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Showing 8145–8160 of 9267 results
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The Wolf’s Head
$20.00Immortalized in words and song, the symbol of the great, untreaded Wilderness, the shores surrounding Lake Superior rustle with stories of gregarious legend, unlikely heroes, quiet sorrow, and unmatched feats of bravery and adventure. From the earliest European records of the world’s largest body of fresh, open water, to the ghostly anecdotes of the men lost in her freezing waters, Peter Unwin records the stories of the great Superior and the people who, over centuries, have determined to make it their home. In short, cultivating chapters, Unwin lays out the history of the lake and its lands, illuminating the stories of the copper stained greed of men who sought the Ontonagon Boulder, the strangling dread of Mishipizheu, the maddening determination of voyageurs as they packed 400 pounds across rugged earth and choppy water, and the hollow ache of loss on the greatest of inland seas. All the ferociousness of the Wolf’s Head the lake embodies is laid out here, filled with extraordinary facts, humorous anecdotes, and an understanding of the people who have chosen to live along its shores. In simple, witty language that endears and engages, Peter Unwin brings Lake Superior to life like no other writer can, delivering in breathless vibrancy, the history of the Wolf’s Head.
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The Wolsenburg Clock
$18.95As Second World War bombs terrorize a small Austrian city near the Italian border, a man wants desperately to save a 600?year?old astronomical clock found there. The clock has been constructed and refurbished by a series of gifted individuals dedicated to producing the finest timepiece of their age. The man learns of the remarkable engineers who furtively added details that reflected their own private stories.
At the cusp of the fourteenth century, Wildrik Kiening was inspired to build the sophisticated clock for the newly consecrated cathedral in Wolsenburg. This magical device that keeps time, charts celestial motion, and even entertains parishioners with a show of automated figures is, however, not built without personal costs.
When a fire guts the cathedral and the clock is ruined, a child?alchemist named Geli Theurl, haunted by a bizarre aging condition, plots to build a second version with the help of her father and grandmother, just as time itself becomes understood in new ways. The second clock ages well, but its gears ultimately seize during the Enlightenment and it takes a final clockmaker ? an industrial mastermind and bastard son of a rich count ? to create the most impressive clock ever built.
The Wolsenburg Clock chronicles the development of a complex machine, and the risks, devotion, and love that went into its construction throughout the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history. Not only has Jay Ruzesky created an engaging fiction about a practical contraption and its engineers, he also alludes to the tensions between the Church and technologists in Western Europe as they battled to be at the forefront of social conscience.
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The Wolves at Evelyn
$24.95At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada’s dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada’s master prose stylists.
Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germany, Harold Rhenisch’s grandparents imagined that British Columbia’s Interior was the end of the earth—a new world where they could fulfil their dreams of the land, freed from tyrrany and from history itself. A generation later, in the wake of World War II, his father arrived, carrying many of the same ideas with him. What they found instead was a colonial culture as highly developed as Doris Lessing’s Rhodesia.
Rhenisch grew up at the nexus of these cultures: a Germany where Nazism simultaneously did and did not happen, a Canada in the process of shedding British colonialism for American, and a land—the Interior—that had no point of contact with any of them.
With remarkable range and vision, Rhenisch turns in a bravura performance, sifting through the ashes of personal experience, family anecdotes, literature, art, history, and the land itself for clues to a great untold story, Rhenisch assembles a collage of images and ideas that becomes a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. The hidden history of a forgotten outpost of the Empire is laid open, shattering dearly held myths and exposing buried skeletons.
How was the sunny, carefree Okanagan Valley fruit culture built on the back of King Leopold’s Congolese slave trade? How does Margaret Atwood’s garrison theory of literature reflect on Rhenisch family’s hidden Nazi past? How did the Hudson’s Bay Company Blanket act as both a cherished kitsch object for generations of Canadians and a tool of genocide? Alternating between light and darkness, great humour and sharp indignation, this is a disturbing, thought-provoking and important work from a masterful writer and cultural analyst.
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The Woman Downstairs
$11.95In The Woman Downstairs, eloquence joins intimately with an attentive and hungry eye. Julie Bruck explores the accidents and acquaintances of life, its small coincidences and occurrences, its unexpected meetings. With a passionate distance, Bruck blends the outside observer’s cool embrace with a desire to know intensely life’s eccentric smallnesses, to gentle the beautiful out of the mundane. By turns witty and thoughtful, Bruck’s writing is always graceful, always a delight.
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The Woman She Was
$21.95Celia Cantú, a pediatrician in Havana, is trying to live a regular life in today’s Cuba. She is engaged to her childhood friend Luis and lives with her 16-year-old niece, Liliana. Celia’s life is disrupted when Luis’s brother, Joe, returns from Miami flaunting his American ways. Joe’s arrival and Liliana’s adolescent restlessness force Celia to examine the discrepancy between her country’s revolutionary ideals and its reality.
As this family drama unfolds, Celia is unnerved by moments when her mind and body seem to be taken over by Celia Sánchez, a heroine of the Revolution and long-time intimate of Fidel Castro. The turbulent past and an undefined future collide when Liliana disappears and Celia sets out into the Cuban countryside in search of her.
The Woman She Was is a deeply moving novel that explores the aspirations, hopes, and fears of contemporary Cubans, as well as the challenges they still face.
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The Woman Who Swallowed a Toothbrush
$19.95Drawing from real medical journal cases, a doctor shares true stories about strange symptoms and perplexing patients
Those in the medical profession know that sometimes the cases that come into emergency rooms or doctor’s offices can be highly unusual — and depending on how things go, the results can be either tragic or comic. This collection of stories reveals some of the oddest and most memorable case histories, from the woman who claims she was brushing her teeth when she swallowed her toothbrush — but in fact was a bulimic using it to induce vomiting — to the man whose routine elective back surgery revealed he’d been carrying a bullet around in his body for years.
From the funny to the frightening, these documented memorable medical mysteries make for fascinating reading.
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The Woman Who Swallowed Her Cat
$16.95Join Dr. Myers in his quest for unusual case studies as he unravels medical mysteries.
- Depressed and lonely, a man decides that pills and alcohol are too gentle an exit. How did he end up in the driver’s seat without his head?
- Drunken neighbours decide that beautifying the hedges on their property can be easily accomplished without hedge clippers. Removing the handlebars of a lawnmower, they lift the mower and its whirring gas powered blades, and quickly lose their buzz.
- A teenager, obsessed with self-stimulation, elects to use uncooked spaghetti during his amorous exploits with disastrous consequences that only a urologist can deal with.
- Vending machines are heavy and formidable foes; no match for an angry high school football player who wants his dollar back.
- Pool balls are round, smooth, and heavy, qualities that make them very difficult to remove from locations they should never have been placed.
- Chlorine is a concentrated toxin. Very little is required to sanitize a pool. What happens when you swim in the wrong liquid?
- Sexual escapades have been known to include all varieties of farm animals. But is it possible to fulfill one’s carnal desires with a John Deere tractor?
- A fisherman hooks a flopping one pounder, and both die in the process without jumping into the lake.
In The Woman Who Swallowed Her Cat, Dr. Myers presents intriguing, humorous, unbelievable, and dark vignettes of real medical life. You’ll be surprised by the truth as patients present to their doctors with usual symptoms that are masking very unusual diagnoses, and you’ll be left wondering how anyone in the world could be affected by these one-of-a-kind medical maladies.
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The Woman Who Would Be King
$34.95Through four decades of entertaining, in the wrestling ring and on the monster truck circuit, Debrah “Madusa” Miceli never could sit still. But her desire to learn, grow, and inspire legions of followers masked deep secrets … Her upbringing was a lie from the start, and the dark truths of her childhood, revealed here for the first time, are the earliest examples of Debrah’s determination to persevere.Professional wrestling may have been an odd choice for a nursing student, but Madusa went all-in, toughening up in Japan before conquering WWE as Alundra Blayze. She held the WWE Women’s belt … until being fired. In the rival WCW, Madusa infamously tossed the WWE belt in the garbage on live TV.Then, in 1999, Madusa changed lanes and revolutionized the monster truck world. At meet-and-greets, girls in pink “Queen of Carnage” t-shirts would wait alongside ogling fanboys. By 2004, she was the world champion in a sport dominated by men.Only one thing has eluded her: motherhood.This is the spellbinding story of how one woman survived child abuse, financial disaster, death-defying injuries, heartbreak, and chaos to emerge triumphant.
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The Wonder Lands War
$24.00I would take the whole world apart to find Alice.
Cross is back in a new adventure – a desperate hunt to find Alice, who had sacrificed herself in their confrontation with a mad Noah and his apocalyptic ark and vanished into a whirlpool. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys across the world to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals, into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying Wonder Lands themselves, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But the angels are looking for Alice too and they will stop at nothing to find her.
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The Wondrous Woo
$22.95Finalist for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. The Wondrous Woo tells the story of Miramar Woo who is the quintessential Chinese girl: nice, quiet, and reserved. The eldest of the three Woo children, Miramar is ever the obedient sister and daughter … on the outside. On the inside, she’s a kick-ass kung fu heroine with rock star flash, sassy attitude, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. Just as Miramar is about to venture forth on the real adventure of leaving home for university, her beloved father is killed in an accident. Miramar watches helplessly as her family unravels in the aftermath of her father’s death. Her mother is on the brink of a recurring paranoia that involves phantom hands. Her younger siblings suddenly and mysteriously become savants, in possession of uncanny talents nicknamed The Gifts. As her siblings are swept up into the fantastic world of fame and fortune and her mother fights off madness, Miramar is left behind, feeling talentless and abandoned with no idea who she really is or who she wants to become. She gets herself to university on a bus with no family to see her off, no hugs, and no support. She is utterly on her own. In a story that spans four eventful years, Miramar ventures forth from the suburbs of Toronto to university in Ottawa and back again. Along the way she encounters people and situations light years apart from her sheltered world. She explores new friendships, lust, and a side of herself never seen before. Ultimately, Miramar discovers the meaning of courage, belonging, and family.
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The Woods
$19.95“Amber McMillan’s writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders.”
-Kevin Chong, author of Baroque-a-Nova, Neil Young Nation and Beauty Plus Pity*
The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a personal memoir that probes the unique and sometimes unsettling tenor of life on one of BC’s smallest gulf islands. The measure of one’s success here, the author discovers, doesn’t rely on status or income, but on the ability to adapt both the rigorous outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and equally challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility.
These are stories of the people and families who sought refuge here, for different reasons and with different outcomes: a city contractor whose idea of relaxing in the country is to spend his time running noisy power tools; a septuagenarian library curator who has happily re-discovered men and Scotch; but mostly the book is about the author and her family.
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The Words Wanting Out
$18.95The Words Wanting Out is the first selection from one of Canada’s most respected poets. In 1982 Barry Dempster landed on the short list for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his very first book, and has since published seven more collections to high praise.Over this time, Dempster has chosen to keep a relatively low profile, relocating from Toronto to the small town of Holland Landing, Ontario, and only publishing his work at small literary presses. Many of his collections are either out of print or not widely distributed, making all of his titles highly sought after by poetry readers across Canada who have discovered his poignant writing by reputation, word-of-mouth, literary journals or by his contributions to our cultural landscape as an editor, instructor and critic. The Words Wanting Out collects the best poems of Dempster’s varied and dynamic output, including those from his 2003 collection Living Well (available in limited edition only from Poppy Press).
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The Words We Share
$22.99“A must-buy.” —School Library Journal
A young girl helps her dad navigate life in a new country where she understands the language more than he does, in an unforgettable story about communication and community by Boston Globe–Horn Book Award-winner Jack Wong.
Angie is used to helping her dad. Ever since they moved to Canada, he relies on her to translate for him from English to Chinese. Angie is happy to help: when they go to restaurants, at the grocery store, and, one day, when her dad needs help writing some signs for his work.
Building off her success with her dad’s signs, Angie offers her translation skills to others in their community. She’s thrilled when her new business takes off, until one of her clients says he’s unhappy with her work. When her dad offers to help, she can’t imagine how he could. Working together, they find a surprising solution, fixing the problem in a way Angie never would have predicted.
A gorgeously illustrated picture book from Boston Globe–Horn Book and Governor General award-winning creator Jack Wong (When You Can Swim, Scholastic) that is at once a much-needed exploration of the unique pressures children of immigrants often face, a meditation on the dignity of all people regardless of their differences, and a reminder of the power of empathy.
“Beautifully written and illustrated. . . . I am so glad this book exists in the world.” —Bao Phi, author of the Caldecott Honor and Zolotow Award-winning A Different Pond
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The Work of Days
$16.95With the prisms of varied vocabularies refracting detail and language, Sarah Lang illuminates the intricacies of communication, of the moments and gaps between action and reaction, and, as she does, announces herself as a commanding and rhythmically captivating new poetic presence.
The first section of this extended meditation borrows from The Farmer’s Almanac, while the second is infused with the language of the occult. Inthe third part, Lang invokes the vocabulary of the institution – the airport, the hospital. In the end, these linguistic pillagings accrete into a poignant shadow under the letters of Lang’s own words, pulling them into a stark and alluring focus. With echoes of Virginia Woolf, Lang has given us a constellation of poems as delicate and relentless as pure light.
‘With ferocity and tenderness, direction and indirection, with and without hope these staggering poems astonish at every turn. One gets up from them changed.’
– Carole Maso
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The World Afloat
$12.95City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)
In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.
Inside the linoleum-lined kitchens and lace-trimmed living rooms that drift through these stories, Farrant interrupts the daily routines – doctor’s appointments, gardening, mealtimes – of her eccentric yet familiar characters with intensely surreal, laugh-out-loud moments. What happens when a whimsical spirit becomes captive to a middle-aged body? At the end of a Love Your Package workshop, what does the wrap-up dinner look like? Can a soggy tomato salad really end someone’s marriage? Brimming with pathos and bathos in equal measure, Farrant’s smart prose offers escape and renewal from the monotony of modern life, while at the same time poking fun at her readers’ pathological devotion to the technology and interpersonal relationships that leave them feeling bored and empty. Sexuality and depravity, childhood and bad parenting, and love and divorce are all deftly handled in this hot flash of a book that goes straight to the heart of things. As each “miniature” reads stranger (and truer) than the one before, Farrant manages to coax her readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy.
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The World at My Back
$22.95“Books written out of great emotional distress are … rarely great literature. Thomas Melle’s [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note.”
—Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)A FINALIST FOR THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE • TRANSLATED INTO EIGHTEEN LANGUAGES
Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.
Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.