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  • The Woman Who Swallowed Her Cat

    The Woman Who Swallowed Her Cat

    $16.95

    Join Dr. Myers in his quest for unusual case studies as he unravels medical mysteries.

    • Depressed and lonely, a man decides that pills and alcohol are too gentle an exit. How did he end up in the driver’s seat without his head?
    • Drunken neighbours decide that beautifying the hedges on their property can be easily accomplished without hedge clippers. Removing the handlebars of a lawnmower, they lift the mower and its whirring gas powered blades, and quickly lose their buzz.
    • A teenager, obsessed with self-stimulation, elects to use uncooked spaghetti during his amorous exploits with disastrous consequences that only a urologist can deal with.
    • Vending machines are heavy and formidable foes; no match for an angry high school football player who wants his dollar back.
    • Pool balls are round, smooth, and heavy, qualities that make them very difficult to remove from locations they should never have been placed.
    • Chlorine is a concentrated toxin. Very little is required to sanitize a pool. What happens when you swim in the wrong liquid?
    • Sexual escapades have been known to include all varieties of farm animals. But is it possible to fulfill one’s carnal desires with a John Deere tractor?
    • A fisherman hooks a flopping one pounder, and both die in the process without jumping into the lake.

    In The Woman Who Swallowed Her Cat, Dr. Myers presents intriguing, humorous, unbelievable, and dark vignettes of real medical life. You’ll be surprised by the truth as patients present to their doctors with usual symptoms that are masking very unusual diagnoses, and you’ll be left wondering how anyone in the world could be affected by these one-of-a-kind medical maladies.

  • The Woman Who Would Be King

    The Woman Who Would Be King

    $34.95

    Through four decades of entertaining, in the wrestling ring and on the monster truck circuit, Debrah “Madusa” Miceli never could sit still. But her desire to learn, grow, and inspire legions of followers masked deep secrets … Her upbringing was a lie from the start, and the dark truths of her childhood, revealed here for the first time, are the earliest examples of Debrah’s determination to persevere.Professional wrestling may have been an odd choice for a nursing student, but Madusa went all-in, toughening up in Japan before conquering WWE as Alundra Blayze. She held the WWE Women’s belt … until being fired. In the rival WCW, Madusa infamously tossed the WWE belt in the garbage on live TV.Then, in 1999, Madusa changed lanes and revolutionized the monster truck world. At meet-and-greets, girls in pink “Queen of Carnage” t-shirts would wait alongside ogling fanboys. By 2004, she was the world champion in a sport dominated by men.Only one thing has eluded her: motherhood.This is the spellbinding story of how one woman survived child abuse, financial disaster, death-defying injuries, heartbreak, and chaos to emerge triumphant.

  • The Wonder Lands War

    The Wonder Lands War

    $24.00

    I would take the whole world apart to find Alice.

    Cross is back in a new adventure – a desperate hunt to find Alice, who had sacrificed herself in their confrontation with a mad Noah and his apocalyptic ark and vanished into a whirlpool. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys across the world to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals, into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying Wonder Lands themselves, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But the angels are looking for Alice too and they will stop at nothing to find her.

  • The Wondrous Woo

    The Wondrous Woo

    $22.95

    Finalist for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. The Wondrous Woo tells the story of Miramar Woo who is the quintessential Chinese girl: nice, quiet, and reserved. The eldest of the three Woo children, Miramar is ever the obedient sister and daughter … on the outside. On the inside, she’s a kick-ass kung fu heroine with rock star flash, sassy attitude, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. Just as Miramar is about to venture forth on the real adventure of leaving home for university, her beloved father is killed in an accident. Miramar watches helplessly as her family unravels in the aftermath of her father’s death. Her mother is on the brink of a recurring paranoia that involves phantom hands. Her younger siblings suddenly and mysteriously become savants, in possession of uncanny talents nicknamed The Gifts. As her siblings are swept up into the fantastic world of fame and fortune and her mother fights off madness, Miramar is left behind, feeling talentless and abandoned with no idea who she really is or who she wants to become. She gets herself to university on a bus with no family to see her off, no hugs, and no support. She is utterly on her own. In a story that spans four eventful years, Miramar ventures forth from the suburbs of Toronto to university in Ottawa and back again. Along the way she encounters people and situations light years apart from her sheltered world. She explores new friendships, lust, and a side of herself never seen before. Ultimately, Miramar discovers the meaning of courage, belonging, and family.

  • The Woods

    The Woods

    $19.95

    “Amber McMillan’s writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders.”
    -Kevin Chong, author of Baroque-a-Nova, Neil Young Nation and Beauty Plus Pity

    *

    The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a personal memoir that probes the unique and sometimes unsettling tenor of life on one of BC’s smallest gulf islands. The measure of one’s success here, the author discovers, doesn’t rely on status or income, but on the ability to adapt both the rigorous outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and equally challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility.

    These are stories of the people and families who sought refuge here, for different reasons and with different outcomes: a city contractor whose idea of relaxing in the country is to spend his time running noisy power tools; a septuagenarian library curator who has happily re-discovered men and Scotch; but mostly the book is about the author and her family.

  • The Words Wanting Out

    The Words Wanting Out

    $18.95

    The Words Wanting Out is the first selection from one of Canada’s most respected poets. In 1982 Barry Dempster landed on the short list for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his very first book, and has since published seven more collections to high praise.Over this time, Dempster has chosen to keep a relatively low profile, relocating from Toronto to the small town of Holland Landing, Ontario, and only publishing his work at small literary presses. Many of his collections are either out of print or not widely distributed, making all of his titles highly sought after by poetry readers across Canada who have discovered his poignant writing by reputation, word-of-mouth, literary journals or by his contributions to our cultural landscape as an editor, instructor and critic. The Words Wanting Out collects the best poems of Dempster’s varied and dynamic output, including those from his 2003 collection Living Well (available in limited edition only from Poppy Press).

  • The Words We Share

    The Words We Share

    $22.99

    “A must-buy.” —School Library Journal

    A young girl helps her dad navigate life in a new country where she understands the language more than he does, in an unforgettable story about communication and community by Boston Globe–Horn Book Award-winner Jack Wong.

    Angie is used to helping her dad. Ever since they moved to Canada, he relies on her to translate for him from English to Chinese. Angie is happy to help: when they go to restaurants, at the grocery store, and, one day, when her dad needs help writing some signs for his work.

    Building off her success with her dad’s signs, Angie offers her translation skills to others in their community. She’s thrilled when her new business takes off, until one of her clients says he’s unhappy with her work. When her dad offers to help, she can’t imagine how he could. Working together, they find a surprising solution, fixing the problem in a way Angie never would have predicted.

    A gorgeously illustrated picture book from Boston Globe–Horn Book and Governor General award-winning creator Jack Wong (When You Can Swim, Scholastic) that is at once a much-needed exploration of the unique pressures children of immigrants often face, a meditation on the dignity of all people regardless of their differences, and a reminder of the power of empathy.

    “Beautifully written and illustrated. . . . I am so glad this book exists in the world.” —Bao Phi, author of the Caldecott Honor and Zolotow Award-winning A Different Pond

  • The Work of Days

    The Work of Days

    $16.95

    With the prisms of varied vocabularies refracting detail and language, Sarah Lang illuminates the intricacies of communication, of the moments and gaps between action and reaction, and, as she does, announces herself as a commanding and rhythmically captivating new poetic presence.

    The first section of this extended meditation borrows from The Farmer’s Almanac, while the second is infused with the language of the occult. Inthe third part, Lang invokes the vocabulary of the institution – the airport, the hospital. In the end, these linguistic pillagings accrete into a poignant shadow under the letters of Lang’s own words, pulling them into a stark and alluring focus. With echoes of Virginia Woolf, Lang has given us a constellation of poems as delicate and relentless as pure light.

    ‘With ferocity and tenderness, direction and indirection, with and without hope these staggering poems astonish at every turn. One gets up from them changed.’

    – Carole Maso

  • The World Afloat

    The World Afloat

    $12.95

    City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)

    In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.

    Inside the linoleum-lined kitchens and lace-trimmed living rooms that drift through these stories, Farrant interrupts the daily routines – doctor’s appointments, gardening, mealtimes – of her eccentric yet familiar characters with intensely surreal, laugh-out-loud moments. What happens when a whimsical spirit becomes captive to a middle-aged body? At the end of a Love Your Package workshop, what does the wrap-up dinner look like? Can a soggy tomato salad really end someone’s marriage? Brimming with pathos and bathos in equal measure, Farrant’s smart prose offers escape and renewal from the monotony of modern life, while at the same time poking fun at her readers’ pathological devotion to the technology and interpersonal relationships that leave them feeling bored and empty. Sexuality and depravity, childhood and bad parenting, and love and divorce are all deftly handled in this hot flash of a book that goes straight to the heart of things. As each “miniature” reads stranger (and truer) than the one before, Farrant manages to coax her readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy.

  • The World at My Back

    The World at My Back

    $22.95

    “Books written out of great emotional distress are … rarely great literature. Thomas Melle’s [The World at My Back] is great literature because he pulls it off without a single false note.”
    —Deutschlandfunk (German National Radio)

    A FINALIST FOR THE GERMAN BOOK PRIZE • TRANSLATED INTO EIGHTEEN LANGUAGES

    Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself.

    Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle’s The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.

  • The World Is a Heartbreaker

    The World Is a Heartbreaker

    $15.95

    The World Is a Heartbreaker inaugurates a new subgenre: imposter poetry. This collection is a set of 1600 pseudohaikus, bite-sized chunks of poetic goodness shotgunned at the distracted masses.

    What’s a pseudohaiku? It’s the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5–7–5 syllable form. The subject matter? Relationships, cats, insecurities – themes recur and build into a kind of non-linear narrative.

    These micropoems are easily digestible yet remarkably acute, a catalogue of scattered thoughts and pointed observations that go down like potato chips – betcha can’t read just one.

    Sometimes sexy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sentimental, but always three lines long, these pseudohaikus are the future of poetry in a world awash with sound bites, news clips, catchphrases. There are no pleasures like the guilty ones.

    About Tjia’s earlier books:

    ‘Gentle Fictions is a tender, playful and inspiring poetry collection … Tjia’s poems are often silly, cute and irreverent, but artfully so.’

    – Matrix

    ‘[Pedigree Girls] is hilarious. It’s also filled with raw, biting social criticism. [It’s] the weirdest comix you’ll read all year … discover the seductiveness of nihilism by way of an author with a sharp sense of humour.’

    – NOW

  • The World Is But a Broken Heart

    The World Is But a Broken Heart

    $19.95

    The eleven interconnected stories in The World is But a Broken Heart follow the Fitzpatricks, a blue-collar family constantly followed by bad luck. Dale, Kenny, and Patrick are tied to each other as only brothers can be. They antagonize each other, fight and argue. More importantly, they look out one for another in a sometimes-violent household. These stories do not shy away from difficult truths: parents who struggle to be parents; a mother who falls into despair; a father numbed by killing for a living; a family torn asunder by a violent death during a strike at a meatpacking plant; a life insurance salesman who preys on the recently bereaved; a grieving student who finds comfort in a relationship with a teacher; and finally, a grown man who makes amends with his estranged–and dying–brother. This coming-of-age collection of stories is a testament to the human spirit and the unbreakable bond between brothers.

  • The World of After

    The World of After

    $24.95

    When Kevin, an Irish Montrealer, attends graduate school at Oxford University in the early 1990s, he meets Leon, a London Jew from a Communist family, and Alex, a Soviet defector’s son raised in Toronto. As the trio begins to form a complex and conflicted friendship, Alex pulls away and spends more of his time tutoring a charming, yet troubled, upper-class undergraduate and less of it with Kevin and Leon. In a fit of jealousy, Kevin and Leon play a prank on Alex and the undergrad, a prank with dire consequences.Ultimately, the three young men go their separate ways, but what happened that night binds them together and helps lead them to freedom and self-discovery in a post-Cold War world.

  • The World So Wide

    The World So Wide

    $24.95

    Felicity Alexander should be charming audiences at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, not under house arrest in Grenada in October 1983, as rumours swirl that United States troops are preparing to invade.

    Born and raised in Winnipeg, the daughter of a Grenadian woman and an absent white father, Felicity is blessed with enviable beauty and an extraordinary singing voice. Arriving in London to study opera in 1965, she finds early success and joy on stage, as well as a sense of belonging in the arms of the charming Claude Buckingham. Members of the West Indian Students Association, Claude and his friends are law students and activists. They plan to return to Grenada to overthrow the corrupt dictator, “Uncle” Percy Tibbs.

    Felicity and Claude’s intense affair cannot survive their diverging destinies. Claude brings revolution to Grenada and becomes a minister in the new Black Pearls of Freedom government; Felicity devotes herself to music, conquering the racism and sexism of the opera world to rise to international stardom. The brighter she shines, the more she struggles to find her place and purpose in life.

    Her career in ascendance, Felicity accepts an invitation to perform in Grenada. The red sky of revolution calls to her almost as much as the hope of Claude’s embrace. But their reunion is interrupted by a coup. Surrounded by soldiers and guns, Felicity’s voice is born anew.

  • The World, the Lizard and Me

    The World, the Lizard and Me

    $19.95

    Claude Tremblay works as a political analyst at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. But when the Congolese warlord Kabanga, accused of crimes against humanity, is released from trial due to a procedural error, Claude resigns his post and follows the accused back to his home country in search of justice. In The World, the Lizard, and Me, Gil Courtemanche writes a stirring and contemporary Heart of Darkness, utterly compelling in its portrayal of Western ideals submerged in the global politics of poverty and violence.

  • The Wrestlecrap Book of Lists!

    The Wrestlecrap Book of Lists!

    $21.95

    Ever wanted to know the worst career choices pro wrestlers made upon retirement? Or which kung fu chop-socky wrestlers would make Bruce Lee do a backflip in his grave?

    The WrestleCrap Book of Lists! has all that — and much more. The gloves are off as best-selling author RD Reynolds and his co-author Blade Braxton pull no punches in looking at some of wrestling’s biggest mistakes, most comical mishaps and most egotistical performers. Among the lists included in this cornucopia of wrestling nonsense are:

    • Sights Wrestling Fans Should Never Be Forced To See Again!
    • The Greatest Mullets in the History of the Game?!
    • Porn Stars Who Moonlighted in Wrestling!
    • The Proof that DX is really, REALLY Gay!
    • The Greatest Mugshots — Featuring Your Favourite Wrestlers!
    • The Pieces of Definitive Evidence that WCW May Have Been Run By Nazis!
    • Pro Wrestling’s Stupidest Hometowns!
    • The Things That Vince McMahon Always Wants to Talk About (Half of Which Involve His Genitalia)!

    Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the book’s craptastic main event: the 25 Worst Gimmicks of All Time.

    Irreverent, off-kilter, and certain to be offensive to all, The WrestleCrap Book of Lists! is pro wrestling’s very worst of the worst!