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Showing 8145–8160 of 9481 results
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The Spine Chillers
$14.99The Spine Chillers is an episodic comic strip relating to the little known story about the time the world’s greatest writers shared a small boarding house, living together to create some of the most loved thrillers and horror stories of all time. Marvel at HP Lovecraft’s inspiration for Cthulhu, gasp as Ambrose Bierce struggles under the weight of his own creative output, and watch as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mud wrestle to determine once and for all who is the better horror writer.
Comic genius Ben Clark is the creative talent behind the strip. Volume 1 collects the first two year run of comic strips, all the way from ‘Feet!’ through to ‘Meet Cthulhu.’ Genuinely funny whilst also at times tender and touching, The Spine Chillers collection is a welcomed cultured tonic during these trying times.
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The Spiral Maze
$11.00The Spiral Maze is Bow’s most ambitious novel so far, combining the pace and tension of the best adventure stories, with a brilliant conceived "other world" which in fact grew from the warped imagination of the protagonist’s undead, tyrranical ancestor.
The Spiral Maze invites students to consider the themes of identity and responsibility while it entertains in high order.
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The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us
$22.00The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is an anthology of fascinating and singular short stories from some of the best Chinese Canadian authors writing today.
Assembled by Dan K. Woo, who was named a Canadian author to watch by CBC in 2022, the stories in the anthology span a wide variety of Chinese Canadian voices, experiences and styles. The collection has contributions from established writers such Sam Cheuk, Sheung-King and Lydia Kwa; up-and-coming voices such as Isabella Wang and even a story available for the first time in English from Bingji Ye. From the practiced fielding of family questions by young women in a Hong Kong living room to a child’s ghost searching for a way to move to the next world to a family living with the unsettling sounds of constant explosions an industrial district on the edges of Beijing, each story is a stunning window into a world new to many North American readers. The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is a powerful and elegant collection of stories that works to redefine Chinese Canadian writing.
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The Spoon Asylum
$15.95It is the summer of 1933 and young Haven Cattrell, seeking work, finds himself abandoned in the small northern Ontario town of Davisville. At an exclusive summer camp for girls he befriends Wetherby Moss and his son Jude who introduce him to the joys and heartaches of jazz.
Jazz had taken a hard blow, during the first-half of the 1930s. Although there was still work to be had for some in places like New York, musicians in other parts of the country were barely existing on what venues remained. Wetherby and Jude had come from that reality and, as Haven mastered the jazz trumpet, he learns the horrifying truth about why Wetherby, his mentor, had to flee his home in Detroit and find sanctuary with his son among the unique subculture of rural Northern Ontario.
But Haven’s story is bigger than his love of jazz. It is the story of the racism that haunted black jazz musicians in the 30s, and how that racism found its way to Davisville. It is the story of how love can blind young men and save them from themselves, and it is the story of how important it is to dream when the chaos and hard times around you want to drag you down.
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The Spruces
$15.95Young, idealistic but frightfully naive, Kevin and Joanne decide to leave the urban streets of Toronto to homestead in the Peace River country. Life on the norther frontier, they learn, is far removed from anything they had experienced in the past. Even being jobless in the mean streets of a large city has nothing to compare with the troubles of homesteading in a norther climate. While The Spruces is set in the years of the Great Depression, the scene it describes is in many ways a forerunner to the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s when young and idealistic city people packed up and moved to isolated parts of Canada and tried to become self-sufficient. However, few of the later adventures ended as tragically as The Spruces.
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The Stand-In
$16.95A retired academic is called to a remote university to speak as the replacement for an old friend recently deceased in unusual circumstances. The Stand-In is a transcript of these lectures, revealing a sophisticated tale of art, fame, and adultery that unfolds through rambling anecdotes and flashes of scholarly grandstanding. Fiercely funny and bitterly ironic, The Stand-In has been called the best academic doppelgänger story since Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
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The Stanley Park Companion
$29.95In The Stanley Park Companion Paul Grant and Laurie Dickson have combined social and natural history–memorabilia, photographs, illustrations, maps, drawings, anecdotes and remembrances–to reveal the many surprises tourists and hometown visitors can find in this thousand-acre sanctuary. From Easter Be-ins and Theatre Under the Stars to poet Pauline Johnson and lifeguard Joe Fortes, from wild wolves and miniature train rides to Skana the Killer Whale and the totem poles (which are the park’s most visited spot), it’s all here in this lively, sometimes quirky compendium of the world-famous park that has been the green heart of Vancouver for over 100 years.
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The Starlight Hotel-Casino
$25.00The Starlight Hotel-Casino is the story of a troubled family business doomed to fail and the stressful dynamics among its members and key employees during the collapse. It describes the inner workings of the casino business and the demise of Reno as a major player in the industry; unable, as it was, to meet the triple threat of Las Vegas, Indian gaming, and the legalization of gambling throughout the United States and abroad. The novel is both a roman à clef and bildungsroman.
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The Stars of Mount Quixx
$22.95Even the best intentions can bring down a mountain …
Sent away for the summer, the Ivyweather sisters were promised a family vacation by their wealthy, indifferent parents. Two at-odds opposites — Constance an anxious society sweetheart and Ivory an adventure-struck rebel — the sisters aren’t sure what to make of the dangerously decayed town of Quixx and its creeping fog that never seems to lift.
When Ivory disappears after a spat with her sister, Constance tracks her to the mountain, where the Ivyweathers learn the town’s hushed talk of monsters is more than just a rumor. There, the sisters meet Derrek, a dapper and talented astronomer who also happens to be a spider-like creature with a scientific mind, the best of intentions, and a tragic past. Together, they all must find a way to lift the dangerous fog that has ensnared the town and return Quixx’s long-lost stars. But they soon discover that something far more monstrous than beasts lurks in Quixx, and it’s poised to crush this sleepy mountain town, along with the dreams of those in it.
Death and discarded memories haunt every corner of Quixx, but kinship, romance, and family — the one we choose — are at the heart of this cautiously optimistic, unabashedly queer modern monster story.
About the Series
Welcome to Brindlewatch — a world like ours from days gone by. Fast shiny cars, growing metropolises, and a war on the other side of the ocean with an enemy no one can see. Back at home, monsters, spirits, and the humans who get entangled with them populate the pages of the Brindlewatch Quintet — five individual, interconnected tales of mystery, romance, and ultimately, belonging. This is the newest YA fantasy series by beloved writer S.M. Beiko, award-winning author of the Realms of Ancient trilogy. It is notable for its charming and quirky tone and diverse cast of relatable characters. The series will begin with The Stars of Mount Quixx in spring 2023 and conclude with The Battle for Brindlewatch in 2027.
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The Steve Machine
$19.95Shortlisted for a 2009 Lambda Award
When Auden learns he’s HIV-positive, he decides to head for Toronto, leaving behind Sudbury and his old personality. Determined to construct a whole new Auden, he gets a new job, new clothes, new habits, new friends, new ways of speaking. And all of these things seem to be leading him inevitably towards Steve, Steve Reinke.
Steve – and here’s where it getsconfusing – is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist (The Hundred Videos), someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions that cure migraines and allow viewers to see five seconds into the future.
There’s something familiar about Steve, thinks Auden. His voice. His dulcet, summery voice. It’s the voice inside Auden’s head, the one that he hears when he reads books. And then Steve tells Auden that together they will build a machine in the form of a book – a machine that will replace this inner voice with something more soothing and satisfying, a machine that will allow the reader to construct a new personality, a machine to make Auden healthy again. The Steve Machine is at once a plague narrative, a love story, a reflection on media technology, and a joy to read.
As an added bonus, this volume has been written both as a regular hold-in-your-hand novel with a beginning, middle, and end (though not necessarily in that order), and as a machine. The Steve Machine.
‘I love this book, though I prefer the original title, Steve Reinke, The Greatest Video Artist in the World.’ – The real-life Steve Reinke
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The Stone Face
$13.00The year is 1964 and first-time film director Alan Schneider is about to embark on a project combining the talents of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett. When Alan visits the home of Keaton to discuss the project, titled simply Film, he discovers the former star engaged in an imaginary card game with the long-deceased Irving G. Thalberg.
It doesn’t take long for Alan to realize that he has entered into an altered universe resembling the surreal world of the Buster Keaton film, a world where doors solve problems and card games provide lessons in life. Alan turns to Beckett for help in making sense of this world, only to find that Sam is perfectly at home in it.
The Stone Face tracks Alan’s journey through the maze that is the world of the Keaton film, a world which, as the making of Film progresses, also takes on elements that might be found in a Beckett absurdist play. By examining the making of Film, as well as the comedy of the Keaton film, the play examines the process by which we create art in general as well as the process by which we live our lives.
Praise for The Stone Face:
“[L]ocal playwright Sherry MacDonald skillfully manages to pay homage to Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett while jibing at subjects as diverse as theatre of the absurd, Abbott and Costello and academic literary theory. … both my hands are clapping.” (ReviewFromTheHouse)
“The energetic tone of the piece is rich and appealing. The slapstick world of Buster Keaton is exploited to full theatrical effect. The voices are vivid, unique, and imbued with useful subtext.” (Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago)
“A wonderfully clever and inventive tale of an interesting collaboration. The comic traditions of Buster Keaton and other silent film stars are drawn on to create a story of a man coming to understand the nature or genius and the mystery of great art.” (Actors Theatre of Louisville)
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The Stone Thrower
$14.95Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction. Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions, and scientifically grounded superpowers — a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed.
At the core of Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second short story collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent’s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, that only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens.
Bonus BackLit materials will include an interview and a list of Marek’s recommended books.
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The Stonehenge Letters
$17.95While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the ‘Crackpot’ file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel’s will, written by several notable Nobel laureates – including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie — each offering an explanation of why and how Stonehenge was constructed. Diligent research uncovers that Alfred Nobel added a secret codicil to his will, a prize for the Nobel laureate who solves the mystery of Stonehenge.
Weaving together a wealth of primary sources – photos, letters, wills – The Stonehenge Letters tells the tale of a fascinating secret competition.
Praise for The Stonehenge Letters:
‘This little novel is a delight from its first word to its last. The Stonehenge Letters is by turns thoughtful,whimsical, haunting and laugh-out-loud funny. Reading this book was like skating over the smoothest ice; I was blissfully unaware of the transition from history to fiction and back again’
– Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl
‘In his alarmingly smart and dangerously absorbing Freud-tinged romance/detective story, Harry Karlinsky deploys explosions, earthworms, radioactive particles and a passel of Nobel laureates to reinvent historyin the golden age of invention.’
– Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
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The Stones of Burren Bay
$23.95In a tragic car accident, 15-year-old Norie loses her deadbeat father while her distant mother is injured. Her prized possession, an antique artist’s box that traveled from Ireland with her great-great-grandmother, is destroyed along with her deep connection to her art. As Norie grapples with her self-identity, obscured by grief and anger, she and her physically and emotionally fragile mother are forced to relocate. With no other relatives to rely on, they call on the kindness of her mother’s oldest friend Dahlia and her daughter Wil, who run the Jolly Pot Tearoom and Burren Bay Lighthouse Museum on Manitoulin Island. Dahlia introduces Norie to ancient Irish Celtic spiritualism and opens the thin veil between the past and present where Norie encounters the echo of a century’s old spirit, Oonagh. Through Oonagh’s own story Norie comes to terms with her father’s betrayal and death and rediscovers her passion for art. As her mother’s emotional wounds reach a crisis, Norie realizes they must face their guilt and grief together in order to heal and become reunited as mother and daughter.
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The Storm of Progress
$22.95In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what’s going on.
Why is it that what we’ve been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history’s greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?
Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy’s most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.
Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.
Because we have what it takes—because we are good.
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The Story of Blue Eye
$18.95The Sun on the Mountains series traces the James family from the loss of their Quaker bank during the American Revolution to their oil company headquarters in present day Calgary. Without stopping a moment of drama, Trafford constructs the foundation of a western Canadian epic that layers Indian and European mythology in a perfect blend of history and adventure through his central character Blue Eye James, whose time honoured codes of hard work, honour, fairness and trust lay the foundation for an empire.