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All Books in this Collection
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Wanted
$17.95It is 1897, and word of gold on the Klondike has spurred a frantic rush of miners to cash in on the riches rumoured to be found there. But by the time the prospectors arrive, all the claims have been staked. Without enough supplies or expertise to endure the harsh conditions of the north, hundreds of lives are devastated by starvation, exhaustion, and disease. Desperation sets in over the landscape and ushers in a harsh social climate of chaos, opportunism, and competition, with people willing to do literally anything to either survive or find a way out.
Very few women joined the scramble, and those who did usually found themselves in high demand as cooks, washers, and objects of entertainment. Little romance filled the air, and those women independent and strong-willed enough to break free of their traditional social constraints acquired great power over the men who attempted to buy and trade them like the most valuable of commodities, “worth their weight in gold.”
In its celebration of one woman’s determination to triumph over all who seek to possess her, Wanted is far more than a period-piece history play. Resonant with echoes of the contemporary global village in which every one and every thing, including body parts and functions, have their cynically and openly advertised price, it is a portrait of raw desire, greed, and lust for acquisition stripped of every veneer of civilization and reduced to a confrontation of the will to power in a world utterly indifferent to what is either fair or just.
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Wanted: Re-imagining the Enslaved
$9.95In this captivating collection of photographs, Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai draw attention to 18th-century fugitive slave ads from Canada’s colonial archives. Juxtaposing reproductions of actual advertisements with contemporary photographs that reinterpret the details of the clothing worn by the freedom seekers as high-fashion, Turner and Pirbhai provoke a conversation about Canada’s often unacknowledged role in the transatlantic slave trade.
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Wanting Everything
$29.95Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occasional writing. Spanning over five decades, this diverse work challenges the conception of what constitutes a prolific literary career, extending the notion of writerly activity to include work that is social, collaborative, and dialogic. Hindmarch has made significant contributions to innovative feminist writing, covering topics such as the embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, working-class women’s labour, and the intimacies of domesticity, all while sustaining an engagement with local places and social economies.
Hindmarch’s work embodies the notion of proprioception that was so central to the poetics of the TISH group and other experimental writing in the West Coast tradition. However, in Hindmarch, “sensibility within the organism” is revisited as a feminist stance that connects the experience of the body – moving through space, breathing, labouring, connecting with others – with a keen observational reading of situations, the self, and others. Wanting Everything recognizes Hindmarch’s significant contribution to Canada’s literary and cultural fields, making her work accessible to new readers and literary scholars, and framing it within the history of avant-garde writing, feminist production, and labour issues. Edited by Karis Shearer and Deanna Fong, this remarkable volume concludes with a brand-new, in-depth interview with the author.
Wanting Everything continues Talonbooks’ affordable and carefully curated Selected Writing series.
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Wanting the Day
$19.95Since the late 1980s, Bartlett has become one of Canada’s leading poets, and the time is ripe for volume of his best work. For Wanting the Day: Selected Poems, he has chosen the most dramatic poems from six earlier volumes. From the beginning of his career, Brian Bartlett’s poetry has been refined and sensual, far-reaching and grounded.
In this new collection, Bartlett’s vision is distilled, and new combinations throw the insights of three decades into high relief. With a passion for the physical rooted in the spiritual, his poems combine seemingly discordant ideas and facts with emotion in a minimum of narrative space. Whether writing about a jazz drummer or a foot-doctor, a run-down hotel or an Adirondack mountain, his gift for language and insight brings into the reader’s consciousness visions never before seen, thoughts and feelings never before recognized.
Favourites in the collection include “Cousin Gifts,” a small-scale, large-spirited Christmas poem; the sequence “Underwater Carpentry,” winner of a Malahat Review Long Poem prize; and “Foot-doctor for the Homeless,” winner of the Petra Kenney Award competition. Wanting the Day has been published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets Society.
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War
$13.95Shane, Tommy, Brad, and Andy are disconnected from themselves, and everyone around them because they’ve been taught, as part of “being a man,” to be aggressive and invulnerable. Language is used to reduce, disparage, and control others. In this play, Dennis Foon invents a slang for the characters to speak, to point at the way we use words as weapons.
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War among the Clouds
$24.95The Great War of 1914–18 was the first conflict in which aircraft played a significant role. It was dangerous and sometimes exciting, and it created and accelerated rapid technological change in the field of aeronautical engineering. The men who served as pilots, observers, gunners, and mechanics signed up for an unknown endeavour and opened up a new chapter in warfare.
War among the Clouds examines the experience of the more than 250 New Brunswickers who served in the British air services during the First World War. While most who saw active service at the front fought in France and Belgium, many served in Italy, Egypt, Macedonia, and Russia. Still others remained behind in Britain or Canada, training new recruits.
Drawing on diaries and letters of airmen, newspaper reports, and archival images and documents, J. Brent Wilson tells the story of a group of men who were forerunners in their field and laid the foundation for the RCAF.
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War Being Waged, The
$15.95The War Being Waged is a poetic and unflinchingly truthful examination of what happens when patriotism and sovereignty collide. An Indigenous mother becomes an activist while her brother becomes a soldier. An grandmother speaks to her granddaughter from prison. A granddaughter, filled with turmoil, struggles to accept her family’s history. Three generations of Indigenous women try to connect the pieces of their lives after experiencing all the ways Canada has torn them apart. A mix of three performance genres–monologue, poetry with video and movement, and contemporary dance–are woven together in this stunning work by Winnipeg theatre artist Darla Contois.
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War Cantata / Child Object
$18.95War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to expose war’s spiral toward hatred.
In 2012, SACD (Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques), in partnership with France Culture, awarded War Cantata the Prix SADC for best world play written in French, and CEAD (Centre des auteurs dramatiques) awarded it the Prix Michel-Tremblay for the best play written in Quebec in 2012.
Cast of 2 men and a chorus.
Child Object translated by Chantal Bilodeau With child as a blank page, a man sets about constructing his ideal companion manipulating personality, gender, and body. The child becomes the ultimate consumer good.
Cast of 1 woman and 2 men.
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War on the Home Front
$16.95Daniel MacMillan never saw the battlefields of Passchendaele or Vimy Ridge. A farmer in the tiny New Brunswick community of Williamsburg, he experienced the Great War entirely from the “home front.” War on the Home Front: The Farm Diaries of Daniel MacMillan, 1914-1927 is a portrait of the other side of war from the perspective of a man who, like countless families across North America, had no choice but keep on going with his life as sons, nephews, brothers and fathers fought and died on battlefields worlds away.
As MacMillan’s moving wartime diaries reveal, these years took a terrible toll on him, his family, his farm, and his community. A fascinating chronicle of wartime life, Daniel MacMillan expressed the fear, anxiety and uncertainty as well as the sense of duty and fortitude that characterized the war experience on an individual level, making the tragic four-year event much clearer in diary form than in second-hand reports.
His insider’s account of supplying money, men, equipment, and especially food for the country and the troops documents the often unnoticed sacrifices of rural people in wartime and their post-war struggles to recover. The diary is also a testament to the loyalty of the people of Stanley parish, who mobilized the churches, women’s groups and other institutions to provide aid to the troops overseas, the Red Cross and other war-related issues. A unique historical document, War on the Home Front encompasses entries written between 1914 and 1927 in which MacMillan describes the hardships of running a farm in the face of acute labour shortages and the anguish of losing friends and neighbours in battle.
War on the Home Front is Volume 7 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
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Warrior Life
$25.00In a moment where unlawful pipelines are built on Indigenous territories, the RCMP make illegal arrests of land defenders on unceded lands, and anti-Indigenous racism permeates on social media; the government lie that is reconciliation is exposed. Renowned lawyer, author, speaker and activist, Pamela Palmater returns to wade through media headlines and government propaganda and get to heart of key issues lost in the noise.
Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence is the second collection of writings by Palmater. In keeping with her previous works, numerous op-eds, media commentaries, YouTube channel videos and podcasts, Palmater’s work is fiercely anti-colonial, anti-racist, and more crucial than ever before.
Palmater addresses a range of Indigenous issues — empty political promises, ongoing racism, sexualized genocide, government lawlessness, and the lie that is reconciliation — and makes the complex political and legal implications accessible to the public.
From one of the most important, inspiring and fearless voices in Indigenous rights, decolonization, Canadian politics, social justice, earth justice and beyond, Warrior Life is an unflinching critique of the colonial project that is Canada and a rallying cry for Indigenous peoples and allies alike to forge a path toward a decolonial future through resistance and resurgence.
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Warriors
$16.95Warriors enters the world of advertising where, even if the product is war, the product can be sold. Two ad men lock themselves in a room to work on a new slogan for The Canadian Armed Forces — the tension of creation is brilliantly and dangerously portrayed as they consider the morality of the war machine.
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Was It Good for You?
$24.95Was it good for you? It was really good for Aislin!Montreal’s infrastructure is crumbling at a faster rate than any city in North America – and there lurks Aislin amongst the thousands of orange construction cones, sketchbook in hand.And bully Stephen Harper finally has his majority, an event that Aislin will be caricaturing keenly, even after over forty years of watching Canadian Prime Ministers come and go.And then there are those rare quiet days in Canada when Aislin has a world full of events beyond our borders to draw upon.WAS IT GOOD FOR YOU? Is a collection of Aislin’s favourites drawn over the last three years. It is his 45th book. He is aiming for fifty. For more biographical information on Aislin (née Terry Mosher), please visit: www.aislin.com
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Washika
$24.95It’s the 1960s and 21 testosterone-drenched high school graduates are bussed into Washika Bay, a company logging camp where they will work for the summer. Idealistic, confident, and sometimes troubled, the young men meet their matches in tough older bush workers and cope with a devastating forest fire, sand flies, and leeches. Henri Morin is particularly sensitive and, though a hard worker, appears to harbor dark thoughts, and another young man’s moving love story is carefully told. In no other place could the transition from adolescence to adulthood be the same. Through its characters and their experiences, this book has revived an era and inspired new life into a wild and beautiful place.
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Washing Off The Raccoon Eyes
$18.00What happens when we believe in something that isn’t there? What happens when we doubt our own history? We cling to the solidity of physical space. Our abstracted sense of being swells to its limits, presses against its boundary of skin, bumps up against the world. Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes explores the idea that we as humans are undefined, chaotic, that we come to know ourselves through the spaces we inhabit and the people we encounter.
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Washington’s Long War on Syria
$24.95When President Barack Obama demanded formally in the summer of 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down, it was not the first time Washington had sought regime change in Damascus. The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country’s fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement—of which Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were committed devotees—came to power in 1963. Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly because it was a threat to its agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations throughout the world. Arab nationalists aspired to unify the world’s 400 million Arabs into a single super-state capable of challenging United States hegemony in West Asia and North Africa and becoming a major player on the world stage free from the domination of the former colonial powers and the US. Washington had waged long wars on the leaders of the Arab nationalist movement—Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Syria’s Assads, often allying with particularly violent forms of political Islam to undermine its Arab nationalist foes. By 2011, only one pan-Arabist state remained in the region—Syria. In Washington’s Long War on Syria Stephen Gowans examines the decades-long struggle between secular Arab nationalism, political Islam, and United States imperialism for control of Syria, the self-proclaimed Den of Arabism, and last secular pan-Arabist state in the region. -
Wasp
$18.95In a town ruled by a shadowy cult, outliers Wasp and Janey nurture a dwindling community of queer resistance. Faced with social isolation and medical barriers, they remain determined to make things work and defend their home. Meanwhile, the Prophet’s daughters grapple with their own sense of home. True-believer Caroline anticipates a lavish future in the cult, but Rachel pushes back at its narrow-minded structures. When birth control is banned and Wasp’s ex-boyfriend Isaac turns up with a suspiciously generous offer, all of their lives are thrown into disarray. Suddenly the clock is ticking, and the cult is closing in. Who can they trust? And who’s in on the game? An electrifying exploration of body autonomy and reproductive rights, Wasp will leave you ready to fight.