recounts one man’s story in a world revved with suspense and alive with wonder.
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The Sleep of Apples
$22.95In The Sleep of Apples, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with passion and consummate skill about nine closely linked characters who walk the tightrope of survival. Set in a gritty Montreal neighbourhood that’s been slowly gentrifying over the last two decades, troubled teenagers and an experienced psychiatrist, a truck driver permanently scarred by a near-fatal accident and a recreation therapist struggle to build a community and make their lives?and their deaths?meaningful. Fierce, original and bracingly honest, these unforgettable stories speak to the author’s Jewish heritage, her experience as a cancer survivor and as loving mother to a gay son and a transgender son. The stories dramatize that families are what we create, not necessarily those we are born into, illuminating how we all live imperfect lives: We love what we have and mourn what we’ve lost. Readers are witnesses as these indelible characters gain strength, insight and empathy through their struggles and suffering. They each bear the scars of trauma but possess the gift of resilience.
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The Sleeping Car Porter
$23.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.”
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
“Suzette Mayr brings to life –believably, achingly, thrillingly –a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly one hundred years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate –and eerily contemporary. The sleeping car porter in this sleek, stylish novel is named R.T. Baxter –called George by the people upon whom he waits, as is every other Black porter. Baxter’s dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with his secret life as a gay man, and in Mayr’s triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but into and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters, and, finally, into a beautifully rendered radiance.” – 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury
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The Sleepworker
$17.95John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with four friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy.
Andy is an artist. Well, he is if you define art as something that people don’t want but the artist wants to give them anyway. His work includes the Double-Murder Gun, which is just as likely to kill the shooter as the intended victim. A gallery owner with Tourette syndrome “discovers” his work and Andy is on his way to being famous. John, on the other hand, is hard at work at being unemployed, drinking all night and sleeping all day—which leaves him very little time for writing poems. Andy, watching him sleep, has an intriguing idea for a piece of art that he thinks will allow John to get paid for what he does best.
Using the story of Andy Warhol and John Giorno and their film Sleep as a starting point, The Sleepworker reads like a Warhol film on fast-forward.
‘As New York, capital of the twentieth century, recedes from memory, it becomes more like Paris; we flock to it to pay tribute to the great things that once happened there. New York is now a miasma of apocryphal myths feasting on its own corpse. On these pages, Martinez spins hazy rumor and wilting gossip into blistering contemporary fiction, holding up Warhol’s mirror to the myth of Warhol himself. The result is a delicious celebration of simulacra where, like New York New York itself, nothing is true, but everything is permitted.’
— Kenneth Goldsmith
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The Slip-Knot
$14.95In turns hysterical and heartbreaking, frantic and thoughtful, The Slip-Knot is a spellbinding comic monologue unlike any other. Journey with the incomparable TJ Dawe as he mans a giant truck, becomes the unhelpful voice on the other end of the phone line, and compiles euphemisms while he stocks the shelves in a drugstore. In between are ruminations and wise observations on long-distance relationships, the history of Santa Claus, recreational Gravol, and why you should never mail meat, no matter what the clerk at the 7-11 tells you.
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the small blue
$10.00What is the small blue? It is a condition. It is a fragmented mood disorder. It is a lyric state, a meditation that moves backward, an exercise in psychic time. It includes impressions, forgotten bits, broken lyricism, biographical sketches. the small blue- a feeling or perhaps the distant translation of a feeling. It is the literal translation of an obscure line from Apollinaire: ‘le petit bleu.’ What is the small blue? It is a book of fragments.
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The Small Nouns Crying Faith
$20.00The first word in this new collection by Phil Hall is “verb” and the last word is “blurtip.” Between these, many nouns cry out their faith within a hookless framework�that sings in chorus while undermining such standard forms & tropes as “the memoir,” “genealogy” and “the shepherd’s calendar.” With a rural pen, these poems talk frogs, carrots, local noises, partial words, remnants, dirt roads, deep breath & hope:
my laboratory the moment
is�accordion-shaped — cluttered — sopping& not eternal
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The Small Things that End the World
$24.95From the Giller-longlisted author of The Factory Voice comes a new novel in a similar vein – a story of the strength and resilience of three separate women, who, at three different points in history, are forced to make tough decisions and come face-to-face with calamities outside of their control.
It’s 1954 and young Sadie Wilder gets her big break at last – a chance to babysit for the posh Bannister family whose regular babysitter, Wanda Keeler, is down with the mumps. Sadie is certain she can deal with any obstacle, but little does she – or anyone else, for that matter – know that on that very night Hurricane Hazel, to this day, one of Canada’s worst natural disasters, is about to strike Toronto. Sadie is alone with the two small Bannister children, Bobby and Faith, as winds and floodwaters ravage the house. The Small Things That End The World tells the riveting story of that fateful, tragic night, and its aftermath that takes us into the twenty-first century, an era of environmental disasters and the fragile economic lives of many, brought on by globalization. Lynes’ novel poses big questions; how do we care for each other? How do we forgive? How do we move from one moment to the next in a precarious world? After catastrophe strikes, how do we keep believing in the forces of good? Jeanette Lynes has crafted a beautifully written story of three women on the margins as each tries to make her way in the world. The novel culminates in 2005, a year of further environmental disaster.