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Showing 8593–8608 of 9248 results
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Under the Stone (Sous beton)
$18.00From birth, the child was locked away in a minuscule cell, at #804 of level 5969 of the Edifice. Around him … only concrete, without a view of the outside world. And two people: the tyrannical father, slowly killing himself; and the mother, fearing eviction. Unmoving in his roost, the child’s life will be disrupted by a transformation that will reveal an unexpected horizon.
Praise for Under the Stone:
“Although thematically this novel is not a relaxing read, it is beautifully written in short, sparse sections that cumulatively build toward a horrendous, yet engaging, alternate reality. Homel’s translation progresses fluidly so that the language never distracts from the narrative, but rather lodges the reader deeper and deeper Under the Stone.” (Montreal Review of Books)Under the Stone exists on the fault line between novel and poem, exploring a monochromatic world haunted by the ghost of self-conscience.
Dark but deeply engaging.“Echoes of George Orwell’s 1984 are heard throughout this excellent novel with its style as cold and dark as whatever lies under the stone… ” (Lisanne Rhéault-Leblanc, 7 jours)
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Under the Zaboca Tree
$19.95At ten, Melody Sparks, better known as Baby Girl, is excited to move to the tropical island of Trinidad with her single-parent dad, but she silently longs for her mother, a woman she can’t recall ever meeting and doesn’t have a photo of. She fits in to her new life in Paradise Lane quite well: she loves her school and makes new friends. However, her longing for blood family remains strong. But Baby Girl is suddenly and unexpectedly uprooted from her comfortable life in Paradise Lane by and forced to reside in Flat Hill Village, a depressed, crime-ridden community. She struggles to adjust to life in this village with the help of new friends, Arlie, a village activist and Colm, a young man who mentors her to write poetry. When Baby Girl witnesses a serious crime, her father insists she move in with relatives she doesn’t know very well, where she ultimately uncovers the truth about her mother. Under the Zaboca Tree is a contemporary coming of age novel that explores multiple issues including the challenges of being a motherless adolescent, searching for one’s identity, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the ability to adapt to difficult situations.
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Undercurrents
$24.00Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry is an introduction to the work of eleven poets who have not yet published full collections of their own, but whose poems have been making their way into print in Canada and abroad.
The poems have been hand-picked by editor Robyn Sarah both for their qualities as individual poems and for the ensemble they create. Each selection has been compiled with a view to showing the poet’s range, yet each is also sequenced so that the poems work effectively as a suite.
The contributors’ ages span five decades, bringing to bear the perspectives and concerns of different life stages. This is not the latest crop of MFAs in Creative Writing, but a foraged gathering of eleven strongly individual poets coming from different regions, different backgrounds, and different walks of life. What they have in common is their uncommon ability to explore our shared human condition in words that resonate.
Featuring:
E. Blagrave
Sarah Feldman
Hamish Guthrie
Amanda Jernigan
Daniel Karasik
Michael Lithgow
George Pakozdi
E. Alex Pierce
Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein
Key Weber
Margo Wheaton -
Understan
$20.95Across space and time, crossing continents and decades, in this volume the poet uses memory and the minutiae of daily life to unravel the mysteries of love and death. He examines belief and superstition, on occasion prays, and delights in the sight of the familiar and the strange, the young and the old. In his journey the poet is lost but holds up the map to everywhere and everyone.
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Understander
$15.00The second trade collection by Ottawa poet N.W. Lea, Understander continues his investigations of language, discourse, and irony through the short lyric.
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Understories
$16.95Understories explores the meeting of the natural, suburban and inner-city experiences of Prince George. These poems look beneath the daily observations of a place jostled between stripmalls and pubs, the university and the mill, and a landscape that presses in at every corner, revealing a sometimes gritty underside. Al Rempel’s poetry kicks the snow off alleyways, tramps around a fallen-in trapper’s cabin, or sneaks onto the neighbour’s front lawn – all with a wink and a nod.
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Understories: Poems
$18.95Understories is an exploration of things visible mostly to the inner eye and memory, things below the surface. The book began as a riff on Mark Strand’s brilliant title, “Planet of the Lost Things,” and it is an exploration of loss, but also of recovery through memory and language. The first part, “A Perfect Afternoon” follows an unfulfilled romance through significant moments and years to elegy for what never was and for the loved one himself. The romance is juxtaposed with epiphanic moments of reflection, joy and dismay, perceptive growth points. The second section, “Functional Families,” considers the theme of family, especially mothers, and moves through varying visions of family to a sort of resolution though the poet’s mothering of her own son. The third section, “Going the Distance for Poetry,” focuses on poetry and art, some of the connections that make the poetic quest possible, literary, artistic and natural (looking at mountains, listening to trees). The final section, “Lost Cities,” looks at New York, Toronto, Florence, ancient Rome, Mayan Mexico through the lens of history and memory, alternating sorrow for loss with belief in the power of poetry to preserve. Once of the themes of Understories is “where does the story end?” and the book takes the long view, writing beyond the apparent ending.
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Underwater Carpentry
$12.95Bartlett takes his readers on a meditative journey in which he encapsulates the complexity of human experience. Delighting in humour and the play of words, he induces his readers to take a new look at historical events, the natural world, and a full range of emotions.
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UNDERWORLD
$24.99The Odyssey, woven through the streets of Winnipeg. Loosely based on Homer’s classic story, The Odyssey, this graphic novel follows Hector as he tries to regain his sanity whilst navigating his way through the criminal underworld on the streets of Winnipeg. As he puts the pieces of his life back together, Hector rediscovers his wife and children, forgotten through his madness. Hector battles to save himself so he can make amends with his family, the chance of redemption tantalizing amongst the inner war in his mind and the physical danger he finds himself part of too.
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Undone
$16.00Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. “Forgotten” has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; “Kindred” features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in “Apprentice,” leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. “Isn’t that our job,” she asks, “to coax out the light in the story?” It’s a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly.
The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to “watching wide” – a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.
“If I had to do it again, I’d place a stethoscope on the heart of us
Sooner. I’d prescribe Neruda, not the despair but the slow blossom of 20 kisses.Goodbye, goodbye to the slippery duvet of this bed. The cold floor
of awake and how hope can have insomnia, spend the whole night wishing.Heartbreak is a geological occurrence.”
from “A Version of Courage”
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Unexpected Break in the Weather, An
$19.00“A Rose on Corydon” is a bridal shop like no other. With a staircase spiraling around a pillar that is a floor-to-ceiling aquarium stocked with tropical fish, and an unrivalled eclectic selection, “A Rose on Corydon” has been the city’s “go-to” bridal salon for three decades. At the center of the novel are seven women: Milly and Gertrude, A Rose’s owners, Jeannette, their assistant, Perfume, who is heading to the altar for the fourth time,and her bridal party–Agnes, Dorien, Wordy–and Arlie, a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor with insight beyond her years.As they enter their seventies, Milly and Gertrude have decided it’s time to close the business. Millie is laid-up with a broken leg and there’s no-one to pass the store to, (except their very estranged daughter, Isadore). They decide to host Perfume’s wedding and make it their closing-out party and have everyone, even the men, don taffeta wedding wear. But when Wordy is diagnosed with cancer, the event begins to look less like a wedding and more like an outrageous living wake.This poetic and graceful novel grapples with the meaning of friendship, family estrangement, and how we care for the ill and the elderly.
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Unexpected Fictions
$10.95These nine short stories are written by well-known authors such as W.D. Valgardson, Martha Brooks, David Arnason, Kristjana Gunnars and Betty Jane Wylie. The collection showcases the work of the prairie Icelandic community and is wide-ranging, contemporary, and highly entertaining. The fictions are sometimes comic and sometimes melancholy, in the best tradition of a “round of storytelling.” Gunnars’ introduction raises questions about the function of fiction and the issues of ethnic writing.
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Unfuckable Lardass
$16.95Unfuckable Lardass reverts the patriarchy’s gaze. It began as an attempt to refract and undercut an outrageous insult allegedly lobbed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel – an egregious demonstration of the framing of women in reductive and sexualized terms ignoring their existence as subjects of their own complex histories. As such, Unfuckable Lardass is fuelled by the energy of grief and rage, counterpoised by moments of love and hope. Drawing on language from a wide range of sources – including European witch trials, Marx, Darwin, Renaissance and popular music, and common profanity, as well as from the author’s experience of post-reproductivity and of carrying out caring labour during declines, deaths, and the COVID-19 lockdown – Strang’s sixth book of poetry not only refuses the objectifying gaze but, more importantly, turns towards the great and expanding richness of alternate possibilities.
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Unfurled
$22.95Ambulance lights flash as a baby is born on a busy city street, pine beetles paint forests a palette of new colours, a young boy faces a watery death under the ice of a frozen lake, and a mother stands in a bathtub at midnight wearing only her gumboots. In this anthology of new writing, women poets from Northern BC share their refreshing, intriguing, mystical and sometimes mythical insights into rural and urban life. Unfurled is a unique blend of emerging and familiar voices and includes work from Gillian Wigmore, Jacqueline Baldwin, Sarah de Leeuw, Donna Kane, Laisha Rosnau, Leanne Boschman and Jamella Hagen–truly a celebration of the women of the North.
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Unholy
$17.95Should women abandon religion?
Four female panellists face off in a wild, whip-smart televised debate about the intersection of religion and misogyny. On one side, there’s Maryam, a progressive Muslim lawyer, and Yehudit, an Orthodox Jewish spiritual leader. The other has Liz, a lesbian antitheist pundit, and Margaret, an excommunicated nun. The debaters wrestle with themselves and with each other: Can you be a feminist and believe in religion? What can or can’t be forgiven? Why do we have faith to begin with? Between the arguments, each of the debaters return to a seminal and secret moment in their past that represents a crisis of faith, leading the debate to become more and more personally charged, until it climaxes in an epic battle.
Unholy delves into the biblical struggles that tear us apart and make us who we are. It’s about having the courage to take the leap in life and into love. What is more holy than that?
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Unicorn in the Woods
$29.95A Globe and Mail Top 100 Selection
Longlisted, National Business Book Award
A CBC New Brunswick Book List SelectionAs tech investors the world over search for elusive unicorns (start-ups valued at over $1 billion), acclaimed business journalist Gordon Pitts asks whether there can be a place for high-tech innovation and unicorn-like value creation outside of major urban centres, whether in Atlantic Canada, rust-belt New York, or Northern Ontario.
Journeying back to the origins of Radian6 and Q1 Labs — two New Brunswick companies that sold for a combined $1 billion — in the basements and offices of a group of geeks and dreamers, Pitts tells a story of two remarkable companies and the legacies that continue to this day. But theirs was not a simple tale of overnight success; there were sellouts and firings, comebacks and vindication, and still unfulfilled promise.
This is a story of high-tech value creation far from Silicon Valley, a story of the mythical unicorn in the woods. Are the stories of Radian6 and Q1 Labs outliers, rogue datapoints that should be discarded, or the foundation for a new knowledge economy outside of the mainstream?