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All Books in this Collection
Showing 8177–8192 of 9481 results
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The Sun, the Wind, the Summer Field
$12.95The Sun the Wind the Summer Field shows the wit, intellect, and skill with words and rhyme for which Alfred G. Bailey is famous. This collection gathers together a half-century of poems. Some are the works of a young, strong voice applying the poetics of T.S. Eliot to the Canadian ethos, while others give voice to old age, undiminished in power and enriched by experience.
Some of the poems in The Sun the Wind the Summer Field have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Cormorant, and Wild East, but most have never been published before.
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The Sunday Book
$19.95In The Sunday Book, Michael Trussler uses memoir to excavate and explore a range of inner lives, all lived at different speeds. With essays touching on the meaning of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century to confronting the complexities of being a parent in the Anthropocene, Trusslers interconnected essays are united by his lived experience with a rare learning disability. The Sunday Book freshly engages with fundamental existential problems such as free will and contingency, all the while providing an original take on our contemporary moment.
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The Supreme Orchestra
$19.95A motley crew of characters deftly woven into a brilliant mashup of the spy novel and the art-world parody.
We know how Simone met the man who will become, for a time, her fourth husband. We know what she does (artist), her friends (a veritable menagerie), her habits (frustrated homebody). What remains to learn are the things she still doesn’t fully understand herself, like her role in the affair of the Port Merveille diamond. The Supreme Orchestra is many things at once: a geopolitical thriller, an art-world exposé, a digressive social study, a mischievous parody. -
The Suspect We
$24.95In The Suspect We, Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson collaborate to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect We is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it. Throughout, Bennett and Neilson query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address.
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The Suspension Bridge
$25.00A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet’s, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don’t always hold up as well as they promise.
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The Sweet Fuels
$17.95With a supple, meditative approach, Erin Knight explores the complexity of beauty in this first collection by an astonishing new talent. The Sweet Fuels also reflects on the notion of orientation — whether in terms of magnetic north or street signs, the entrails of an animal or the vowels in a name — as a task of translation.
Of the more than four dozen poems in the book, some are written in English, others are rendered from Spanish. Still others perform a high-wire act — written in English, converted to Spanish, and then back into English. The practise of translation allows for a direction that does not try to reorder or simplify the world, but rather emphasizes the promise of continuous engagement with our points of reference.
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The Sweetest One
$21.95Cosmopolitan and curious seventeen-year-old Chrysler Wong suffers from a debilitating fear brought on by belief in a family curse. Three of her siblings have died after turning eighteen and venturing beyond the borders of their tiny rural Alberta town, and the fourth, her favourite, has recently left and is incommunicado. Is she destined to share their fate – or worse, doomed to live a circumscribed life?
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The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing
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The Tablecloth Trick
$16.95An unrequited love story? Possibly. (Probably?) A suicide note? Perhaps.
The Tablecloth Trick’s unnamed narrator recalls a childhood spent with Caroline — always Caroline — the centre of his universe, delving into books (hundreds of them) at a Winnipeg library and sharing an extraordinary friendship and a recondite sense of wonderment in scientific and ontological inquiry. Until one day Caroline opens her school locker and finds a MASH note from an astronaut — that is, she discovers other boys.
When she leaves for university, memories of Caroline are put in a closet; he starts working at Estella’s Pie in the Sky Bakery. His search for illumination continues in a lonely, insular world of reading and acutely imagined juxtaposition — of disease and art; of Catholic mythology and the female body.
Now, years later, after rediscovering Caroline at St. Boniface Hospital, the narrator is compelled by old emotions to return to the phantasmagorical thoughts of his childhood — to imagine two of them together, the life he was never meant to live.
Collecting linguistic oddities, scraps of images, bits of text, and hybridized references, Rick Crilly cuts-up and collages, disassembles and recreates an anatomical mystery where a blank page becomes a meditation on grief, and a crossed out word is a librarian’s scalpel. The Tablecloth Trick whips away the artifice between Fiction and fact (that’s Fiction with a capital F — because Plato loved capital letters, after all) to see what, if anything, is left standing.
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The Tale of Don L’Orignal
$16.95Winner of the 1979 Governor General’s Award for fiction, Antonine Maillet’s virtuoso creation, The Tale of Don L’Orignal, is now back in print. Maillet’s tale begins one day, not so very long ago but back in the youth of the world, when a hay-covered island materialized off shore, an island populated by fleas who soon took human form. The leader of this uncouth crew of have-nots, Don l’Orignal, wore a moose-antler crown as his badge of office. At his right hand were his brave lieutenants: his son, Noume, and his general, Michel-Archange. The general’s wife, the doughty charwoman, spy, and rabble-rouser La Sagouine, had one finger in every pie and one raised to her neighbour, La Sainte.
The Flea Islanders were constantly at odds with the almost as clever but far more civilized upper crust of the mainland village: the mayoress, the schoolteacher, the merchant, the banker. When they invaded and tried to steal a keg of molasses, the outcome of the mock-heroic battle was unclear, except that La Sainte’s son, the hapless young Citrouille, and Adeline, the merchant’s lovely daughter, had fallen in love.
With the insider’s accumulation of oral history, gossip, and shrewd hindsight, Antonine Maillet has conjured up a fictional Acadia that her ancestors would relish. Perhaps those who could read it would have even understood it: she wrote Don l’Orignal in a version of 16th-century domestic French that she adapted for modern readers. In this far-fetched, but always entertaining fable, Maillet holds up a mirror to Acadian history and to an all too fallible human nature.
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The Tale of Teeka
$15.95Rural Quebec in the fifties. A battered child, Maurice, has taken refuge in a fantasy world. Alone on the farm one afternoon, he invites his pet goose, Teeka, into the house where his bedroom and the bathroom become the scene of some of Tarzan’s most terrifying adventures. His parents unexpected return forces Maurice to commit a desperate and cruel act of violence.
The original production of L’Histoire de l’Oie, toured by Théâtre des Deux Mondes in French, English, German and spanish, represented Canada at numerous international festivals and garnered rave reviews and several prizes in Dublin, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Limoges, London, Mexico City, Munich, Toronto, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.
Adapted for television by the playwright and directed by Tim Southam, L’Histoire de l’Oie / The Tale of Teeka was broadcast in French and English on the CBC / Radio Canada National Networks in the spring of 1999. The production won the Banff Television Festival Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian English-Language Production.
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The Tale-Teller
$21.95The year is 1738. Jacques Lafargue, a wide-eyed young Frenchman, arrives in New France aboard the Saint Michel. But before his Canadian adventure has a chance to begin, he is detained at Quebec harbour by suspicious port officials. Their distrust proves warranted: instead of a young man named Jacques Lafargue their captive turns out to be a young woman named Esther Brandeau, and instead of answers to their questions about who she is and where she came from, they are given tales of castaways raised by apes, of blind lovelorn sailors and merciless pirates, of runaway slaves and kindly desert nomads, and of other curiosities in a limitless world.
Few suspect the truth: Esther is a Jew, which by law prohibits her from entering New France, and she is using her tale-telling to escape the restrictions placed upon her race and gender. And no one – not even Esther herself – realizes the power her stories have to open their hearts and minds to old dreams and new possibilities.
The Tale-Teller is a marvel. Susan Glickman takes readers on a journey of discovery – starting with the fascinating true story of an obscure historical figure, and continuing through an intimate and richly-detailed portrait of Canadian colonial society, guided always by a map of wonders – to reveal timeless truths.
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The Tangled Miracle
$21.95A first-rate thriller from one of Canada’s pioneer abstract painters.
A cult leader announces a miracle will take place and she will rise to heaven. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all of America hums with anticipation. On the appointed day, she disappears and scientist Mortimer Hood, there to verify the miracle, must investigate how—and whether—the whole thing is a hoax, or if the priestess has been murdered.
Originally published in 1936, this edition features a new introduction by poet and academic Gregory Betts.
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The Tartarus House on Crab
$19.95Jack Tartarus, a photographer, has returned to his family’s house on Crab, an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. After mulling it over for ten years, Jack has decided to tear his family’s house down, board-by-board, just as his father built it up. He purchases a wrecking bar. Struggling with the first piece of siding, his wrecking bar jammed between ancient planks, it seems the house is determined to remain. The people on Crab Island are also angrily opposed to his plan—including his responsible sister, his self-centered niece, a beautiful woman he knew intimately long ago, and Turtle, the hardware store clerk and the island’s self-proclaimed guardian.
In a story about families and family history, Jack’s calculated plans for demolition are fired by the memory of his parents and the other losses he has felt. Like the others who have retreated to Crab Island, Jack has come to a place where he must make peace with the house, in order to construct his future.
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The Taste of Ashes
$24.95Isabel Lee’s early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pull the tattered fragments of her life together and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged daughter. Once idealistic and hopeful, Father Alvaro Ruiz now has his own demons to confront. Brutally tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan authorities and unable to escape from the wounds of his past, Alvaro returns to Canada seeking sanctuary, a broken man with a tenuous grip on his faith in God and humanity. Isabel and Alvaro’s stories slowly weave together and they are eventually faced with their greatest challenge yet: can they carry on in the wake of the damage and bring themselves to forgive? Compelling and disturbing, but ultimately hopeful, this is the story of how we find grace in the most unexpected places.
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The Taste of Penny
$12.00
Jeff Parker’s characters stumble awkwardly into situations that reveal the darkest sides of themselves: Encountering a female Chechen suicide bomber on a bus ride in Russia, a man finds himself sexually aroused by the terrorist act he’s sure she’ll commit. A father reluctantly accompanies his draft dodger son to Quebec where he erects an enormous and obscene American flag in his front yard. A character who accidentally swallows a penny during a roadside sobriety test finds himself in a state of existential angst when it stays inside him. The characters in these fifteen voice-driven, comic stories show the trammelled among us, beaten down time and time again, still finding cause in the world for hope.