A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more
All Books
All Books in this Collection
Showing 849–864 of 9248 results
-
Barclay Family Theatre, The
$18.95With The Barclay Family Theatre, his second collection of short stories, Jack Hodgins introduces us to a cast of characters who transform the everyday world of Vancouver Island into a wondrous world of human warmth and comic energy.
-
Bardy Google
$16.95For thousands of years, formal compositional rules of rhyme, metre and rhetorical devices have shaped the language of poetry, creating “meaning” through the interplay between these culturally determined aesthetic prerequisites imposed on its syntax, and the “other” intelligence of the poet pushing against these constraints. Bardy Google reinvents these formal boundaries within the frame of our wired world.
With only one hidden exception, each of the texts in this book was constructed through Frank Davey’s use of speci?cally devised Internet searches. The “rules” for their composition varied: “Love + 560” began at the 560th line of the search results; most selections excluded incomplete sentences; most included only the ?rst sentence of a search result; all excluded sentences in which all the terms searched for did not occur; and all except two sequenced the sentences in the order found. Some, such as “Time Lapse Action,” “Sorry” and “The Imaginaries,” contain tonal shifts enabled by an abrupt change of the search protocol during their composition. In all cases, any re-composition of the pieces was done only by revising the initial search protocol and generating a new text to replace a previous one.
Because the content of the Internet, and the search-engine priorities assigned to that content, change continuously, these texts are unique and unrepeatable. The same search protocols used in a later month or year could produce quite different results from those assembled here—or distressingly similar ones.
These texts are part of Davey’s ongoing work on the use of the sentence as the basic structural unit of poetry—to create poetic texts, as they have always been created, out of the materials of prose. They also constitute another of his forays into cultural commentary—in this case, disclosing how our engagement with globalized culture creates meaning as it “speaks through itself.”
-
Bare Bear Bones
$17.95At the instruction of their marriage counsellor, empty nesters Norm and Ruth book a trip to a place where they remember being in love, the Bear Bones Family Campground, in order to rekindle their spark. After arriving late in the night, the conservative couple wakes to discover that their once familiar spot has become the Bare Bones Alternative Lifestyle Campground, and that nobody else is wearing any clothes!
Besides figuring out which side of the clothesline they’re on, Norm and Ruth have to work on their communication, whether it’s blindly directing one another to the washroom or re-establishing their goals in life. With the help of guests and staff, the couple starts to open their eyes and find their way back to their happy place.
-
Barefoot Helen and the Giants
$12.95Helen is a fine hand with a slingshot, and more than at home in the woods. After all, she was raised by bears. When she stumbles upon three evil giants, she hatches the perfect plan to rid the land of them. Well, almost perfect…
Bulleybummus, the fiercest giant, catches her and insists she help kidnap the princess Antoinette. Instead, Helen manages to save the sleeping princess and finish off the giant before heading quietly back home. No one knows who the giant killer is, but Antoinette is determined to find out and comes up with a plan of her own.
-
Barfly
$19.95A CBC Books’ Poetry Collection to Watch for in Spring 2024 • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title
We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.
In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
-
Barker
$19.00Barker
-
Barkerville Days
$26.00Fred Ludditt is known to have done more than any other single person to save Barkerville for posterity—otherwise the fast-decaying town would have been stripped bare by souvenir hunters, and the nearby settlements of Van Winkle and Antler Creek, Marysville and Richfield would have been forgotten. Barkerville Days is the priceless product of interviews which can never be done again. Ludditt himself mined for gold in the Barkerville area in the 1930s—and there he met and spoke with old miners who worked the Cariboo gold fields in the previous century, as well as their descendants. This book, first published in 1969, is the nearest thing we have to a definitive history of one of the world’s most colourful gold rushes.
This reprint edition contains the original text and photos along with an Introduction by Fred Ludditt’s daughter, Karin Ludditt, who as a young child lived in Barkerville until her family was relocated when the town became a Provincial Heritage Site in 1958.
-
Barnabas Bigfoot: A Hairy Tangle
$10.95Barnabas Bigfoot: A Hairy Tangle
-
Barnabas Bigfoot: Bone Eater
$10.95Barnabas Bigfoot: Bone Eater
-
Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid
$26.00Discovering the richness of Canadian theatre over the past two centuries or so should be the product of cultural histories. In Canada, such detailed studies are still scattered in a bewildering array of scholarly articles and original texts. Why should students of Canadian theatre have to search through rare book rooms to find, read, and act their own drama? This anthology offers a modest answer. It is a collection of 25 representative playwrights and their work, divided over six historical periods from 1606 to 2001. A brief, cultural overview of the era, notes on each playwright, and suggestions for staging are followed by four or five scenes from each period.
-
Barrington Street Blues
$14.95Two men are found dead outside a bar. Helped by Father Brennan Burke and hindered by his femme fatale law partner, Monty Collins investigates people desperate to cover up a series of parties that got way out of hand.
A rich man and a poor man are found dead from gunshot wounds outside a seedy bar on Barrington Street in Halifax. The police declare it a murder-suicide, but bluesman/lawyer Monty Collins — hired to represent the victims’ families — suspects it’s a double murder.
The case gets complicated when the police link the gun to the suspicious death of a high-flying lawyer named Dice Campbell. Helped by his friend Father Brennan Burke, and hindered by his femme fatale law partner Felicia Morgan, Monty explores the dark side of Halifax society: hookers, drug addicts, boozers, gamblers, and people desperate to cover up a series of parties that got way out of hand.
Monty’s investigations lead him to a ruthless businessman with street connections, a preacher who’s been seen cruising for young people, and an oddball psychotherapist who may have overstepped the boundaries of therapy with more than one person in the case. As the story unfolds, Monty finds himself returning again and again to trade barbs with Dice Campbell’s hard-drinking widow, Mavis, whose motives are not as clear as they initially seem to be. But the murder isn’t the only thing on Monty’s mind.
A secret from the past and turmoil with his estranged wife Maura have Monty singing the blues, lashing out at his closest friends, and spending far too much time in the bars of Halifax.
About the Collins-Burke Mysteries
This multi-award-winning series is centred around two main characters who have been described as endearingly flawed: Monty Collins, a criminal defence lawyer who has seen and heard it all, and Father Brennan Burke, a worldly, hard-drinking Irish-born priest. The priest and the lawyer solve mysteries together, but sometimes find themselves at cross-purposes, with secrets they cannot share: secrets of the confessional, and matters covered by solicitor-client confidentiality. The books are notable for their wit and humour, and their depiction of the darker side of human nature ? characteristics that are sometimes combined in the same person, be it a lawyer, a witness on the stand, or an Irish ballad singer who doubles as a guerrilla fighter in the Troubles in war-torn Belfast. In addition to their memorable characters, the books have been credited with a strong sense of place and culture, meticulous research, crisp and authentic dialogue, and intriguing plots. The novels are set in Nova Scotia, Ireland, England, Italy, New York, and Germany. The series begins with Sign of the Cross (2006) and continues to the most recent installment, Postmark Berlin (2020).
-
Baseball Love
$19.95Having written books in practically every genre, George Bowering is often introduced as someone who adores baseball, yet ironically he did not begin this book about the game until he was appointed Canada’s first Poet Laureate for 2002–04. This picaresque memoir of a road trip with his fiancée through the storied ballparks of a poet’s youthful dreams is built on the bargain of fiction—that the narration of someone else’s life requires the listener or reader to fill in the blanks of what we know is out there, somewhere in the world, but which takes place at such a great distance of time and space from us that we can only imagine it to be real.
Beginning with the exquisite charm of listening in on Bowering as a youthful sports reporter in his home town of Oliver in 1948, “the greatest year in human history,” moving through the brash hubris of his career as a star player–reporter in the Kosmic League of the 1970s, to staring down the bittersweet foul line of the Twilight League of the twenty–first century, Baseball Love is a book about Bowering’‘s life in love and the game, played with a consummate craft and skill into the paradise of what we can only ever imagine to be real, and leavened at all times by the conscious and playfully ironic chatter of the infield.
Its provenance uncertain, the diamond in the ballpark—where no cars are allowed to drive, where time stands still unless there’s an out and where one adheres to the rules governing behaviour in the yard—is the quintessential North American vision of paradise: a walled garden in the midst of the dark satanic mills of blind industrial progress and the chaos of the everyday in the exploited wilderness that surrounds it.
-
Based on Actual Events
$17.95Taking its inspiration from the Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a desire for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness (“So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy”), Based on Actual Events adds up to be Moore’s best book yet.
-
BASH’d
$16.95When naïve small-town boy Dillon meets the sophisticated urban Jack in a gay bar, it’s love at first sight, and not just for a one-night stand either! While these star-crossed lovers manage to bring their initially dubious if not downright disowning families together in celebration of their marriage, their unblemished love certainly hasn’t changed the world—quite the contrary. When Jack becomes the victim of a gay-bashing, Dillon sets out on an indiscriminate rampage of revenge. Unfortunately, the straight men he takes on are neither particularly homophobic, nor are they exactly itching for a fight and the scene quickly turns ugly, teetering on the verge of a slaughter of the innocent until the police intervene. Realizing too late that two wrongs don’t make a right, the lovers, wrapped in each other’s arms, die in a hail of bullets.
Arriving in heaven, much to their contrite surprise, the creator fits the souls of these two Romeos with a set of wings and sends them on a mission of redemption. Condemned to wander the earth and tell their cautionary tale forever to whomever will listen, their angelic personae TBAG and FEMINEM have had no trouble enthralling wildly enthusiast audiences all over North America with the rap opera rhymes of this tragic tale ever since.
While the goal of BASH’d is first and foremost to tell an engaging gay love story, it also flips the music industry’s gangsta stereotype of rap music on its head and returns it to its political roots—in this case to explore the dangers of the kind of attitudes that continue to condone and even encourage sexual discrimination of all kinds in our society.
Not since Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a narrative poem inspired such empathy in the hearts and minds of its audience.
-
Basmati Brown
$16.95Written mainly during the poet’s travels through India, Basmati Brown represents a spiritual and social journey through Punjabi cultural roots while retaining a clear connection to a home in British Columbia. Phinder Dulai’s poems have the ability to seduce with liquid words, caressing the reader with Punjabi rhythm and speech pattern in harmony with English voice. Basmati Brown is beautifully illustrated with evocative black-and-white photographs from both India and Canada. Dulai is a poet to watch, receiving high praise from talented Canadian writers such as Michael Turner and George Bowering. With just his second book of poetry, Dulai is already carving a name for himself in the Canadian literary scene.
-
Bats or Swallows
$16.95Shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
The innocence and clarity of Teri Vlassopoulos’s narrative voice reveals new and unexpected layers. The characters in these stories look for signs and omens as they attempt to understand events in their lives by framing them in abstract superstitions. The stories in Bats and Swallows are sharp, accurate, told with balance and skill.
“Vlassopoulos has found a way to carry over the wide-eyed curiosity and innate goodness of childhood into the mysterious, often sad, often tragic world of adulthood.”—Montreal Review of Books