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All Books in this Collection
Showing 8561–8576 of 9311 results
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Truth or Death
$29.95In the tradition of James Frazer, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Thierry Hentsch retells, with new urgency and a keen critical eye, “the story of the West” that shapes our perception of the world. Yet, “the story of the West” does not exist. Only a reading of its most seminal texts—from Ulysses to Hamlet, from the Torah to the Gospels, from Plato to Descartes—can bring it alive.
His tale turns on a startling discovery: The Christian message of immortality is conditional. To overcome death—the touchstone of the human condition—the believer must accept the Truth of salvation. Western civilization, by replacing God with technoscience, offers the universal promise that salvation may now be gained on earth. Yet, as a condition, it would impose its own absolute morality on the world. Truth or Death: the Biblical injunction is ours as well.
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Try Not to Be Strange
$24.95Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming.
Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves, Michael Hingston details the friendships, feuds, and fantasies that fueled the creation of one of the oddest and most enduring micronations ever dreamt into being. Part literary history, part travelogue, part quest narrative, this cautionary tale about what happens when bibliomania escapes the shelves and stacks is as charming as it is peculiar—and blurs the line between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that it may never be entirely restored.
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Try Not to Get Too Attached
$25.00Using line drawings, colour and text, Robin Richardson transposes the sensibility of poetry into illustrated works, creating bite-sized, artistic meditations on the terribly wonderful, malleable and absurd experience of being alive. Richardson’s intuitive works—inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts—are drawn from fleeting, conscious contact with various notions and emotions; they feel their way around meaning and what it is to be human.
It’s here, amongst animal imagery and Jungian psychological concepts, that the viewer can, if not careful, become lost in a collection of unsettling yet playful art: themes of loss, fear and euphoria are materially manifested through felt pen and pencil crayon. Within these works of art are scraps of consciousness, demons brought into the light of day and shared as if to say, clearly: you are not alone.
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Tsi Niió:re Tenkarakhwaráhseke (Mohawk Edition)
$16.95Tsi Niió:re Enkarakhoténhseke is the first ever poetry book in the Mohawk language published in Canada. The poems creatively reveal the beautiful and bitter essences of the world from a distinctive Indigenous female voice. Inspired by her recent global travels, experiences, relationships and Haudenosaunee perspective, the poet unapologetically sings words of midlife wisdom and cultural confidence. By using this creative foundation to unite distinctive communities, the author expresses raw emotion throughout her journey toward inner peace from a uniquely Indigenous point of view. It is this strong expression that the poet hopes will become a global guide for her communities to follow and interpret while encountering their truths and identity.
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Tsqelmucwilc
$22.95In May 2021, the world was shocked by news of the detection of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS) in British Columbia, Canada. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed the vestiges of children as young as three on this site of the infamous residential school system, which systematically removed children from their families and brought them to the schools. At these Christian-run, government-supported institutions, they were subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuse while their Indigenous languages and traditions were stifled and denounced. The egregious abuses suffered in residential schools across the continent caused – as the 2021 discoveries confirmed – death for too many and a multigenerational legacy of trauma for those who survived.
“Tsqelmucwilc” (pronounced cha-CAL-mux-weel) is a Secwepemc phrase loosely translated as “We return to being human again.” Tsqelmucwilc is the story of those who survived the Kamloops Indian Residential School, based on the 1988 book Resistance and Renewal, a groundbreaking history of the school – and the first book on residential schools ever published in Canada. Tsqelmucwilc includes the original text as well as new material by the original book’s author, Celia Haig-Brown; essays by Secwepemc poet and KIRS survivor Garry Gottfriedson and Nuu-chah-nulth elder and residential school survivor Randy Fred; and first-hand reminiscences by other survivors of KIRS, as well as their children, on their experience and the impact of their trauma throughout their lives.
Read both within and outside the context of the grim 2021 discoveries, Tsqelmucwilc is a tragic story in the history of Indigenous peoples of the indignities suffered at the hands of their colonizers, but it is equally a remarkable tale of Indigenous survival, resilience, and courage.
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Tsunami
$34.95Peter is a misfit, an awkward 12-year-old who’s mercilessly bullied in school and quietly ignored at home. Peter’s lonely life in small-town New Zealand is upended by the arrival of Charlie, a badass girl who might just be the friend Peter has been needing. But when Peter’s bull-headed commitment to the truth brings him into conflict with Gus, a troubled and violent classmate, things quickly spiral out of control and the two boys find themselves in a terrifying situation neither of them could have ever imagined.
Drawn in a charming and disarmingly cartoony style and full of pitch-perfect dialogue, Tsunami is a devastating and hilarious coming-of-age story, a nuanced examination of adolescent alienation and the unpredictable consequences of our actions.
Winner of NZ Book Award for Children and Young Adults – Best First Book
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Tucked Away
$22.95It seems like a dream gig when Daphne gets the job offerlive in Montreal’s Underground City for a full year and blog about the experience. The flip side of the city has all the creature comforts. The year will fly by. Except there’s a catch. To collect her whopping bonus for sticking it out till day 365, Daphne must agree never to set so much as a toe outside the territory of the Underground City, submitting to an ankle monitor to keep her honest. Even if the conditions are hardcore, she doesn’t have much choice. Out of work, and sole provider for a grandmother whose bank account is on life support, Daphne signs on the dotted line. And that?s when her life goes into freefall.
Inspired by Daphne, her grandmother comes up with an underground plan of her own, sheltering a family of illegal refugees in her basement. Daphne’s initial fury at her grandmother?s risky move does an about-face once she meets Chantal, a young runaway holed up in the Underground City, fleeing a threat she refuses to disclose. When Chantal shows up on Daphne’s doorstep desperate for protection, Daphne must decide if she’s prepared to lay her underground future on the line to rescue a group of virtual strangers from discovery and ruin.
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Tuft
$18.00Tuft: “A bunch (natural or artificial) of small things, usually soft and flexible, �fixed or attached at the base.” OED
With Tuft, Kim Minkus takes us on flights of poetic fancy into futures where we “observe the green elite” and “iceplants bloom in the monotony of paved paths.” We tangle and climb into language and are swept into the lives of the animals that haunt the shores of our city’s waterways. This is a world where worker, lover, animal and poet unite. Minkus brings Venus and Satan into one sentence and in doing so unleashes the “bitter-broken-fallen” of our world. This is a gathering that calls out to the reader to pay attention and look closely. Tuft reminds us that without words our bodies would not exist and that only time makes us secret. We are all attached to something.
Minkus forms impossible compounds to do just what the best poetry must: express the inexpressible
– Stephen Collis, The Globe and MailHer utterly original voice is unlike any other in poetry.
– Judith Fitzgerald, The Globe and Mail -
Tug of War
$19.95Tug of War is the first book of its kind. Written by a sitting family court judge in layman’s language, it demystifies complex family law concepts and procedures, clearly explains how family court works, and gives parents essential alternatives to resolve their own custody battles and keep their kids out of the often damaging court system.
Breakup rates in North America are skyrocketing. Recent statistics say 45% of marriages end in divorce, and at the centre are countless children, thrust by their families into a complex and seemingly impermeable family court system. Tug of War explains the role of lawyers and judges in the family justice system, and examines the parents’ own responsibilities to ensure that post-separation conflicts are resolved with minimal damage to the children stuck in the middle of parental disputes.
Justice Harvey Brownstone explores themes that apply to all families and parents in conflict. He draws on fourteen years sitting on the family court bench to provide clear case examples with inclusive and accessible language. Tug of War describes alternatives to litigation and exposes the myth that parents can represent themselves without a lawyer in family court. Justice Brownstone discloses the inner struggles of parents, judges and lawyers in the maelstrom of marital conflict.
This book is a must-read for couples involved in or contemplating separation, family law judges, lawyers, mediators, parenting coaches, psychologists, family counselors, social workers, students and professors of family law at law schools. It is endorsed by judges currently sitting in Ontario and New York State.
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Tulip and other Plays
$21.95These plays clustered about the themes of the fragility of love and the ephemerality of life. TULIP (2006). Commissioned and developed by Nightswimming Theatre. Set in the madness of 17th Century Holland during the spectacular and frighteningly strange Dutch obsession with tulip bulbs, TULIP is a wild play about greed, beauty, deceit and botany. The bubble bursts; within days, many are ruined. Starvation and poverty ensue. Adrift in a sea of menacing shadows, the characters of TULIP must now desperately try to reconstruct their shattered lives with only the broken mirror of their hopes and dreams to guide them. WILDEST DREAMS (2013). Developed by Nightswimming Theatre & Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. Poor old Jack. It just keeps going bad. Is that any way to have a life, thinks he? Would it rain?, he wondered, gazing fearfully into the dark grey sky. It smelt like rain. A conspiracy of nature? Its no good – Audrey’s screwing around. And nobody cares. And nothing makes any sense. WILDEST DREAMS is the story of middle-aged love, or love past middle-age, or the failure of this love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE (2019). Developed by Playwrights Workshop Montrèal. A contemporary lamination, an elegy for the authenticity of experience, and for re-claiming one’s own life. Which, after all, is the same as love. ALL THINGS AT ONCE features a giant Gulliver, dancing cows, ferocious boundaries, counterfactual history, and shocking deaths. The protagonist, the poet Byron – his delusion (not always charming but somehow courageously engaging) – drives him to seek out a frighteningly desperate truth to the raw reality of his life. A life where love and loss predominate the landscape.
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Tulpa Mea Culpa
$24.95When Gellhorn, a notable poet, begins a university residency in a “dynamic metropolis” and stays at the illustrious Máximo College, he finds himself scandalized, and for little known reason. Scrutiny by his new academic neighbours is the least of his worries, as he learns of the existence of Aaron Schnell, his physical pseudo-twin, and an actor and film “double.”The Chair shares fragments from the oeuvre of Thomas Claque, a recently deceased author who contrived the tale of the pseudo-twins. The Chair’s scholarship leads him to the real Máximo College, where he revives those characters and scenarios, before travelling to a smaller prairie town where he reimagines one of Claque’s risqué getaways. There he meets a young woman doing her creative thesis on the double in literature.Petra, a police clerk in an entirely different prairie city, receives a photograph of a missing person and recognizes a passenger from her weekday commute. Non-routine surveillance draws her deeper into his world until a global pandemic abruptly stalls her progress. Her romantic prospect soon leads to a greater mystery punctuated by the words, TULPA MEA CULPA, although its uncanny truth will be ultimately less provocative than serial coverage in the Prairie Pulse.Tulpa Mea Culpa is a literary tour-de-force and solidifies Morse as one of Canada’s most exciting writers today and proves why he is a two-time Governor General Award nominee.
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Tumblehome
$22.95On a warm August evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s 7,600 square-kilometre [3,000 square-mile] Algonquin Provincial Park. She is on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability-and nerve-to one day take a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry. Going solo may not be necessary after all.
But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of a broken engagement to her One True Paddling Partner, Brenda ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome-part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth-is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.
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Tumbleweed
$19.95In this latest short-story collection Josip Novakovich explores the shallow roots of emigration as he traverses North America from university post to writing residency. These stunning stories showcase the author at his most intimate, taking on an aura of memoir as they invite us into the privacy of his family experiences. Above all, Novakovich is in search of a natural existence, whether it be living close to the land or raising animals.
The author of the critically acclaimed Ex-Yu, which illustrated the lives of those scarred by the Balkan wars, here revels in the rootlessness of America and its wide-open spaces. As a companion to Ex-Yu (2015), Tumbleweed reveals a rarefied author who is as capable of warming readers’ hearts as he is of probing the depths of global despair.
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Tumblin’ Dice
$26.95Two aging rock stars plot against the manager who ripped them off in this witty thriller by “Canada’s answer to Elmore Leonard.” (Toronto Star)
Tumblin’ Dice rolls with cops and mobsters, rock stars and bikers, in a gritty, absorbing tour through a criminal underworld that’s thoroughly convincing
The High, a band with a few hit songs back in the late 1970s, have reunited to play the nostalgia circuit at casinos. But for bassist Barry and lead singer Cliff, this tour will be more lucrative than it appears, as they team up to turn the tables on the gritty underworld of these gambling palaces — robbing the loan sharks and drug dealers.
After coming across their old manager, who had swindled millions from them years ago, Barry and Cliff decide to go for the big score and get it all back — and more. But when a notoriously dangerous motorcycle gang gets involved, all bets are off.
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Tumbling for Amateurs
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 FIDDLEHEAD POETRY BOOK PRIZE
A reimagining of an instructional text on tumbling supports poems about the amateurishness of being human.
Tumbling for Amateurs is a reimagining of James Tayloe Gwathmey’s 1910 book of the same name, published as part of Spalding’s Athletic Library. Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text. In the spirit of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, word and image work for each other, creating something more than just an instructional manual.
Tumbling is, well, a metaphor for everything. And we all are, well, amateurs. Experimentation abounds in these poems and manipulated pictures. There are anaphoras, list sonnets, erasures, palimpsests and concrete poems, all working from tumbling’s limited vocabulary and central focus of acrobatics and gymnastics. In this experimentation of form and text is a search for the lyric, for an emotional connection when one isn’t always possible, in bodies, in movement, in desire. “We measure our lives by what our bodies can do.”
“We have no other way to touch each other. / Really no other way to touch each other. / We seek this particular exercise because / we have no other way to touch each other.” Like the tumbling acts from which they spring, Gwathmey’s poems are delightfully performative. They leap, loop, and reconfigure familiar forms into fresh and acrobatic new intimacies. Slyly queering his source text — an early 20th century tumbling manual for young men salvaged from the dusty closet of family history — Gwathmey transforms instruction into seduction as he conducts a tender and playful archeology of desire.” – Suzanne Buffam, author of A Pillow Book
“Matthew Gwathmey’s poems, springboarding from a genre of fitness manual popular in the early twentieth century, tumble us into the present through tests gamily set for body and mind. As ripped as his gymnast protagonists—evoked so fetchingly in the book’s illustrations—Gwathmey writes a poetry eschewing the lyrical in favour of a stripped-down, athletic language that gives shape to ‘what must remain / nameless.’ There’re so many ways to read ourselves into Tumbling for Amateurs. Go toe to toe with these poems and they’ll tone up your grip on what poetry is.”
– John Barton, author of Lost Family“Gwathmey’s poems go together like a troupe, somersaulting through the vocabulary of the way a body moves. They turn the still past into this moving present.” – Paul Legault, author of The Tower
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Tuner of Silences, The
$19.95“Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa.”—Doris Lessing
“By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic.”—Henning Mankell
Mwanito Vitalício was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito’s been living in a big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He’s been told that rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. In the place his father calls Jezoosalem, Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden. The 8th novel by NY Times-acclaimed Mia Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanito’s struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman’s arrival in Jezoosalem, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father’s story and the world are heard once more. The Tuner of Silences was heralded as one of the most important books to be published in France in 2011, and remains a shocking portrait of the intergenerational legacies of war. Available for the first time in English.