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Showing 8161–8176 of 9492 results
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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.
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The Story of My Life Ongoing, by C.S. Cobb
$19.95Corey Cobb was born intersex, but because Corey’s father and stepmother didn’t make a big deal of it, it isn’t until Corey’s dad dies suddenly and Corey is back with a disapproving mother that making a gender choice becomes an issue. Corey is now legally old enough to refuse medical intervention–but not old enough to prevent “choosing not to choose” being considered by Corey’s mother to be a psychiatric problem. While in the youth psych ward, Corey meets Kim, diagnosed as anorexic, and together, the teens discover important, perhaps catastrophic, truths about each one’s past.
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The Story That Brought Me Here
$24.95Thousands of newcomers are pouring into Alberta from around the globe, bringing unexpected gifts. Many are writers and storytellers.
What pulls them to Canada? What happens to them on the journey? What experiences have they deliberately left behind? What treasures do they bring? How do they describe their emerging sense of place and their creative aspirations in a new home?
In this moving collection of stories and poems, writers from around the world share their thoughts on creating a life in Alberta. Expressed with beauty and clarity, and sometimes translated from the writer’s native tongue, these very personal accounts of joy and sadness, regret and humour, homesickness and exuberance, describe the defining moments of a departure and an arrival.
Contributors to The Story That Brought Me Here include Jalal Barzanji, Edmonton’s first Writers in Exile; Rita Espeschit, Thuc Cong, Mohammed Al-Nassar, Monika Igali, Sabah Tahir, Therezinha Franca Kennedy, Sangmok Lee, Sudhir Jain, Yi Li, Athiann Makuach Garang, Marsh Hoke, Tortor Maruku, Reinekke Lengelle, Brian Brennan, A.K. Rashid, June Smith-Jeffries, Magdalena Witkowsky, Anna Mioduchowska, Ikponwosa I.K. Ero and Comfort Adesuwa Ero, Wilma Rubens, Patricia Lopez de Vloothduis, Neung-jae Park Mary Cavill, Mansoor Ladha, Chantal Hitayezu and many others. With photographs by Shabnam Sukhdev.
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The Strange Scent of Saffron
$20.00Lower Saint-Lawrence, summer 1988. Looking to escape the violent grip of her uncle and twin brother, Nil heads for Le Bic with a half-tamed fox in tow. There, the tough young woman meets Jacob, an HIV-positive restaurant owner mixed up in illegal saffron trafficking. Meanwhile in India, Amar is about to take part in his first harvest of the red gold while his sister Alaka tries to conceal the embarrassment of her first period. The Strange Scent of Saffron is a raw, gut-wrenching novel about the lack and gradual attainment of empowerment, partly through a sensorially-rich connection with the world.
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The Strange Truth About Us
$16.95“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.
M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her work is infused with acerbic wit and innovation, and her surrealistic visions of everyday life are startlingly precise.
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The Street of Butterflies
$19.95Mehri Yalfani’s stories in The Street of Butterflies feature Iranian women dealing with displacement, cultural change, and struggles for survival and adaptation as immigrants in North America. At the same time, the challenges they face also reveal the racial, gendered and cultural anxieties of these same individuals who carry with them the biases of their country of origin to the norms of the new land. “Soleiman’s Silence,” “Felicia,” “If You Were I,” “Geranium Family,” and “Line,” all portray many dimensions of the migrant’s strive (or the refusal) to build a home, away from home. The stories that are set in Iran contain the complexity of the social and political context after the revolution that deposed the shah. These stories provide a glimpse of life in post-revolutionary Iran, where the new regime that replaced the old one continues the suppression and prosecution of political activists, only more harshly and mercilessly. Anyone who has lived under a brutal dictatorship can easily identify with the paralyzing fear of Sara and Nazar in the story, “Books,” the agonizing wait of Zinat for her disappeared son in “Unexpicable Story,” or the narratives of the ten-year-old child whose activist parents have perished in notorious prisons of the Islamic regime in “Where is Paradise?”
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The Streets of Winter
$19.95The Streets of Winter is a fast-paced, intricately crafted novel of life in the city. The characters find in Montreal the anonymity they crave, bartering their identities for the chance to reinvent themselves. Scrupulously plotted, rich in cultural detail and alive with Montreal’s many voices and accents, The Streets of Winter is an absorbing novel about life in modern urban Canada.
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The STU Reader
$19.95St. Thomas University has nurtured exemplary people for a century — from its first alighting in Newcastle to its current perch on a Fredericton hilltop. Here, in celebration of St. Thomas’s 100th anniversary, is the first-ever collection of fiction, poetry, and prose by the university’s most celebrated writers, including David Adams Richards, Sheldon Currie, Leo Ferrari, Sheree Fitch, and Kathy Mac.
Philip Lee’s thrumming account of a public auction kicks off the collection. Next up: Sheree Fitch’s poem, “Cop,” which wends through undercover prostitution and a child’s abduction. Hard on its heels: Sheldon Currie’s pitch-perfect story from a Nova Scotia coal-mining town. Once you begin, you’re sure to read until the entire, delectable volume is consumed.
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The Student
$21.95The Student is a portrait of a life in two snapshots.
It’s 1957 and Miriam Moscowitz is starting her final year of university with unwavering ambition. She is a serious and passionate student of literature who studies hard, dates a young Jewish man with a good job, and is the apple of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s. But then, in a single moment, her dreams crumble around her. Unsure of how to break a path for herself, she begins a reckless affair with an American student obsessed with the civil rights clashes in the south. When the young man abandons her to join the movement back home, Miriam gets on a bus to follow him, no longer sure of anything in her life.
Forty-eight years later, Miriam is the about to witness her son’s wedding (a newly-legal, same-sex marriage). She climbs the stairs to her study to look at a book she had carried with her on a bus to Detroit. She reads the marginalia written in her young, minuscule handwriting. It is familiar and strange, embarrassing and exhilarating, and she wonders what the young person who had written all these words almost half a century ago had to do with the old woman who read them now.
The Student is a compassionate and compelling work of fiction that brings together two pivotal times in history. With its innovative structure, masterful prose, and intelligently crafted characters, this book illustrates how we are shaped by – and can eventually overcome – the constraints of the times we occupy.