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Showing 849–864 of 9481 results
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Balancing Bountiful
$24.95As the daughter of Mormon leader Winston Blackmore, Mary Jayne Blackmore grew up within the closed-off polygamist community of Bountiful, BC. She spent her younger years riding ponies, raising pet lambs and playing in the hay in the Old Barn. Her family’s staunch Fundamentalist Mormon faith imposed fanatical doomsday preparation and carried an instilled fear of the world outside her community.
The church community split in 2002 when her father was revoked of his leadership position by Prophet Warren Jeffs. In 2017 Winston Blackmore was convicted of practicing polygamy further inciting the media sensationalism and worldwide criticism that had surrounded Bountiful for decades. Through the evolving and controversial narrative of her young adult life, Mary Jayne was forced to redefine her faith, family and womanhood for herself.
Along with her own healing journey, Mary Jayne works to support healing within her family and community. She is also building her own place in the world–as a teacher, mother, writer and educated woman–and she has managed to restore loving bonds with her family, including her father.
From a childhood in an idyllic but sheltered community to early adulthood in an arranged marriage, ensuing divorce, and eventual return to Bountiful, Balancing Bountiful is Mary Jayne’s journey of coming of age and coming to terms with her background as she strives to answer the question: What is the right kind of family, the right kind of woman and the right kind of feminist?
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Balconville
$17.95Balconville is Canada’s first bilingual play. Three families and Thibault, the neighbourhood rubbie, sit on their balconies in the heat of a Montreal summer. It is election time and Gaétan Bolduc is running for re-election for the Liberals. His broadcast truck roams the streets making election promises in English and in French, and playing the music of Elvis Presley. The English and the French-Canadian working class take on the Establishment in this award-winning play.
Cast of 3 women and 6 men.
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Baldur’s Song
$19.00Winnipeg’s boom-town days at the turn of the nineteenth century come to life through the eyes of Baldur, a boy from Gimli, the Icelandic immigrant settlement on the southernmost shore of Lake Winnipeg. Both city and boy grow from innocence to savvy creatures of business as they mature, fall in love, and survive the politics of a competitive, cut-throat society.Arnason’s Leacock-nominated humour permeates this simply told story but takes a subtle turn under the drama of passionate young hearts struggling to find their places in the New World.At the same time he discovers his musical talent whistling to the dead in the village graveyard, Baldur encounters his first and life-long love, Lara, a girl of mystery and fey spirit. Her father, Gudmundur Palsson, is an influential and intimidating community leader who gives Baldur his first big break as a musician, but later becomes a competitor when Baldur teams up with ambitious real-estate mogul Johnny Ashdown.Notable characters like Ashdown, Palsson, and Lara bring early Winnipeg to life. Older neighbourhoods like the West End, Wolseley, West Broadway, and the Exchange District are immediately recognizable, and readers navigate the dirt streets and boardwalks with Baldur in Arnason’s vivid narrative.
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Baldwin, Styron, and Me
$22.95Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
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Baltic Quintet, The
$25.00Tied together only by the touch of the Baltic Sea, the poems in this anthology feature the invigorating voices and visions of Northern Europe. The Baltic Quintet gives the reader a taste of the poetic riches available beyond our borders.
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Bambi and Me
$17.95Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his discovery of his emerging emotional sensibilities as a child and an adolescent. In the piece that gives the book its title, he writes: “Did you cry as much as I did at the death of Bambi’s mother? Personally, I’ve never got over it.”
Bursting with wit, charm, and the profound resonance of youthful self-discovery, Bambi and Me provides Tremblay’s many fans with a clear sense of the origins of the talent which has made Michel Tremblay one of the most important and fascinating playwrights and novelists of the 20th century.
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Bamboo Cage
$16.95In 1942, RAF flight controller Robert Wyse became a Japanese prisoner of war on the island of Java in Indonesia. Starved, sick, beaten, and worked to near-death, he wasted away until he weighed only seventy pounds, his life hanging in tenuous balance. There were strict orders against POWs keeping diaries, but Wyse penned his observations on the scarce bits of paper he could find, struggling to describe the brutalities he witnessed. After cleverly hiding his notes in a piece of bamboo next to his bed, in December of 1943, he carefully hid his notes inside a bottle beneath his prison hut. After the war, he wrote to the Dutch authorities, asking them to dig up his diary and return it to him.
In this detailed and frank portrayal of life under Japanese occupation, Wyse reveals the both the best and the worst of human nature. He criticized his fellow soldiers for botching the defence of Java and Sumatra and admonished his captors for their brutality. Yet, Wyse also describes the selfless efforts of the Dutch civilians who helped the prisoners by doing whatever they could as well as his first-hand observations of acts of self-sacrifice among the prisoners themselves.
Bamboo Cage is volume 13 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
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Banana Boots
$15.95Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language or culture, but one of British imperialism and the class structure it imposes on its “colonials,” the ironies of such an event are, of course, both delicious and irresistible.
Though first mystified by the dismissive and disinterested response to his play, Fennario gradually realizes that it is his handlers and agents, presenting him as an icon of the British Empire, who are causing the problem. Once out among the working class and the bristling tension-filled atmosphere of their pub-based communities, Fennario experiences a mutual epiphany of solidarity with “the troubles” in Ireland and “the troubles” in Quebec, brought to a head by his soul mate “Banana Boots,” the stand-up Irish comedian who regales his audience with scathing caricatures of both Ian Paisley and the leaders of Sien Fein. Himself an Anglophone descendant of Irish immigrants who came to “the point” in Montreal to escape the potato famine in 1847, Fennario remains an unabashed Marxist and Quebec separatist.
Banana Boots is Fennario’s clearest expression of his revolutionary social conscience since his highly acclaimed student journal Without a Parachute; it is also published in celebration of the historic 1998 referendum in Ireland.
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Banana Boys
$17.95A smart, contemporary, and wickedly funny play about five young Asian Canadian men wrestling with issues of race, identity, and the death of a friend. Banana Boys is one story, fragmented into five and reconstructed throughout the course of the lives of the five young men it follows. Adapted from the novel by Terry Woo, Banana Boys is a “meditation for the restless” and a call to anyone who has felt out of place in the world.
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Bandit
$19.00In 1966, Ken Leishman stepped onto the Winnipeg Airport tarmac and into the pages of Canadian history as the mastermind behind the country’s largest gold theft. Known as the “flying bandit” or the “gentleman bandit,” Leishman had already gained Dillinger-esque notoriety as a bank robber, when he stole the public’s imagination with his last great exploit: brazenly – and politely – holding up a bank in Toronto.
Regarded as a Robin Hood-like figure at the height of his exploits, Leishman had humble beginnings in Holland, Manitoba. Master story-teller Wayne Tefs imagines what happened behind the “Flying Bandit” headlines, inter-mingling the full-on action of the gold heist with the story of a smart but troubled kid growing up in a stifling small prairie town. Raised by ultra-strict grandparents, young Ken thrived on Bowery Boys, Gary Cooper and James Cagney movies. As a married man and father of seven, Tefs’ Leishman dreams of greatness, and a good life for his family free from poverty and worry. Even as he plots the greatest caper in Canada, he is conflicted by his wife’s tears and guilt-ridden with his failed promises to go straight.
Once again, Tefs presents another fictionalized version of a tremendous true story. Readers will be hard-pressed to judge the life of this “gentleman bandit” and Canadian folk-hero who dared to fly far out of bounds. -
BANG BANG
$17.95Lila, a young Black ex-cop, has been on leave from the police force ever since she shot an unarmed Black youth. She’s moved back in with her mother, Karen, and is drinking beer for breakfast. So when Tim, a white playwright, shows up at her door to casually inform her that his play inspired by her experience is being adapted into a movie, Lila’s trauma is dragged out for speculation once again. The star of the film, their ex-cop bodyguard and Karen are pulled into the fight, leading to an epic metatheatrical standoff in a living room play about a living room play about gun violence, police, art and appropriation.
This dark, fast-paced dramedy by the author of Punch Up and Mustard traces the responsibility we have as artists in storytelling and the impact of what it means to be inspired by true events.
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Bang Your Head
$22.95“And in this corner, at 260 pounds, from Parts Unknown, it’s The Missing Link!”
Wrestling fans around the world thrilled to those words in the mid-80s as the bizarre and volatile Missing Link would enter the ring. But then, he disappeared from wrestling as mysteriously as he appeared, and for more than a decade fans wondered what became of him. Now, the man behind that blue-and-green mask is finally stepping out to tell people the real story. No, he wasn’t a Stone Age throwback or even a refugee from a circus freak show — he was veteran ring hero Dewey Robertson, known to wrestling fans for his all-Canadian looks, physique, and mastery of a thousand wrestling moves.
Written in a plain-talk, straight-from-the heart style, Bang Your Head tells Dewey’s story from the very beginning — growing up in the wrestling mecca of Hamilton, Ontario; becoming one of the stalwarts of Toronto’s Maple Leaf Wrestling promotion; moving to the southern United States to morph into one of wrestling’s most popular “goons”; losing his career and abusing alcohol and drugs; beicomng destitute and homeless for nearly a year; returning to Canada to begin a long road to recovery; and finally emerging victorious only to find that his fans were still waiting. The tremendous response to his appearances showed that interest in the Link was as strong as ever.
Bang Your Head also gives fans an unprecedented look at the reality of a wrestler’s life outside the ring: the weeks on the road away from family and friends, the constant risk of injury, loneliness, financial instability, strains on family life from constantly moving around to follow the work, and the easy access to women, alcohol, and drugs. Dewey is one of the few pros who will admit publicly that he used steroids, and graphically documents the damage they did to his health.
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Bangladesh 1971
$17.95Reflections on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the creation of Bangladesh, from a war correspondent who was present at the birth of the new country.
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Banker, Builder, Blockade Runner
$25.95On July 28, 1870, Mather Byles Almon, President of the Bank of Nova Scotia, announced that the cashier, James Forman “has been guilty of making many fraudulent entries in the books of the bank, by which he has abstracted a large amount of its funds.” In this unusual biography, Pat Lotz profiles James Formana man who “left no letters.” Accused of embezzling over $300,000 from the Bank of Nova Scotia, Forman resigned his post in disgrace before leaving Nova Scotia for England. The crime shocked Victorian Halifax, bumping the Franco-Prussian war from the front page of the local newspapers. In this unique book, Lotz traces the life of a man who left very little personal information, in letters or otherwise, about his life and work.
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Banking on Life
$22.95Banking on Life
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Bannock Republic
$14.95Find out what yoga, residential schools and the missing thirteenth floors have in common in the new comedy by Kenneth T. Williams. Bannock Republic reunites the cousins Jacob and Isaac Thunderchild 10 years after the mayhem of Thunderstick. This time, a beautiful and vengeful third-party manager will wreak havoc with their lives. Jacob is working as a video journalist and barely clinging to his sobriety. Isaac is now chief of their reserve and trying to get the band out of debt. Destiny Charles, appointed to take over the bandÕs finances, will make Jacob and Isaac realize that some secrets are better left buried.