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Showing 8593–8608 of 9481 results
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Toronto, Mississippi
$15.95Jhana, is a beautiful eighteen-year-old who lives with her mother Maddie and their boarder Bill, a sometime poet. Jhana’s father, King, shows up partway through the first act and it is his presence for the first time in a long time in this unusual family that really galvanizes all four of the characters into action.
King is an Elvis impersonator, getting sick and tired of doing the same old song and dance. Jhana is mentally handicapped and working at her first “job” in a workshop for disabled people where she puts four screws in a bag and then another four screws in another bag and so on. In her mind she is on stage at Maple Leaf Gardens singing and strutting her stuff, just like her father does. Maddie is trying to keep it together while working full time as a teacher and as a mother, too busy to admit to her own loneliness. Bill is harbouring all sorts of feelings for Maddie that he is afraid to act on.
While this is a play about the power of family and love, it is finally a play about self-destruction and creation. At its heart is Jhana, whose character begs the question whether the other characters, in their own ways, are any less handicapped. She’s good company—funny, driven, passionate and yearning for the same things those around her yearn for—if they can get over their preconceptions about the mentally handicapped and give her the space to achieve her dreams.
The play came out of the author’s decade-long involvement working with mentally handicapped adults and children as a life skills instructor. Re-released in a revised and updated edition, it is Joan MacLeod’s first full-length play, receiving more than twenty international productions over the past two decades.
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Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries
$24.95Exploring the experimental energy of an era, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 brings together more than 100 works by 65 artists and collectives to highlight an innovative period in Toronto art history. Amidst the social and political upheavals of their time, the artists that emerged in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s pushed the boundaries of conventional painting, sculpture, and photography, exploring new ways of art making.
Organized thematically and punctuated by references to Toronto and its cityscape, this unique publication highlights the era’s preoccupation with ideas of performance, the body, the image, self-portraiture, storytelling, and representation. Featured artists include Michael Snow, Joanne Tod, the Clichettes, Duke Redbird, Barbara Astman, Robin Collyer, Robert Houle, Carol Condé, and Carl Beveridge, as well as photographer June Clarke, illustrator Ato Seitu, dub poet Lillian Allen, and many others.
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Torontology
$15.95White Noise alchemy: poetry for the next millennium. In a world where the poet is a filter, a cultural recombinator, Torontology sifts through the blur of data and stimulus to find the gold in the dross. From OuLiPo to Vispo to post-LANGpo, Stephen Cain explores the poetics of constraint and the practice of unconstrained writing. In Torontology, Grendel meets Beowulf on the College streetcar, Eliot interrogates Atom Egoyan’s Prison Tattoos while enjoying Vacillation in a Blanket, and Guided by Voices is both a brilliant band and an oblique love poem. For Cain, Sir Thomas Browne is on equal footing with James Brown. That pop song buzzing through your head? The TV show that’s become a guilty pleasure? That flock of pre-teens behind you on the subway? They’re all as “real” and poetic as classical tropes, archetypes, and forms. Torontology: a philosophy of Being in the “centre of the universe”? Or merely the urban landscape at the turn of the 21st century? Either way, in Cain’s terms, context is always as important as content, and the quotidian is more expansive than you’ve ever imagined.
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Torp
$18.95The landlord, the husband, the wife, and the lover. Giulio di Orio, an assistant lecturer in Philosophy, brings one of his students, known as Torp to the Vancouver flat he shares with his wife Nicole. Soon their landlord is convinced that Torp is the devil incarnate, and the police have arrested him for the street bombings that have been plaguing the city. A sexually-charged tale bubbling with lust, suspected murder, and the twilight of the flower children–all set against the backdrop of martial law in 1970 Vancouver.
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Tortoise Boy
$15.00Four disparate people confront each other, their memory, and their responsibility at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode. ‘Tortoise Boy’ is a “chamber play,” four monologues, or mono-dialogues, if you will. The actors play many characters to tell the story, and they are also four voices, four instruments-a quartet-allowing them at times to step beside characters and show the story from other points of view. Can we have a future without a past? Is there any meaning to a past that has no future? When do our memories open doors, and when do they close them? What’s best forgotten? What’s indelible? The ancient Greeks believed that memory is the mother of the muses, and the words memory, muse, and music all share a common root.
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Total MMA
$19.95?
Since the beginning of time, men have engaged in hand-to-hand combat. In Ancient Greece, they called it Pankration, a no-holds-barred battle. Over time, one complete combat system was replaced by a variety of limited ones like karate, boxing, and wrestling. In the modern age this created an eternal question: who was tougher? Could a boxer beat a wrestler? Could a kung fu artist dispose of a jiu jitsu man?
The Ultimate Fighting Championship answered those questions emphatically in 1993 — and Mixed Martial Arts was born. Early stars like Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie propelled this new sport into the North American public’s consciousness while pro wrestlers Nobuhiko Takada and Masakatsu Funaki led a parallel evolution in Japan, where cultural forces led to fighters becoming mainstream celebrities.
With no television contract and little publicity budget to speak of, the UFC was forced to adopt an aggressive marketing scheme to get public attention. The potential for carnage and blood was played up and a predictable media outcry soon followed. Politicians, led by Arizona Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain, were able to ban the sport in most states and even managed to suspend pay-per-view broadcasts.
While the popularity of MMA was at an all-time-high in Japan, MMA failed to thrive in America until Spike TV finally took a chance on the controversial sport and The Ultimate Fighter thrust mixed martial arts back into the mainstream, creating new mega-stars like Forrest Griffin and Rashad Evans, and breathing new life into old favourites.
For the first time, Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting arms you with all the history and information you need to know to understand the contemporary world of Mixed Martial Arts, where the backroom deal-making is as fierce as the fighting.
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Touch
$22.95Anna Gareau arrives in Victoria, BC, with two things to hide—an illegal pistol, and the ability to read people’s pasts by touching certain objects.
After a woman is drowned in the pool at her hotel,Anna must lie to protect her secrets and is dragged into a terrifying murder investigation. Colette Kostyna, the victim’s best friend, joins forces with Anna to expose the murderer. While the events surrounding the drowning are mysterious, the events occurring at The Rail—the local news magazine where the victim worked—are horrifying. There is a powerful creature with a grudge stalking those at The Rail, and Anna and Colette have become its new prey.
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Touch Anywhere to Begin
$22.95Shortlisted, New Brunswick Book Award (Non-Fiction)
From acclaimed author Mark Anthony Jarman comes Touch Anywhere to Begin, his first book of travel writing since the publication of the critically acclaimed Ireland’s Eye in 2002.
In 18 unusual, head-spinning essays, Jarman can drift through Venice amid the revelry of carnival and the arrival of the impending pandemic or visit a private club along Shanghai’s Huangpu River to be serenaded by a band of retired People’s Liberation Army singers. In “Panthers and Gods Prowl a Palace of Sin,” an invitation to the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai forges a connection with a jetlagged pair of Arctic throat singers and a doctor fascinated by Canada. In “Jesus on the Mainline,” an extended hospitalization beside the intubated victim of a drunk-driving accident reveals a difficult family drama.
And this, of course, is only the beginning. Masterfully written, Touch Anywhere to Begin penetrates the impressionistic moments and intimacies of travel to reveal character and place like none other.
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Touch the Dragon
$20.00New material including photos, maps and an afterword by Karen Connelly is included in this new format edition of her 1993 Governor General’s Award-winning classic, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal. At the age of 17, the adventure-seeking Calgary teenager went to Thailand on a Rotary exchange program and her life changed forever. Twenty-four years later, Connelly is still travelling and writing, inspiring the world with her stories.Through vivid imagery, humour and careful observation of the families, school friends and Buddhist rituals around her, Connelly brings to life the small village in northern Thailand where she stayed for a year.Initially homesick and frustrated by the habits and lifestyle of the gentle but patriarchal Thais, Connelly begins to view herself as one of them by the end of her stay. The idea of returning to Canada becomes terrifying and strange because she has become so accustomed to her new community and the Thai way of life. Put together from her journals written at the time, Connelly’s to-the-moment chronicling of her experience reveals a momentous growing experience in the heart and mind of a young woman.
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Touch to Affliction
$16.95From the ruins of poetry, fiction and philosophy comes Touch To Affliction, a meditation on the notion of homeland, on patrie and the inhumanity that arises from it.
This is a text obsessed with ruins: the ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body. The history of the twentieth century is a history of barbarism, and Stephens walks, like a fl̢neur, through its midst, experiencing through her own body the crumbled buildings, the dessicated cities, the eviscerated language and humanity of our time, calling out in passing to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Gorecki, Simone Weil. In the end, it considers what we are left with Рindeed, what is left of us Рas both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century.
Insistently political but never polemical, Touch To Affliction, at the interstices of thought and theunnameable, is at once lament, accusation and elegy.
Praise for Paper City:
‘Understanding is almost antithetical to the project Stephens seems to have assigned herself, that of unraveling or radically altering our sense of logic, of language, of narrative, of body, of desire, of words on paper. She wants the book to burn in our hands and, indeed, it does.’
– NewPages
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Touching Strangers
$19.95Aaron Cordic and Samantha Riske are a couple of twenty-something hypochondriacs living in east-end Toronto. While Aaron works part-time at a bathroom supply store, donning surgical masks, plastic gloves, and a backpack full of sanitary products, Samantha hides herself away in their apartment, tip-toeing around naked and spying on the neighbours. Between paranoid trips to the doctor and extremely intimate examinations of each other’s bodies, they’ve managed to eke out an isolated and highly sterilized existence.
Then, one day, birds begin falling from the sky as numerous tenants in their building become mysteriously ill. Before long, a pandemic known as Buzzard Flu has swept across the city, and Aaron and Samantha must come to terms with the all-too-real possibility that disease, or even death, could finally be at hand. But is Buzzard Flu the biggest problem the couple must face? Or does a more dangerous killer lurk closer to home.
By turns disturbing, uplifting, funny, and weirdly erotic, Touching Strangers examines what it means to be young and afraid in a world more hazardous than we want to believe.
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tours, variously
$19.95A poem as a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms. Asking how words form spaces of shifting relation, tours, variously dwells on narration as an operation that works on spaces and bodies as they negotiate their place among framed exhibits and pinned specimens ready for misrecognition. These poems saunter through an abstracted network of transformational encounters where bodies struggle with and against a game of follow the leader, postured by the series of connected rooms we share. Together they guide the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always stepping between the sayable and the unsaid.
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Toward the North
$22.95Toward the North is the first anthology of thirteen short fiction pieces written and translated by Chinese-Canadian writers during the last two decades, each of which depicts the contemporary lives of new Chinese immigrants to Canada, and illustrates newcomers’ perspectives of multicultural Canada. The theme of the anthology is Chinese transnational and cross-cultural life experience. A fundamental concern shared by most of the authors is to redefine their characters’ cultural identity in their acculturation across times and space. In these stories, the exploration of the relationship between Chinese immigrants and Canadians extends beyond “yellow”/”white” binary model, revealing interactions between the Chinese and other ethnic communities. Struggles between cultural assimilation and resistance are vividly and captivatedly portrayed. The authors’ approaches to their characters’ life experience of culture’s in-between displays an intriguing diversity both in content and in styles.
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Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge Volume I
$79.95From boat-building to berries, from knitting socks to mending nets, Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge vividly presents the rich, place-based knowings and doings of more than one hundred knowledge-holders from rural Newfoundland. Renowned artist Pam Hall perfectly marries her singular artistic vision and her exhaustive community-based research in a stunning celebration and preservation of rural knowledge. These images and texts come together to reveal and revalue the local in a time when global monoculture seems overwhelming.
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Tower 25
$19.99TOWER 25 is a 128 page graphic memoir about homelessness, addiction, trauma and recovery. Written and illustrated by PJ Patten, Tower 25 follows his journey through homelessness, from living in a nice condo to sleeping in bathrooms at the beach after losing everything to meth addiction. This project engages with themes of addiction, trauma, responsibility and ultimately healing. It offers a first hand account of the struggles of being homeless and the challenges one is faced with trying to get off the streets.
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Towers of Babylon, The
$22.95Embracing the anxieties of contemporary urban life, The Towers of Babylon tracks a group of hapless Millennials trying to find meaning in a world that consistently rejects them. What do you do when you have a graduate degree and are stuck working at a bagel shop? Or you’ve snagged a steady, middle-income job only to find it’s plunging you into a moral abyss? Or you’ve worked your way into the upper echelons of the finance sector, but are still (still!) somehow struggling to pull in enough to support the dependents that just keep popping up around you? What happens to your faith when the world that was promised to you is collapsing at your feet?
As the novel’s four narrators pinball around Toronto—where real estate prices are hyper-inflated, public infrastructure is crumbling, and climate change is bringing on killer heat and savage storms—they each try to do what’s right for themselves and for the world. Trouble is, none of them can agree on what right means.
There’s chronically unemployed and accidentally pregnant Joly; her best friend Louise, a billboard marketing genius in moral crisis; Joly’s boyfriend Ben, a communist/Anglican hybrid with a big heart and big hopes and a big reservoir of anger; and Yannick, Joly’s brother, a private equity hotshot, overworked and overburdened and trying to shake off an encroaching depression with brute will.
The Towers of Babylon looks at a generation struggling—professionally, personally, and spiritually—to carve out their place in a civilization that may well be inching toward decline.