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Showing 8129–8144 of 9492 results
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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.
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The Small Way
$18.00What strange gravity draws two people together? What pulls them apart? In The Small Way a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouse’s transition. Intimate and powerful, the poems celebrate the courage of a partner coming out as a transwoman and records the confusion in facing a partner’s changing gender identity. Speaking to the tenderness that exists between two people, the book explores shifting bodies and changing emotional landscapes, and examines what it really means to love someone. The poems reside in the stillness of two bodies and in the intersection between time and grief. The Small Way is a passionate record of love and loss, and a naked exploration of vulnerability. The book is an elegy to love and memory, a chronicle of holding on and letting go.
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The Smell of Rain
$22.99Each family has their story, and each one is different, depending on who tells it. Fighting encroaching darkness, Alice chronicles her own story, one of love, loss, and learning how to piece it all back together. These deeply personal entries weave their way through past and present, spinning a kaleidoscopic and increasingly fragmented narrative.
“No matter who we are or what kind of life we lead, we are always alone in the end,” writes Alice.
Both delicate and iridescent, The Smell of Rain is bound to make you think: how will you fare when you see the gossamer thread of life begin to fray?
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The Sniger and the Floose
$13.99On a very Random Island
in the North Atlantic Sea,
some very Random animals
are hiding in the trees?So begins Ashley Fayth?s delightful nonsense poem in which readers meet a range of ?wild and wondrous? beasts?like the sniger, the floose, the squiffin, and the butterflabbit. With its playful rhymes and rollicking rhythm, this book is a perfect read-aloud. Yet even in its silliest moments, The Sniger and the Floose is a gentle reminder to respect and preserve the beauty of the natural world around us, and a joyous celebration of imagination.
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The Snow Kimono
$18.95Ilona Martonfi’s third poetry collection, The Snow Kimono, can best described as an obsession with truth. The Snow Kimono invites the reader into a magical world where reality shimmers with the fragile beauty of the moment and the dark, haunting awareness of a painful past that lingers just out of sight. Compassionate and disturbing, witness poems elaborate on history, exile, the war refugee, the dispossessed, and the disappeared. Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, identity, place, and with loss — especially in the series keening for a mentally ill daughter. The past and the present mix in this compelling collection of free verse and prose poetry that draw the reader into a language that illuminates the way in which the beauty of human spirit is both concise and eloquent.
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The Snow Queen
$14.95Winner of the 2001 Aurora Award for Best Long Form Work in English!
In this reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, the magical worlds of Saami shamanism and the Kalevala coexist with the polite Victorian society of nineteenth-century Scandanavia. At a time when traditional faith is challenged by modern science, the old pagan gods still haunt the northern forests. Kernaghan blends fantasy and historical realism to create an enchanting, provocative story that will inspire readers of all ages.
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The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius
$15.95The Society for the Destitute Present Titus Bouffonius presents five characters who shelter at the Society for the Destitute and who get a $500 grant from Arts Educational Outreach to put on a play. They decide to do Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus because it has the most murders, but as you might predict, this is not your average night of Shakespeare. Shocking, outrageous and stupidly funny, the characters often forget their lines, forget what play they are in, say whatever the hell they want to, or refuse to stay dead when they are killed. And, as only clowns are able, they turn the tables on us, the audience, and present us with our own foibles in a way that is both hilarious and inevasible. With the inspired marriage of Shakespearian text like, “I plead my passions for Lavinia’s love,” and inspired contemporary dialogue like, “You merciless piss-flapping dick-weed twat-waffle slug,” and the French clown technique of bouffon. Audaciously satirical and physical, the play is an unflinching look at war, rage and grief through characters who yearn for beauty in the grotesqueness of our world today.
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The Society of Experience
$22.00When his father – a distinguished writer – unexpectedly passes away, Derrick van der Lem’s insulated world implodes, leaving a much stranger and crueler place than the one he knew. In the midst of his downward spiral, the mysterious Society of Experience asks him to take part in a baffling science experiment involving time travel, with the possibility of changing his life and pulling him out of his rut. When the experiment begins to untangle, Derrick finds himself out of his depth and in the middle of a nightmare, with only the company of a beautiful stranger to steer him from chaos to heartbreak. Meanwhile, who are the society, and what are their true intentions for Derrick? Is time travel real, or is it yet another contrivance the Society has invented?
Part Philip K. Dick, part mystery, The Society of Experience is an inventive, fast-paced story of a man’s journey for a better future through streets, alleyways and deserted buildings.
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The Soft Signature
$12.00The Soft Signature is a place where multiple meanings are generated and evoked through the disruption of simple linear narrative and lyric sensibility. For Lise Downe, language is not simply “a means to an end.” Instead, its instability and unpredictability are encouraged and given a free hand: the effect is the creation of a “nowhere,” or alternate reality, that is as Canadian as Canada itself. In breathtaking poems like “Arranged Tributaries,” Downe proves herself the consummate literary scientist: the imagination’s cartographer, geologist, meteorologist, and historian. Ultimately, The Soft Signature documents a natural history of culture and communication, momentarily stabilizing the perpetually shifting sands upon which all such institutions are built.