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Showing 8673–8688 of 9248 results
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Venera Dreams
$25.00Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. It is divided in three sections. The first, The Lure of Vermilion, describes the impact of Venera’s lure on various characters. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, ranges from the Roman Empire’s invasion of Venera and an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dalí’s ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade’s relationship to Venera. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.
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Venus of Dublin
$14.95In Venus of Dublin Marianne Ackerman has spun a spellbinding tale about an actor, a painter and their muse. The play was inspired by a famous portrait of the actor Edmund Kean that hangs in London?s Garrick Club. In it, Kean is depicted as a Huron prince, Alanienouidet, wearing a costume which the chiefs of a small community near Quebec City gave him when he visited in 1826. The chiefs, him on what became known as Kean?s lost weekend in the wilderness. Five years later, while on tour in Dublin, the once-great, untamable stage performer Edmund Kean hires a local renegade to paint his portrait. As Kean relives his encounters with the Huron of Quebec, the spirits of the wilderness inhabit him and unleash a mystical and surprising portrait of desire. What results is an entirely unexpected rendering of the artist. Venus of Dublin is a poignant tale about the personal cost and public inspiration of an artist?s quest for immortality. The play premiered at Montreal?s Centaur Theatre in April, 2000.
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Venus’ Daughter
$15.95Venus’ Daughter is inspired by the life of Sara “Saartjie” Baartman, who was known as “The Hottentot Venus”. Baartman was a Khoisan woman taken from South Africa to be displayed on London stages from 1810 to 1815, and was then posthumously displayed at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, France until 2002. The story follows Denise, a young Black woman guided by an ancestor to begin her journey into self-love. Exploring the intersection of myth, fable, and the reality of how women and their bodies are viewed, Venus’ Daughter peels back the layers of pop culture’s obsession with the Black female form and the silence around the infamous figure, making connections through the centuries.
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Verbal Violence
Verbal Violence unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class. Here the master’s house and tools are in flames, fire fanned from within, as their colosseum is turned quarry. Critically straining the email thread, the Freedom of Information Request, and the white paper through an aesthetics of anger that appropriates their last gasps at relevancy, Verbal Violence registers the absurdities of a purposeless people “just doing their job.” Hacking up neoliberal doublespeak, ideological reproduction, and progressive-except-Palestine rhetoric, La France spits it out time and time again, scheduling a meeting to verbalize the what and the who liberal democratic institutions systematically shut down. Verbal Violence confronts capitalism’s managerial style guide for saying nothing at all with the fiery and empathetic conscience of the managed, their cri de cœur cracking the straight-faced bureaucracy of our most banal communications.
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Vermeer’s Light
$19.95George Bowering has always maintained many of his poems are germinated in secret ways—secrets he has, until now, assiduously kept to himself. In suddenly giving most of those secrets away, Vermeer’s Light, much of it written while Bowering was “in office” as Canada’s first poet laureate, constitutes an extraordinary gesture of generosity from a poet to his readership who has so honoured him. Its alphabet series A, You’re Adorable, by “Ellen Field,” a pseudonym Bowering often used in the nineties; Imaginary Poems for AMB , addressed to his late wife Angela; He Is Not, a micro-translation of Shelley’s Adonais; Q&A, which dares to take on the most fundamental questions of the human condition with levelheaded honesty and wit—the list of revelations and the pyrotechnics of Bowering’s craft presented here are spellbinding.
But the greatest astonishment about this celebratory collection from a poet at the height of his powers is that it contains all eight variations of “Grandfather,” Bowering’s most anthologized poem to date, set into an essay, Rewriting My Grandfather, like eight jewels in a crown at the end of the book. It is here that the poet presents his readers with a voyage of discovery; that the buried treasure of his invisible but adamantine craft is to be found; and the gift of entrance into how George Bowering creates his work is revealed.
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Vermin
$18.00Vermin is a collection of diverse poems, matter-of-fact daydreams of body parts, money, family life, murder, children, and animals. Whimsical, unsettling, or creepy, depending on the reader’s mood, the poems are united by an urge to crawl out from the suffocating spells of late capitalism, and take a look around.
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Vern Thiessen: Two Plays
$19.95Apple
Andy is in trouble. Downsized from his job, his marriage in crisis, he meets a mysterious young woman who he looks to for salvation. But when his wife becomes seriously ill, Andy must make a choice: care for an estranged wife, or run away with a woman he knows little about. A haunting tale of sex, secrets, and second chances.
Winner of the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Outstanding New Play (2002) and winner of the Alberta Play Competition (2001).
“A belief in the power, or at least the grace, of silence is one of the pluses of Apple, a tightly knotted, carefully crafted play where the concept of love gets dissected and scrutinized like a renegade cell under a microscope…” —Edmonton Journal
Blowfish
“…we all have to eat… we all have to die….” What do food, funerals, the Edmonton tornado, and Mila Mulroney have in common? Join the elegant and debonair caterer Lumiere as he serves up a whole new eating experience.
“The dramatic fabric Thiessen has woven is a tight accumulation of emotional and narrative threads… a life picture that entertains… that frequently moves, that engages, that disturbs.” —The Ottawa Citizen
“Let’s just say that it’s black. It’s creepy. It’s deliciously morbid and delectably dark.” —Vue Weekly -
Vernacular Muse
$14.95The Vernacular Muse tackles head-on conservative Canadian critical theory and practice. Personal and provocative, Cooley’s lucid essays in The Vernacular Muse range from the vernacular in Prairie poetry, thepoetics of the line break, and the poetry of eye versus ear to substantial readings of texts by Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Laurence, Michael Ondaatje, Sinclair Ross and Robert Duncan. The first collection of critical essays from a central figure in the making and recognition of prairie writing.
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Vers de nouveaux sommets
$50.00Lawren S. Harris doit sa renommée à ses paysages emblématiques pénétrés d’un force tranquille résolument canadienne. Dans les années 1920, un monde intérieur audacieux et coloré commence à se manifester dans son œuvre, et en 1934, contre toute attente, il entreprend une carrière de peintre abstrait outre-frontière.
Le milieu social, intellectuel et esthétique du transcendantalisme américain sert de modèle à un mouvement d’art abstrait en Amérique du Nord. Inspirés par les idées de Kandinsky et les écrits d’Emerson et Whitman, Harris et ses contemporains américains — Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Katherine Dreier et Raymond Jonson — se tournent vers l’abstraction pour exprimer des états de conscience plus élevés.
Aspirant à s’élever au-dessus des choses terrestres, Harris délaisse le paysage au profit du spirituel et de l’intériorité. Ce magnifique ouvrage reproduit plus de 75 peintures réalisées par Harris et ses contemporains. Les essais de Roald Nasgaard et Gwendolyn Owens analysent l’exploration de la modernité chez Lawren Harris et l’évolution de son œuvre vers une abstraction qui se nourrit du dynamisme de la culture visuelle ambiante.
Vers de nouveaux sommets : Lawren Harris et ses contemporains américains accompagne une exposition organisée par la Collection McMichael d’art canadien qui prendra l’affiche en février 2017. L’exposition sera présentée également au Musée Glenbow, à Calgary, dans le cadre d’une tournée canadienne.
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Very Good Butter
$14.95Dark, bizarre: new stories, new beginnings. In Very Good Butter, John Lavery’s debut story collection, characters are like electrons. As they spin they attempt to overcome their potential differences, they move in and out of each other’s orbits, emitting, as they do, a few photons of light. Their efforts, however, are constantly altered, and even undermined, by the unpredictable influence of the outside world’s chemical activity. Touching, terrifying, and funny, Lavery’s stories are about people trying to understand their place in the world.
Like those who believe we dream backwards, that the mind reconstructs a dream from the moment of waking, the stories in Very Good Butter lead toward possible beginnings. They are attempts, in the deepest sense, to keep the reader reading, dreaming wakefully — attempts to construct a destiny that is appropriate to the essential mystery behind the first encounter of the principals. For Lavery, it doesn’t matter whether stories span minutes or years: everything is enclosed within a first, germinal instant.
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Very Small Something, A
$18.95Olive Bezzlebee lives by the sea in a fantastic town with the world’s biggest bubblegum factory, where its citizens blow bubbles all day. But Olivia can’t blow a single one and feels as if everyone looks down on her. Leaving Covington to find a place where she might belong, she learns the true meaning of both family and home.
A Very Small Something, beautifully illustrated by Alexander Griggs-Burr, is a story to which all children – and any tuned-in parent – will be able to relate. Blowing bubbles may indeed be a very small something . . . but when you are a small child and it’s the thing you most want to do, a bubble can mean the whole world.
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Vessel
$23.95An evocative, lyric bricolage of memoir, literature, history, and translation that wrestles with the shape death takes.
Who would think to call Ophelia a corpse? She is but a woman emptied of herself.
In 1993, when she was 18 years old, Dani Netherclift witnessed the drowning deaths of her father and brother in an irrigation channel in North-East Victoria, Australia. Or, she saw her father and brother disappear beneath an opaque surface and never saw her loved ones again. Netherclift hasn’t stopped imagining the shape of this bodily loss. Not viewing the bodies grows into a form of ambiguous loss that makes the world dangerous, making people seem liable to suddenly vanishing.
What would it have been like to have seen them, after the fact? To have looked upon their bodies. To picture the emptied vessels of her father and brother is to reach toward a sense of closure; a form of magical thinking in which goodbye is made possible. Vessel pulls together a language of space and ruin, building toward the realization that all bodies become in the end bodies of text, beautifully written palimpsests—elegies—inked on the skins of the dead.
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Vetala, The
$18.95Nada Marjanovic, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has spent more than twenty years translating an obscure text on the vetala, a parasitic, vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she finds herself face-to-face with the undead that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her lover ? and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge. She must rely on her intellect, mythic lore, and even dreams to piece together the mystery of the manuscript. The vetala’s opposition grows increasingly violent as Nada nears the book’s conclusion, and with the help of two colleagues, struggles to decipher its climactic secret, which would allow her to exorcise the demon at last ? freeing not only the mysterious man whom he has possessed for centuries, but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love.
Suspenseful and unforgettable, Phillip Ernest’s debut novel captures the most universal elements of human experience ? even the monsters we face. -
Vetiver
$14.95Joël Des Rosiers is an acclaimed Haitian-born francophone writer whose work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and whose life reads like a novel — he is a psychiatrist, an award-winning poet and a political activist on the international stage. His poetry collection Vetiver, which won the 1999 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the 2000 Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois Rivières, is now published for the first time in English.
Vetiver, a grass also known as cuscus, was brought from the Indies to Haiti. There it has taken root and flourished, becoming all-pervasive. The heavy aroma of the grass permeates everything. In Vetiver, the grass is a powerful, mythical symbol for Joël Des Rosiers, representing the root of lyrical possibility.
An homage to his native land, Des Rosiers’ narrative poem evokes all of the wild opulence of the Caribbean world and plumbs the depths of memory in language that is rich and multihued, full of tangible flavours. It is a hymn to the power of the word, the book and the voice, guided by the heritage of ancestors and the sensual proximity of people and things.Des Rosiers revisits themes from his three previous collections here: nostalgia, the search for roots and identity, the pain of memory, and the exploration of real and imagined spaces. Rooted in mystery and sacrifice, these narrative poems are shaped by extreme tensions that blend, in a strange way, with a seemingly clinical erudition where the melancholy of the flesh offers itself up as a substitution for mourning, religious ceremony and sensuality.
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Via Roma
$20.00In Via Roma, Mary Melfi’s protagonist Sophie Wolfe experiences passionate, singular love, horrific loss, a journey to the Otherworld to meet one last time her departed lover, and finally happiness with the man who has stood by her. Intensely erotic, outspoken, earthy, without being clinically pornographic or gushy, the novel is a metaphysical exploration of love, suspense, suffering and redemption.
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Viaticum
$19.95When Annika Torrey is diagnosed with cancer, she has no one in her life she can turn to. Divorced and estranged from her fundamentalist family, she sells her life insurance policy for cash, hoping to live out her final days in peace. But then Annika is given a rare second chance. Meanwhile, struggling real-estate agent Matt Campbell is drowning in debt. Desperate to save his career and marriage, he lets an old friend invest his money, but the big payout he’s promised never materializes. Suspecting fraud, his search for answers leads him to the mysterious Annika, and soon both characters are trapped in a web of deception and desire, their hopes for redemption threatened by the contract that binds them. Viaticum is a taut psychological drama about two people fighting to maintain their dignity in a world that objectifies them. Thematically rich and morally-fraught, this intelligent and finely-crafted novel is timely and relevant.