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Showing 817–832 of 9248 results
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Bad Date
$17.95Vancouver’s downtown East-side neighborhood, the poorest postal code in Canada, is a ten-block compound of poverty, pain, and despair in a sparkling, healthy, rich city. In the parlance of the street, this area is known as Low Track, where drug-addicted prostitutes barely sustain themselves and their habit by selling their bodies. Suspended in the miasma of smoke and despair and the stench that hangs over these mean streets is the mystery of thirty-one Low Track prostitutes who appear to have vanished over the past few years, without a trace. Theories abound about serial killers and murderous freighter crews, while some speculate that some of the women shook their drug habit and just walked away from the life. In Trevor Greene’s illuminating book, Bad Date: The Lost Girls of Vancouver’s Low Track, he writes about this true-life mystery. Having interviewed the families of the missing women and the police involved in the case, he comes up with some possible explanations of what might have happened. There are no bodies, no eyewitnesses, and no clues. Just a void where thirty-one women once were, families and friends left behind, and a mystery that has the women still working Low Track watching their backs and fearing the night.
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Bad Engine
$20.00Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross
Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn’t exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest.
Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis’s published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis’s long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous.
Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human. -
Bad Houses
$22.95A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humourous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Kelly Link
From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.
In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas’s hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father’s pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.
Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.
Featuring Stintzi’s own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.
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Bad Ideas
$18.95Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: “An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas”; “I pull a Clark Kent / transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn’t”; “Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?” Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.
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Bad Ideas: A Novel
$18.95Wildly funny and wonderfully moving, Bad Ideas is about just that — a string of bad ideas — and the absurdity of love
Trudy works nights in a linen factory, avoiding romance and sharing the care of her four-year-old niece with Trudy’s mother, Claire. Claire still pines for Trudy’s father, a St. Lawrence Seaway construction worker who left her twenty years ago. Claire believes in true love. Trudy does not. She’s keeping herself to herself. But when Jules Tremblay, aspiring daredevil, walks into the Jubilee restaurant, Trudy’s a goner.
Loosely inspired by Ken “the Crazy Canuck” Carter’s attempt to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car, and set in a 1970s hollowed-out town in eastern Ontario, Bad Ideas paints an indelible portrait of people on the forgotten fringes of life. Witty and wise, this is a novel that will stay with you a long time.
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Bad Imaginings
$19.95Winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Caroline Adderson’s short fiction collection travels far and wide. From adolescent brothers marooned at an indifferent relatives cottage, to a Depression-era Ukrainian immigrant reading the drought-parched skies above Palliser’s Triangle, to two friends trying to make sense of feminism in the eighties, Adderson captures her characters’ cadences, conflicts, and consolations, their individual burdens and the mysteries they share. Adventurous, often funny, and impeccably researched, these stories chart their lives with compassion and intelligence.
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Bad Land
$24.95LONGLISTED FOR THE GILLER PRIZE
A slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands
Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina’s brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez – a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak – upending Regina’s quiet life.
It’s clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won’t come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through the plains and mountains of Alberta’s badlands to the coast of BC, forcing Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.
By turns thrilling and heartwarming, rife with gothic tension, and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.
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Bad Latitudes
$18.95Adventure and danger follow a young woman as she escapes her boring suburban life in Toronto for the late 1970s population boom of Whitehorse.
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Bad Things Happen
$19.95The characters in Bad Things Happen — professors, janitors, webcam models, small-time criminals — are between things. Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin’s unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives change, for better or worse.
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Badass on a Softail
$17.95As David Hoffer, 44, rides his Harley Davidson Heritage Softail south on the Laurentian Autoroute to a memorial for a friend who has died of prostate cancer, he worries that he may soon join his pal on the other side. His back is killing him, and he’s got a pain in the rear end that just won’t go away. Hoffer’s pain in the butt may be non-medical. To finance new equipment for his music video production company, he has sold land adjoining his studio to the Children of the Sun, but he has learned that their religious activites don’t consist of nude sunbathing. His affair with Roberta, half his age, is complicated by his attachment to his previous lover. His inner child (more dopehead adolescent than squalling infant) is annoyed with him; so is his ex-wife; so is his business partner. So are some other people who don’t like his style.
Set in 1994 in the Laurentians where the Solar Temple cult was planning its apocalypse, Badass on a Softail is a culture-jamming fugue on what happens when the Age of Aquarius stares into the mirror and sees the Age of Acquisition staring back.
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Badass(ish)
$19.95Three teens set out to stop a pipeline, but their secrets, anxieties, and one very obnoxious ex-boyfriend might just explode their friendship first.
Reeling from an online Hatestorm after she blamed Alberta’s oil industry for a devastating forest re, Davis wades back into climate activism to impress her two new friends and win back her ex-boyfriend. The novel is told from the points of view of the three main characters: Davis’ parents work for the oil company she is fighting against; Renzi knows what it’s like when climate change strikes back when her grandparents’ home in Puerto Rico is destroyed by hurricanes and Jae hasn’t found the right moment to share the truth about her growing feelings for another girl.
Tripped up by family pressures and their own secrets and lies, the teens’ anti-pipeline efforts may jeopardize their friendship and lose the people they love most unless they find their own ways to fight for what they believe in. -
Bag of Hammers
$19.95There are the timeless questions that must be answered: Where is the most boring town in Eastern Canada? How can a government most efficiently mismanage prosperity? Are all of our contemporary psychoses a direct result of the motion-picture montage? As the Newfoundland saying goes, that’s “as foolish as a bag of hammers.” And in this collection of hilariously creative essays, critically acclaimed writer Edward Riche stretches his satiric muscles to lambaste just about anything that crosses his field of vision. Newfoundland writes a heartfelt letter to Canada, offering to console mainland anger over a pint. The Canadian government brainstorms to find the national symbol it can ruin next. If you think the world is going crazy, Riche will confirm your suspicions as he takes off the kid gloves and trades them for a Bag of Hammers.
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Balancing Bountiful
$24.95As the daughter of Mormon leader Winston Blackmore, Mary Jayne Blackmore grew up within the closed-off polygamist community of Bountiful, BC. She spent her younger years riding ponies, raising pet lambs and playing in the hay in the Old Barn. Her family’s staunch Fundamentalist Mormon faith imposed fanatical doomsday preparation and carried an instilled fear of the world outside her community.
The church community split in 2002 when her father was revoked of his leadership position by Prophet Warren Jeffs. In 2017 Winston Blackmore was convicted of practicing polygamy further inciting the media sensationalism and worldwide criticism that had surrounded Bountiful for decades. Through the evolving and controversial narrative of her young adult life, Mary Jayne was forced to redefine her faith, family and womanhood for herself.
Along with her own healing journey, Mary Jayne works to support healing within her family and community. She is also building her own place in the world–as a teacher, mother, writer and educated woman–and she has managed to restore loving bonds with her family, including her father.
From a childhood in an idyllic but sheltered community to early adulthood in an arranged marriage, ensuing divorce, and eventual return to Bountiful, Balancing Bountiful is Mary Jayne’s journey of coming of age and coming to terms with her background as she strives to answer the question: What is the right kind of family, the right kind of woman and the right kind of feminist?
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Balconville
$17.95Balconville is Canada’s first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and in French, and playing the music of Elvis Presley. The English and the French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment in this award-winning play.
Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
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Baldur’s Song
$19.00Winnipeg’s boom-town days at the turn of the nineteenth century come to life through the eyes of Baldur, a boy from Gimli, the Icelandic immigrant settlement on the southernmost shore of Lake Winnipeg. Both city and boy grow from innocence to savvy creatures of business as they mature, fall in love, and survive the politics of a competitive, cut-throat society.Arnason’s Leacock-nominated humour permeates this simply told story but takes a subtle turn under the drama of passionate young hearts struggling to find their places in the New World.At the same time he discovers his musical talent whistling to the dead in the village graveyard, Baldur encounters his first and life-long love, Lara, a girl of mystery and fey spirit. Her father, Gudmundur Palsson, is an influential and intimidating community leader who gives Baldur his first big break as a musician, but later becomes a competitor when Baldur teams up with ambitious real-estate mogul Johnny Ashdown.Notable characters like Ashdown, Palsson, and Lara bring early Winnipeg to life. Older neighbourhoods like the West End, Wolseley, West Broadway, and the Exchange District are immediately recognizable, and readers navigate the dirt streets and boardwalks with Baldur in Arnason’s vivid narrative.
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Baldwin, Styron, and Me
$22.95Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.