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Showing 8369–8384 of 9492 results
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The Wrestlers’ Wrestlers
$23.95A walk-through wrestling history, starting with the founding fathers such as Ed “Strangler” Lewis and the incomparable Lou Thesz, to modern-day masters such as Daniel Bryan and Kurt Angle.
The Wrestlers’ Wrestlers spotlights elite performers and analyzes exactly what made them your favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestlers. Authors Dan Murphy and Brian Young interviewed more than 40 in-ring veterans, historians, referees, and promoters to get a unique insider’s look at the people who have made a lasting impact on the world of professional wrestling. It offers a special peek “behind the curtain” and a rare look into the top stars’ thoughts on their peers, their influences, and their personal favorites.
The Wrestlers’ Wrestlers is a history of professional wrestling but also a tribute to the frequently misunderstood art itself. Featuring stars of the 1920s to today, this essential read deserves a prominent spot on the bookcase of every fan and historian.
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The Writer
$15.95Donald Wellner knew success when he wrote a hit play thirty-five years ago, but now he’s recently separated, living in a small apartment, and promising that he’s trying to start a new script. His fortysomething son Blake is a travel writer with commitment issues who pops by between trips to try to hold his family together and prove his worth. Over seven years, Donald experiences the onset of dementia, and father and son become both closer and farther apart. This story of familial bonds provides delightfully comical and satisfyingly sentimental clarity in those small moments that will last forever.
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The Writing on the Wind’s Wall
$22.00The Writing on the Wind?s Wall listens at length to the voices of those affected by ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ in the city of London, Ontario, a national healthcare hub: a death doula, a sound-healer, a psychiatrist, a scholar, a doctor, a medium, an ethicist, a prospective recipient, a politician, a reverend, and several recipients’ survivors. Facilitated by Kevin Andrew Heslop, these dialogues are informed by the work of a wide variety of cultural leaders, including Paolo Freire, John Cage, Li-Young Lee, Thích Nh?t H?nh, and Robert Hass. The collection documents how euthanasia, while in the spirit of individual liberty, increases proportional to the world?s socioeconomic, ideological, and (therefore) ecological unsustainability. The Writing on the Wind?s Wall is a testament to what a community felt and believed in the 2020s about living, and dying, together.
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The Wrong Bashir
$18.95Bashir Ladha, a bohemian philosophy podcaster, finds himself
unwittingly thrust into the spotlight when he is chosen to assume a
distinguished religious position that his parents have eagerly accepted on his
behalf. Before Bashir can object, two committee representatives are at his door
to congratulate him. As the representatives start to suspect a
mistake has been made, Bashir’s jubilant grandparents and relatives arrive to
commemorate the honour. A charming farce ensues, prompting questions around
whether the seemingly wrong Bashir may, in fact, be the right one.Fast-paced, original, and laugh-out-loud funny, this delightful debut
by Zahida Rahemtulla invites us to look at values passed down through generations, the
ties of community, individualism, and how we are
shaped by those who love us most. The
Wrong Bashir is a hilarious romp that affectionately portrays an
intergenerational family caught up in much more than a case of mistaken
identity. -
The Xenotext: Book 1
$19.95The first work of ‘living poetry’ in the world, by the author of the bestselling book Eunoia
Shortlisted for the 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Alberta Literary Awards)
Internationally renowned poet Christian Bok has encoded a poem (called ‘Orpheus’) into the genome of a germ so that, in reply, the cell builds a protein that encodesyet another poem (called ‘Eurydice’). After having illustrated this idea in E. coli, Bok is planning to insert his poem into a deathless bacterium (D. radiodurans), thereby writing a text able to outlive every apocalypse, enduring till the Sun itself expires.
Book 1 of The Xenotext is an ‘infernal grimoire’ that introduces readers to the conceptual groundwork for this project. The book offers a primer in genetics, even as it revisits the pastoral heritage of poetry, updating the orphic idylls of Virgil for a new age of mythic danger – be it in the beauty of artful biogenesis, if not in the terror of global extinction.
‘The cellular “rules* that govern this extraordinary text allow Bok to create one of the most beautiful poems of our time – a poem in which the georgics of Virgil join forces with the double helix of Watson and Crick.’ – Marjorie Perloff
‘If Human reverence was slanted more toward Nature and less toward the exaltation of gods, our scriptures might have looked something like The Xenotext.’ – Peter Watts
‘Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bok has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials.’ – The Guardian
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The Xenotext: Book 2
$24.95It lives! The bestselling author of Eunoia writes a death-defying poem in DNA
In The Xenotext: Book 1, Christian Bök outlined his plan to insert his poem, written as DNA, into a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text able to outlive every apocalypse, enduring till the Sun itself expires. Now that the experiment has finally succeeded, Book 2 of The Xenotext situates that poem within the deep time of the cosmos.
Our civilization has only very limited methods for preserving its cultural heritage against a potential planetary disaster (be it thermonuclear warfare or astrophysical barrage); however, this experiment rehearses some of the techniques likely to be used in the future to preserve our archives against such annihilation.
Writing in his signature poetics, Bök speculates that, buried within the biochemistry of Life itself, there really does exist an innate beauty, if not a hidden poetry – a literal message that we might read, if we deign to seek it.
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The Y Chromosome
$19.95The Y Chromosome challenges the reader to meet an all-woman society of the future. The few remaining men live in hiding. When one of these men is discovered, the resulting conflict threatens both worlds.
The futurist society was developed by necessity and is far from perfect, but it now abhors its male-dominated past, where violence escalated to an extreme. The journals of a man who lived during The Change reveal the desperate turmoil and anger of a world facing the extinction of half its members. The journals are now part of university history courses, leading to assessments of the past that are both ironic and disturbing.
Despite its striking differences to our world today, there are uncomfortable similarities. Taut and gripping, a page turner at its very best, the novel asks important and fundamental questions about who we are as women and men and what we will do to survive.
Originally written and published thirty years ago to enthusiastic reviews, The Y Chromosome is even more relevant today.In an all-woman society of the future, the few remaining men live in hiding. The futuristic society was developed by necessity and is far from perfect, but it now abhors its male-dominated past, where violence escalated to an extreme. The journals of a man who lived during The Change reveal the desperate turmoil and anger of a world facing the extinction of half its members. The journals are now part of university history courses, leading to assessments of the past that are both ironic and disturbing. When one of the living men is discovered, the resulting conflict threatens both worlds. -
The Year of No Summer
$19.95On April 10th, 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted. Th e resulting build-up of ash in the stratosphere altered weather pat-terns and led, in 1816, to a year without summer. Instead, there were June snowstorms, food shortages, epidemics, inventions, and the proliferation of new cults and religious revivals.
Hauntingly meaningful in today’s climate crisis, Lebowitz’s lyric essay charts the events and eff ects of that apocalyptic year. Weaving together history, mythology, and memoir, The Year of No Summer ruminates on weather, war, and our search for God and meaning in times of disaster.
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The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits
$24.00A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a spacefaring whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a recreation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanity’s quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.
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The York Factory Express
$24.95Every March between 1826 and 1854, the York Factory Express began its journey from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s headquarters on the Pacific Ocean, where the express-men paddled their boats up the Columbia River to the base of the Rocky Mountains at Boat Encampment, a thousand miles to the east. At Jasper’s House they were 3,000 feet above sea level. Their river route would return them to salt water once more, at York Factory, on the shores of Hudson Bay. It was an amazing climb and an amazing descent, and they would do a similar climb and descent on their journey home to the mouth of the Columbia. The stories of the York Factory Express, and of the Saskatchewan Brigades they joined at Edmonton House, are told in the words of the Scottish traders and clerks who wrote the journals. However, the voyageurs who made the journey possible are the invisible, unnamed Canadiens, Orkney-men, Iroquois, and their Métis children and grand-children, who powered the boats back and forthacross the continent every year. But their history was oral. If the traders had not preserved the stories the voyageurs told them, we would not know this history today – as it is portrayed in The York Factory Express.
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Theatre and (Im)migration
$25.00Theatre and (Im)migration shines a bright light on the impact that immigrant artists have made and continue to make on the development of Canadian theatre, from themes, characters, and world issues to financial structures and artistic techniques. This collection of essays demonstrates how the increased presence of immigrant theatre artists actively contributing to English and French Canadian theatre prompt their audiences to rethink fundamental concepts of nationalism and multiculturalism. Contributors include Moira Day, Alan Filewod, Aida Jordão, Ric Knowles, Natasha Martina Koechl, Rebecca Margolis, Lisa Ndejuru, Nicole Nolette, Eleanor Ty, and many more.
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Theatre and AutoBiography
$29.95That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and students of AutoBiography, a research subject now viewed as respectable in academic circles, have recently mapped the contours and shifting parameters of the autobiographical and the biographical processes, thereby contributing to the profile and stature of both.
This collection brings theatre practitioners together with academics from three continents in a groundbreaking exploration of the interdisciplinary realm of Theatre and AutoBiography. On the theoretical side, the contributors draw on a range of contemporary theorists: from Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, Mieke Bal and Homi Bhabha; from Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan to Leigh Gilmore, Paul John Eakin and Philippe Lejeune.
In general terms, auto/biographical performances have become hugely popular forms in Europe and North America because we live in a culture of me or I at a time when access to cultural production is easy. AutoBiographies satisfy our desire for story at the same time as they promise to give us truths (if not Truth). With the post-postmodern return of the author and the waning of a deep-seated antihumanism associated with modernist ideology and aesthetics, a desire for agency, voice, visibility and subjectivity has resurfaced with a renewed passion.
The playwrights discussed here could scarcely be more broadly representative of British and North American drama in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: from W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett to Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock and David Mamet; from Spalding Gray and Karen Finley to Linda Griffiths; and from Orlan to Sally Clark, R. H. Thomson, Monique Mojica and George Seremba, the range of styles performances and subjectivities is extraordinary.
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Theatre Histories
$25.00Includes:The Toronto Lyceum: A Study of Early Canadian Theatre in Miniature by Richard Plant (1976)Infinite Variety or a Canadian “National” Theatre: Roly Young and the Toronto Civic Theatre Association, 1945–1949 by Anton Wagner (1988)Dora Mavor Moore: Before the New Play Society by Paula Sperdakos (1989)William Aberhart: The Evangelist as Subversive Political Dramatist by Moira Day (1990) Feminist (Theatre) Historiography/Canadian (Feminist) Theatre: A Reading of Some Practices and Theories by Susan Bennett (1992)Performing Politics: Propaganda, Parody and a Women’s Parliament by Kym Bird (1992)“Getting to” Canadian Theatre History: On the Tension Between the New History and the Nation State by Stephen Johnson (1992)Stories of Interest: Some Partial Histories of Mulgrave Road: Groping Towards a Method by Ric Knowles (1992)On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Postcolonialism Axis by Denis Salter (1992)Out of the Closet: Dramatic Works by Sarah Anne Curzon, Part One: Woman and Nationhood: Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 by Celeste Derksen (1994)A Golf Club for the Golden Age: English Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Strange Case of Roy Mitchell by Scott Duchesne (1997)Captain George Vancouver and British Columbia’s First Play by James Hoffman (2000)Performance and Memory in the Party: Dismembering the Workers’ Theatre Movement by Alan Filewod (2003)Introduction to Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English by Monique Mojica and Ric Knowles (2003)“Seeking Clues of Queerness”: Researching Contemporary Canadian Queer Theatre by Tony Berto (2009)Sinking Neptune: Introduction by Donovan King (2009)Sinking Neptune by The Radical Dramaturgy Unit, Optative Theatrical Laboratories (2006/2009)Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
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Theatre in Alberta
$25.00Includes:
A Literary Perspective on the Plays of W. O. Mitchell by Diane Bessai (1984)Elsie Park Gowan: Distinctively Canadian by Anton Wagner (1987)
CKUA: Radio Drama and Regional Theatre by Howard Fink (1987)
The Banff School of Fine Arts 1933–1969: “A Theatre of the People” by Moira Day (1989)
“The Country Mouse at Play”: Theatre in the Peace River District 1914–1945 by Moira Day (1991)
“The Actors Excelled Their First Efforts”: Amateur Theatre in Lethbridge, Alberta, 1885–1990 by Ches Skinner (1996)
Reacting to the Right[eous]: The Political Plays of Frank Moher, Lyle Victor Albert, Raymond Storey and Greg Nelson by Anne Nothof (1996)
World on a String by Liz Nicholls (1998)
“Introduction” to Scraping the Surface: Three Plays by Lyle Victor Albert by Lynne Van Luven (2000)
Calgary’s Wild Ride: How the High Performance Rodeo Inspired and Transformed a Theatre Community by Martin Morrow (2005)
Globalisation’s Marginalia: Anglo-Canadian Identity and the Plays of Brad Fraser by Roberta Mock (2006)
The Construction of Masculinity in Sharon Pollock’s Whiskey Six Cadenza by Mark Vincent Diotte (2008)
Canada’s Citadel Theatre and the Alternatives by Diane Bessai (2008)
Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada. -
Theatre in Atlantic Canada
$25.00Includes:
Mermaid Theatre: The Mythic Dimension by Donna E. Smyth (1978)
On the Edge: Michael Cook’s Newfoundland Trilogy by Brian Parker (1980)
The Political Dramaturgy of the Mummers Troupe by Alan Filewod (1987)
Not Leaving Home: Growing up Artistically in Atlantic Canada by Bryden MacDonald (1990/91)
The Subjects of Salt-Water Moon by Robert Nunn (1991)
AnOther Story: Women’s Dramaturgy and the Circulation of Cultural Values at Mulgrave Road by Ric Knowles (1995)
On the Margins: Eastern Canadian Theatre as Post-colonialist Discourse by Mary Elizabeth Smith (1996)
Too Distant Voices: The Publishing of Dramatic Texts in the Maritimes by Bruce Barton (1999)
Icycle: New Languages. Newfoundland’s Artistic Fraud Creates New Languages for Theatre, New Languages for Icebergs by Denyse Lynde (2003)
Cultural Evolution in Newfoundland Theatre: The Rise Of The Gros Morne Theatre Festival by Michael Devine (2004)
Afro-Gynocentric Darwinism in the Drama of George Elroy Boyd by George Elliott Clarke (2004)
from “God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays by Jerry Wasserman (2005)
TheatrePEI: The Emergence and Development of a Local Theatre by George Belliveau, Josh Weale, Graham Lea (2005)
Building Bridges: English & French Theatre in New Brunswick by Glen Nichols (2005)
Can I Get a Witness? Performing Community in African-Nova Scotian Theatre by Maureen Moynagh (2006)
Crossing the River: Zuppa Circus’s Penny Dreadful by Roberta Barker (2008)
On the Edge of the Eastern World: John Barlow’s Inspiration Point and Atlantic Canadian Aboriginal Theatre by Len Falkenstein (2010)Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
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Theatre of the Unimpressed
$14.95How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.
Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?
A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form.
Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination.
‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom “interdisciplinary” is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail
‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General’s Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)