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Showing 8145–8160 of 9492 results
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The Solid Form of Language
$19.95“Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.” With this concise and broadly informative essay, renowned poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of writing and a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning.
Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times. The first four sections of the essay describe the earliest creation of scripts, their movement across the globe and the typographic developments within and across languages.
In the fifth and final section of the essay, Bringhurst introduces his system of classifying scripts. Placing four established categories of written languagesemographic, syllabic, alphabetic and prosodicon a wheel adjacent to one another, he uses the location, size and shape of points on the wheel to show the degree to which individual world languages incorporate these aspects of recorded meaning. Bringhurst’s system is based on an appreciation that indeed no one’s hands are fast enough and that no single script adheres to or can be understood within the confines of a single method of transcription.
Readers will find this combination of anthropology, typography, literature, mathematics, music and linguistics surprisingly accessible and thought provoking. The text is accompanied by diagrams and typographic examples that make for an experiential study of the relationship between writing and meaning.
This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a letterpress printed jacket. The book was designed by Robert Bringhurst and Andrew Steeves, and printed on Zephyr Laid paper. The cover was hand-printed letterpress on St. Armand handmade paper.
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The Sometimes Lake
$18.95The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection The Sometimes Lake will transport readers from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the deep lasting space of the prairies.
The characters that readers meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd.
There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; others who are confused by cultural shift or troubled by the security of cults; women who try to grieve for their unborn children, and others who play at suicide.
At the vortex of the surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion.
Her curiosity and scrutinizing intelligence as well as her ever playful wit guide the reader through close encounters with physical and psychological landscapes and then reveal the uncommon denominators in them that make people unique. -
The Song Collides
$16.00‘The Song Collides’ takes the reader on a highly personal and internal metaphysical investigation into the state of the natural world-and then back again via more lyrical and local enquiries that speak to each and every one of us. Life is an exchange: each of us takes in the world and then expresses it for ourselves and for others. This is a simultaneous and nearly imperceptible process that lasts, we hope, at least until the exit.
Calvin Wharton’s poems in ‘The Song Collides’ pulse and soar with the sounds of beautiful music. Whether a specific one of ‘The Song Collides” lyrics, prose poems, sonnets, or elegies mentions music or not, Wharton’s mastery of his art never fails to bring his words to resonant life in the ear and mind. He is a connoisseur of precise details that, transformed through his attention to the musicality of language, ring within the reader’s memory like a favourite tune. -Tom Wayman, author of ‘High Speed Through Shoaling Water’
Here is a poetry ofgentle surprises, of the enjoyment of “salt air, sweet water / qualities that feed days / and grow into years,” of ironies that enrich, “every answer lost in the question following.” And even when we are reminded of everyday “skimpy wishes,” how good to read these nuances so carefully shaped for our pleasure, each reminding us to “begin wherever you are, / but first look around.” – David Zieroth, ‘The Fly in Autumn’
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The Soul of All Great Designs
$29.00For Alec, an independent businessman and classic car aficionado, life has been a series of lies that he has told himself and the people around him. Raised by a stay-at-home mother, and a father who worked on the line at an automotive factory in the Greater Toronto Area, Alec sets himself up as an interior designer. His success, he believes, is due as much to his talents as to the false impression he creates among his clients: he is a fashionable and trendy gay man, well-known in his world.
Sumintra, or ‘Sue’, as she calls herself, does not chafe at her parents’ expectations for her, as she lives a separate and secret life. When she meets Alec at a classic car show, their private worlds connect and they fall in love. The trouble for them is that they have public lives that are contrary to their personal hopes and fears.
In a short novel that resembles Coetzee’s Disgrace in both the elegance of its writing and its emotional impact, Neil Bissoondath has forged the finest novel of his career.
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The Sound and the Glory
$19.95A unique and comprehensive look at the Seattle Sounders franchise and its storied run for the Cup
The Seattle Sounders were a sensation from the start, attracting crowds of sizes unlike any MLS team had ever seen. By the 2016 season, Seattle was averaging more than 42,000 fans per home game, the most of any soccer team in the Western Hemisphere, and more than behemoths like Chelsea F.C. and A.C. Milan overseas. But, for all of its early consistent success, Seattle had yet to actually win the league.
In order to reach the ambitious goals the club set for itself, the Sounders needed the jolt of a championship. To get there would require tumult previously unknown to a club built on stability, a clash of egos, and a title run so unlikely it could hardly have been scripted. This is a Cinderella story for all MLS fans and every Sounder at heart.
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The Sound of a Rainbow
$22.95Sometimes the challenges we resist the most can give us the strength to transform into the person we want to be. Troubled, almost 16-year-old Raven Tantie just wants to be left alone, after her disastrous final performance in The Teen Talent show goes viral on social media. Worse, following a therapist’s advice, her divorcing parents send her to Rainbow Wings, an inclusive summer camp for the performing arts in Northern Ontario. Initially, Raven is angry at the world, but inside she’s desperate for acceptance and belonging. Campers with physical exceptionalities, learning disabilities, and complex neurodiversity are welcome at Rainbow Wings. Anxious and self-absorbed, Raven resists the charms of the quirky staff, the other campers, and the beautiful natural environment. When Ash, a camper with autism struggles to cope, her empathy for others begins to grow.Camp Director J. B., a former rock musician and professional clown, utilizes a philosophy of loving respect to help the campers. His estranged elderly mother lives in an abandoned wildlife sanctuary nearby, under threat from unscrupulous developers. When hard decisions have to be made, can Raven learn to use kindness and honesty to help new friends and herself? Because sometimes, when life deals hard problems, you can regain your confidence, and with trust and hope, build a better future.
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The Source of Light
$15.95The Source of Light profiles two seventeen-year-olds as they put on their detective mindsets and physical disguises to seek answers to serious questions such as Mike’s mother’s infidelity and Mike’s father’s involvement in industrial espionage. Set against the backdrop of a synchrotron, a football field-sized facility that uses light millions of times brighter than the sun to peer inside matter, the teen detectives soon begin to connect the world’s most powerful microscope to nefarious black market schemes.
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The South Will Rise at Noon
$19.99Hot on the heels of Douglas Glover’s Governor General’s Award for fiction for his riotous novel, Elle, Goose Lane has brought back into print Glover’s hilarious novel, The South Will Rise at Noon, originally published in 1988.
At the centre of this story of a modern-day knight errant is Tully Stamper, a bankrupt, a liar, a tippler of corn juice and a deadbeat husband who has abandoned his wife and child no fraudulent psychiatric grounds. He is also one of the world’s last innocents. The setting for Tully’s adventure is Gomez Gap, Florida, a sliver of the Old South turned into a Hollywood backdrop for the movie recreation of a famous Civil War battle. From the time Tully stumbles out of the swamp and into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her flamboyant film-director husband Oscar Osterwader to the moment when the enraged citizens of Gomez Gap carry him back to the swamp and leave him chained to a pine tree to die, we are Tully’s co-conspirators, his partners in crime, sharing his pain, his optimism and his wayward wit.
A disarmingly intimate and energetic portrait at once hilarious and cautionary, crazy and bittersweet, The South Will Rise at Noon shows off Douglas Glover’s true comic form.
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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.