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Showing 8289–8304 of 9492 results
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The Ventriloquist
$15.95In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his “self ” as a construct of characters, along with his “other” imagined characters, to an audience which bears witness to the enormous psychological risks an author must take in the creative process. Constantly walking the dangerously thin edge separating the creation of voice from its appropriation, the ventriloquist struggles to control and shape an imaginary dialogue that we know originates from a single source, but successfully creates the illusion of personal conflict and resolution, success and failure, triumph and despair.
Part of the extended metaphor of interaction between an authoritative adult psychoanalyst and a deeply disturbed adolescent patient, each of the characters in The Ventriloquist is stripped of their clothes of convention, encouraged to reveal both their “real” and “imagined” transgressions of mind and body, to break free of the constraints and taboos against incest, abuse, dominance and submission which are at one and the same time both the foundations and the limitations of the most fundamental of human interactions. As fractured as the process of writing itself, with all of its false starts, pauses, blockages and revisions, both the ventriloquist and his puppet in this play become a series of unresolved vocalized texts and erasures of self and other, locked in the struggle of the constructed self to imagine an other that is, in the end, more than merely an elaborated fragment of whom any given character represents from one moment of successful illusion to the next in both the “real” and the “imaginary” world.
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The Verdict on Each Man Dead
$14.95“A delight to read.” — Ottawa Review of Books
Peter Cammon is now retired from New Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, the former chief inspector has found himself in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, after agreeing to help a colleague with a difficult case. A resident on tranquil Hollis Street has been beheaded, her husband has disappeared, and there is no obvious perpetrator. Yet the neighbors seem apathetic — silent to the point of complicity.
Peter joins the manhunt and is shocked to discover a link leading from the killer to the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombing cases, files Peter himself worked on during the 1990s. To untangle the evidence, Peter and his acquaintance in local law enforcement must strike unholy alliances with corrupt cops, Mexican drug lords, and perhaps one of the world’s most notorious terrorists . . .
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The Verdict on Each Man Dead
$24.95The fast-paced third volume in the series
Peter Cammon, now retired from New Scotland Yard, is drawn into a confrontation with evil in a most unlikely setting. The former chief inspector finds himself in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah, chasing a depraved man who may have deep terrorist connections.
When a killer attacks on tranquil Hollis Street, the neighbours seem apathetic — silent to the point of complicity. A resident has been beheaded, her husband has disappeared, and there is no obvious perpetrator. A drug dealer? A terrorist? An angry neighbour?
Peter joins the manhunt and is shocked to discover a link from the killer to the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombing cases, files Peter himself worked on during the 1990s. In order to trap the killer-terrorist, Peter and his acquaintance in local law enforcement, Henry Pastern, must strike unholy alliances with corrupt cops, Mexican drug lords, and the Unabomber himself. Will Peter have to bend the law and embrace the rules of the Old West to stop this psychopath?
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The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry
$14.95Mary Dalton’s 2020 Pratt Lecture engages with the vernacular voice in Newfoundland poetry, illustrating the move from uncertainty to acceptance and welcoming of the beauty and variety of the language of Newfoundland.
The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry explores some of the tensions between the oral and the written in the poetry of Newfoundland, with particular emphasis on the struggle towards a confident incorporation of vernacular speech in the poetry of the island in the latter part of the twentieth century. As the word “strain” suggests, there were reservations and hesitancies about drawing on what is a hugely rich linguistic and sonic resource for poetry, one of many vitiating results of a colonial legacy. This Pratt Lecture celebrates the vitality of poetry which lets in Newfoundland idioms and cadences. Among the poets considered are Percy Janes, Tom Dawe, Al Pittman, David Glover, John Steffler and Harold Paddock, and the generation who followed them: Agnes Walsh, Gordon Rodgers, Carmelita McGrath, Michael Crummey, Robin McGrath.
The PRATT LECTURES were established in 1968 to commemorate the legacy of E.J. Pratt. Over the years, the series has hosted a litany of world-renowned authors and scholars, including Northrop Frye, Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, and Dionne Brand.
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The Very Good Best Friend
$26.95Embarking on a quest to locate her best friend Rebecca, who abruptly left everything behind to join an enigmatic intentional community overseen by a wealthy magnate within the depths of an abandoned mall nestled in the countryside, Carolyn joins forces with a determined local journalist determined to unveil the truth behind the community’s enigmatic leader, a man who presents himself as a benevolent figure liberating those burdened by student loan debt and the shackles of capitalism. However, as Carolyn draws closer to the mall, she finds herself increasingly ensnared in the community’s eerie and bewildering atmosphere, with Rebecca slipping further from her grasp. Amidst the unsettling backdrop, Carolyn wrestles not only with the specters of her past-her twin sister’s baffling disappearance decades before-but with the unsettling notion that her sibling’s spirit may be manifesting within the confines of the mall, its sinister influence looming ever larger.
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The Very Marrow of Our Bones
$18.95Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers
On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing.
Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . .
Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running — and forgetting — lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret.
Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.
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The Vestiges
$16.95Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which the book is built, “sets out to explore / what happens / to humans when they are reduced / to things by other humans.” In asking this question, “The Vestiges” is a long poem engaged with modernist poems that move from the particularities of everyday life to enduring and unanswered political and cultural questions. Covering a wide terrain of research, the other serial poems in the book mine various texts, from the Craigslist “auto parts” section to Jane Jacobs, from Marx to Marcuse, and from historical accounts of cities to contemporary real-estate promotions, in order to build up an eclectic atlas of this unstable moment. In terms of contemporary poetics, The Vestiges enters into dialogue with modernism, conceptual writing, and post-conceptual art.
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The Vic
$16.95A young woman has disappeared at the edge of the city. Four women are drawn into the race to find her. As we watch them grid-search the fields for traces of her passing, we move through the shattering events of their recent lives that have left them as lost as she is. Mentor and protégé, lovers and sisters, they explore one burning question: who’s got the power, and what is he or she going to do with it?
Redolent with ambiguity, playing on the multiple meanings of victim, victory, and theatricality while undermining and interrogating these conventions, The Vic creates an ensemble of sharply drawn characters: eight ethnically diverse women, ranging in age from their teens to their fifties, each of them eager to claim the entitlement they feel their status as victim has “naturally” conferred upon them.
Drawing on the cult of Rock Thériault (aka “Moses”) near Burnt River, Ontario, in the early 1980s, and the Bernardo case, The Vic starts out where the popular media coverage of these events leaves off: with the media’s inability to penetrate the humanity of its subjects beyond the constructed veils of saints and sinners; evil perpetrators and innocent, “helpless” victims. It is an unsparing, often shocking, sometimes incredibly humourous dramatization of how the status of victim has become the most powerful and effective manipulative tool for social advancement in an age where all public discourse begins and ends with the populist media motto, “if it bleeds it leads.”
Cast of 8 women.
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The Vicinity
$15.00In The Vicinity David O’Meara gives us a new kind of cityscape, one that brings its unseen, and usually unsung, materials to the foreground. Brick, concrete (that “not-so-silver screen / our walk-on parts are posed upon”), glass, steel, wire: they step boldly from anonymity into fresh focus, backdrops goaded into stardom. Full of casually-worn wit and humour, often using intricate forms that deftly reflect their subjects, these poems probe our conventional attitudes while walking us down present or remembered streets – “Some-such Avenue / Rue Saint Whatever.” – See more at: http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=149#sthash.mWW5Wuo0.dpuf
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The Violin Lover
$22.95Set in Jewish London in the 1930s, Susan Glickman’s The Violin Lover is written against the backdrop of Hitler’s escalating campaign against the Jews. This beautifully written novel tells the story of Clara Weiss and Ned Abraham, “the violin lover,” brought together by Clara’s 11-year-old son, Jacob. A successful doctor and amateur violinist, Ned is pressured to practice a duet with Jacob by the boy’s piano teacher. Though reluctant at first, Ned is charmed by the young prodigy and surprised by Jacob’s dedication and passion for music. In him Ned sees his younger self, so young and full of promise. A friendship is soon built on a mutual love for music. A dinner invitation to spend Passover with the Weiss family seals Ned’s fate and a clandestine love affair begins. Although they both agree that no one must ever know — especially not Clara’s family — their affair inevitably comes to a crashing end, with disastrous, life-altering consequences.
Unfolding like a melody, The Violin Lover is infused with music and told in three voices. It is a powerful novel about the love one feels for family, friends, culture, faith and music, and the passion that comes with it — regardless of the outcome.
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The Virgin Trial
$17.95Fifteen-year-old Bess has no idea when she heads to London to see her Uncle Ted that she is about to find herself at the heart of a scandal involving sexual impropriety; her stepfather, Thom; and an attempted overthrow of the government. What does all this have to do with her? How adroitly can Bess manoeuvre through a series of interviews to avoid being swept up in the peril that might ensue? And will she be able to spin the facts to create a myth based on her own innocence?
In this gripping follow-up to The Last Wife, Kate Hennig continues her Tudor Queens Trilogy by cleverly exploring victim shaming, sexual consent, and the extraordinary ability of girls becoming women as she reimagines the scandalous and little-known story of Elizabeth the First before she was Queen.
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The Vision Tree: Selected Poems
$17.95This volume includes work selected from each of Phyllis Webb’s books of poetry published prior to 1982, including: Trio, Even Your Right Eye, The Sea Is Also a Garden, Naked Poems, Selected Poems 1954-1965, Wilson’s Bowl, Sunday Water, Thirteen Anti Ghazals and Talking.
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The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
$29.95For more than three decades, Robert Lepage’s dynamic multimedia performance works have been produced on stages worldwide. Celebrated for his bold, visionary aesthetic, Lepage has received several high-profile commissions in recent years, including two Peter Gabriel world tours, Cirque du Soleil’s KÁ in Las Vegas, a dramatic staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at London’s Royal Opera House.
Despite Lepage’s prolificacy, and his status as one of the pioneers of new media performance, little critical writing about his work has been published, particularly in English. Ludovic Fouquet’s The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage, translated for the first time into English, thus presents much-needed in-depth analysis of Lepage’s strategies and practices.
The book’s title references the experimentation so integral to Lepage’s creative process and the ways in which he and his creative arts company, Ex Machina, have always been attuned to the synergistic possibilities that emerge when art encounters science and technology. Whether as a playwright, actor, film director, or stage director, Lepage is forever in search of new mutations of form and expression, and his unexpected narratives often write themselves out of discoveries he makes when staging a piece – indeed stagecraft often guides story in Lepage’s creative realm.
This full-colour volume will be of keen interest for theatre practitioners of all kinds, from set designers to directors, from academics to fans. -
The Vivian Poems
$20.00These poems peel back the layers of suburban life and the American Dream. Vivian Maier was a self-taught street photographer who worked as a nanny for wealthy employers in New York and Chicago. The poet imagines her as a documentarian who is compassionate, abrasive, and meditative, while her subjects provide their own narrative. More than anything, the poems are a response to her work, which is all we have that comes directly from her. It is a deliberate challenge to the “mystery nanny” she is reduced to in much of the constructed narrative of her life.
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The Vowels of Perfect Power
$17.95If you’re like most people on the planet, the natural, creative energy you were born with has become trapped within as you constantly strive to meet family, social, and work expectations. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Bob McCulloch and Julia Gluck, veteran coaches and motivators, show you how to liberate your natural energy. Using many real-life stories, they walk you through these proven, powerful practices: A – awareness: staying mindfully aware of self and others, capturing and cherishing your lightness, and being thoughtfully authentic; E – engagement: getting and staying personally engaged, staying resolved without attachment, and accepting and supporting your mutuality with others; O – openness: accepting every idea’s inevitable relevance, allowing and fully appreciating fresh associations, and perceiving the positives in every idea that comes your way;and, U – understanding: acknowledging and suspending judgment, confirming your understanding, and embracing the power of the both/and. And they show how all of these practices are orchestrated by, I – integrity, as your Thoughtful I helps you intervene between your emotions and responses.
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The Voyageur 2
$25.00Fintan O’Neill’s no hero. There’s not a lot of money in 17th century Ireland, but the likeable, withdrawn 15-year-old’s the poorest kid in Waterford, living on a small tenant farm with a tough cynical mother, forced to do what she’s had to for her and her boy to survive. The sudden arrival of Fintan’s older cousin Ruari, an ex-soldier with a troubled past, has turned Fintan’s world upside down. Appointing himself a stand in father figure, Ruari leads Fintan into a world of vice and violence. But Fintan never thought an evening pub venture would end up in Ruari’s death. And he absolutely never counted on Ruari dumping a strange-looking coin into his lap with a dying request to return it to its original owner.