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Showing 8193–8208 of 9267 results
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Theories of Everything
$22.99“I remember thinking to myself, as I said goodbye to my friends and walked home through the dimly lit backstreets, that the past comes back to haunt everybody sooner or later.”
In this finely honed collection of short fiction, Dwayne Brenna creates a series of unforgettable characters, from academics and street people to musicians, movie stars, videogame players and their mothers, cooks, actors, boxers, and even a parrot, and, with compassion and affection (and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour) tests their mettle in a variety of fascinating locations, from Saskatoon to Victoria to Libya to Los Angeles to London to Hawaii and beyond, with familiar and homey details and a fidelity to mood and atmosphere.
Along the way, Brenna tackles a wide selection of conflicts and social ills—good versus evil, scruples and the lack of them, doing or not doing the “right thing,” yielding or not yielding to temptations, and the many other struggles of the human heart—all without being didactic or preachy, but simply by addressing the very human circumstances his characters find themselves in, and how they manage to escape, or not escape, the predicaments arising because of who they are, who they’ve been, and who they could be.
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Theorizing Empowerment
$29.95Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought is a collection of articles by Black Canadian feminists centralizing the ways in which Black femininity and Black women’s experiences are integral to understanding political and social frameworks in Canada. What does Black feminist thought mean to Black Canadian feminists in the Diaspora? What does it means to have a feminist practice which speaks to Black women in Canada? In exploring this question, this anthology collects new ideas and thoughts on the place of Black women’s politics in Canada, combining the work of new/upcoming and established names in Black Canadian feminist studies.
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Theory
$17.95Is there a limit to free speech? Who gets to decide?
Isabelle’s film theory students are stunned that she would open an unmoderated online discussion group to complement a controversial syllabus. Her intention was for them to learn from each other, but when an anonymous student starts to post racist comments and offensive videos on the forum and others challenge Isabelle’s methods, she is forced to decide whether to intervene or to let the social experiment play out. But the posts soon turn abusive and threatening to Isabelle’s relationship with her wife, Lee, causing her to take matters into her own hands.
In this thrilling exploration of the intersections and divisions within liberalism, a young tenure-track professor finds herself in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse that has her questioning her beliefs and fighting back for her life.
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Therafields
$32.95?
At one point in the 1970s, 900 people were engaged with a therapeutic community in Toronto. Living together, and sharing emotional problems, the participants helped to create an institution owning houses, farms, and buildings. Therafields, the largest urban commune in Canada, was created by Lea Hindley-Smith, a woman from England with no formal training in therapy. But she exuded an astounding charisma, and developed ardent followers.
Initially, students and faculty from St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, were drawn to her, and gradually the word spread that this woman had enormous power to listen, and to heal. Carpenters, poets, teachers, lost souls — they all found a home in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. And according to one of her followers at the time, Lea “was a gifted healer, a real estate entrepreneur — and, as it turned out, a woman stalked by madness.”
When the real estate market turned sour in the late 1970s, the financial structure began to crumble. At the same time, Hindley-Smith’s health started to fail, and by the early 1980s the movement had collapsed.
Here, Grant Goodbrand reveals the behind-the-scenes story of Therafields.
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There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore
$18.95There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore explores the manipulative pull of self-mythology and how it informs the telling of story–whether by a fan worshipping her idol, or an old vaudevillian star reminiscing about a glamorous past. Intimate glances into the lives of the famous bring back points of reflection on their relation to the everyday. Poems about the cast of The Wizard of Oz present the tragedy and ambition of Hollywood life. “Some make their living never headlining,” but for the exhausted star, “it’s like getting off a decades-long train ride, having finally arrived, somewhere, where bluebirds fly, you know? Somewhere like the end, the final surrender.”
The life of the stars is full of glamour, but is also contrasted with the trauma of leading such a life: “what a world, what a twisted/world this is, that, like a boxer’s embrace,/ beats us into bloody conceit.” Following this thread are poems about the sometimes-similar struggles and dreams of the less fortunate, portrayed with storybook metaphor as “An aimless swirl to the centre of things where/ there are dying fathers, angry mothers, cruel sisters,/ the same old story.” Alternating between prose, lyric, elegy and dramatic monologue, the poems of There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore question the nature of performance, blur the lines of identity, and illustrate the age-old hunger to find, amidst life’s glitter and waste, a happy ending.
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There Are Victories
$23.95A historical portrait of one woman’s quest for happiness amid a lifetime of bad men.
There Are Victories is a proto-feminist, anti-Bildungsroman that explores the intersections of misogyny, class, religion, and prejudice within upper class Anglo-Montreal and New York City society before, during, and after WWI. Originally published in 1933, There Are Victories takes up the catastrophe of the home front and the ways in which the life—and happiness—of the novel’s protagonist, Ruth Courtney, is continually undermined by the bad behaviour of men. This new edition features a foreword by Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud.
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There Are Wolves Here Too
$23.95Spilt blood whets the appetite of a ravine at the heart of Haddington Springs, a bedroom community with a closet full of bones.
It’s 1997, and Robin and his two best friends, Steph and Dylan, are ready to dive into their first summer as teenagers. But when Catherine, a classmate’s younger sister, disappears, Robin finds his carefree life of mall arcades, soccer, and slasher movies swapped out for one of paranoia, guilt, and confusion. While parents form search parties and police chase vaporous leads, Robin becomes convinced that there is a darker element at play, one that he might have accidentally set loose. All the while, he is trying to figure out his changing relationships, growing closer to Steph as his friendship with Dylan is increasingly marred by mercurial moods and secrets. Delving into the most awkward and bewildering time of adolescence, Niall Howell’s There Are Wolves Here Too blends coming of age with noir and horror elements as we move with Robin through the difficulties of learning who to trust and when to trust yourself.
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There Can Never be Enough
$21.00David Arnason is one of the most loved and prolific short story authors on the prairies. Over a lifetime of writing David Arnason has crafted some of the most memorable stories in the Canadian literary canon and now for the first time the very best of Arnason’s stories have been compiled into a single volume, There Never Can be Enough: New and selected stories of David Arnason.
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There Is No Blue
$23.95THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023
CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2023
Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
“Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love.” – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
“This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down.” – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
“Exquisite.” – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife
“I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker
“This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human.” – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
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There Is No Falling
$12.00A member of the Tish group of poets in the 1960s, There Is No Falling is Hogg’s first published work since 1986. Written in his usual spare style, Hogg’s poetry deals with the intricate details of everyday life.
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There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow
$18.95Grocery-store clerk Beth has had a hell of a week. A hell of a life, actually, full of people squashing her soul. And after pushing back at life—stabbing a steak to her boss’s desk and lighting a magazine rack on fire, for instance—freshly unemployed Beth regroups at her mom’s suburban home. Just when Beth starts to think she’s to blame for systemic limits, the gift of a bird feeder sparks a relationship with a talking Crow who reconnects her with her true power.
This sly chamber piece from new voice Caleigh Crow turns post-capitalism ennui on its head with a righteous fury. It unearths the subtle (and not so subtle) ways we gaslight the marginalized, especially Indigenous women, people living with mental-health afflictions, and anyone struggling to make ends meet in low-income service jobs. There Is Violence captures the vivacity and humour of one truly remarkable woman not meant for this earth, and brings her to her own glorious transcendence.
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There’ll Be Another
$16.95There’ll Be Another delivers on the promise of the title: It is actually three books of poems in one, each offering the reader the unique new opening of an entirely different language.
The first, Heavy-Hearted in Havana, is made up of a series of poems written during McFadden’s sojourn in Cuba in the spring of 1994. His observations on the decaying realities of the populist revolution launched by Fidel Castro are coloured by one of the key poems in this section, “The Death of Greg Curnoe,” a lament for the author’s friend and collaborator who died in a cycling accident in 1992.
The second, Sex With a Sixteen Year Old, is a series of chiefly narrative poems dealing with the experience of being a reclusive, solitary poet living in Toronto where the solitary exercise of the poetic imagination leads inevitably to thought crimes.
The third, Anonymity Suite Part II, is an unexpected extension of the highly formalist series of poems that appeared in the book Anonymity Suite in 1992. These poems tend toward the impersonal and are more inspired by cultural history than by immediate experience or solitary reflection.
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There’s Always More to Say
$26.95In the title story of Natalie Southworth’s debut collection, sisters sneak out of their unstable mother’s apartment to find “reality,” an experience with lasting repercussions. Southworth concentrates on moments like this—moments of disconnection, family fragility and unexpected expressions of love.
The stories that make up There’s Always More to Say focus on characters struggling to achieve what they think they should want despite the demands and loneliness of modern life. A puppeteer attempts to reinvent himself as a realtor. Preteen girls strive to become like their absentee fathers. A nanny must decide between her future or that of the family dog. A high-achieving working mother is imprisoned by her antidepressants.
Infused with humour and verve, yet full of warmth, Southworth interrogates the quest for more and what it means when ambition clashes with private reality.
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Therefore Choose
$22.95On a summer visit to Germany, George, a young medical student at Cambridge, meets Anna von Kleist, whose intellectual force, beauty, and self-assurance smite him full in the heart. It is 1936. Hitler is already in power, and a shift has occurred in Germany that Anna, George, and their friend Werner have not fully grasped. Europe is on the cusp of war when the three find themselves in a painful love triangle that plays between England and Germany. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, they must choose and live with the consequences of their choices.
Reviewers have compared Oatley’s pure, spare prose with that of A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. In Therefore Choose, his intimately rendered characters draw us irrevocably into their quest for meaning, hope, and understanding in a world diving headlong into chaos.
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Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel
$19.95This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.
Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness—the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.
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These are not the potatoes of my youth
$19.95Shortlisted, Trillium Book Award for Poetry and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
In this confessional debut collection, Matthew Walsh meanders through their childhood in rural Nova Scotia, later roaming across the prairies and through the railway cafés of Alberta to the love letters and graffiti of Vancouver. In this nomadic journey, Walsh explores queer identity set against an ever-changing landscape of what we want, and who we are, were, and came to be.
Walsh is a storyteller in verse, his poems laced with catholic “sensibilities” and punctuated with Maritime vernacular. In These are not the potatoes of my youth, Walsh illuminates the complex choreography of family, the anxiety of individuality, and the ambiguous histories of stories erased, forgotten, or suppressed. Readers will find moments of humour, surprise, and a queer realization that all is not what it seems.