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All Books in this Collection
Showing 8769–8784 of 9311 results
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Virtualis
$18.00Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees. Lush and extravagant, this is writing tuned in to the terrestrial spectacle.
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Vis à Vis
$14.95In Vis à Vis, Don McKay charts a vision of poetics that keeps its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon. As one of Canada’s leading poets, McKay has long been known for his passionate engagement with his natural surroundings. This book collects three essays on this relationship, together with new and previously published poems that further demonstrate these ideas. Using bushtits, baler twine, Heidegger and Levinas, McKay sets out to explore some of the almost unspeakable concepts driving the use of language particular to poets, and the arguably skewed relationship human beings have with their natural surroundings.
In a book the Globe & Mail calls “stylishly constructed” and “impeccably casual,” one of Canada’s best-loved writers offers his own sense of poetics.
Finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction.
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Vishnu Dreams
$24.95Ven Begamudré’s latest work of fiction combines Hindu mythology with the story of a family. Through the veil of Vishnu’s unions with Lakshmi and his incarnation in the tale of Manu and the fish, the novel portrays a pair of siblings as they navigate 1960s North American culture under the weight of their emotionally abusive father and ambitious mother. By day Subhas and Durga master the logistics of junior highschool in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, while at night they watch the disintegration of their parents’ marriage.
Following the breakup, and in the wake of an unfortunate misunderstanding between the two siblings, Durga moves to Canada with their mother, while Subhas remains in the United States with their father. Now in her late teens and training as part of the Seaforth Highlanders reserve regiment in Vancouver, Durga struggles to find her way in a place she loves, while back in Pennsylvania, Subhas works a part-time job at a gas station during the oil crisis.
“About 1983 I made fictional sketches about a young woman named Jo who joined the army reserve as a clerk. Her best friends at a Vancouver high school included Meg, a vain debutante; Beth, a shy pianist with a terminal illness; and Amy, a hot-headed cowgirl from the interior of BC. They were sisters in spirit alone and none had the last name of March. Soon I forgot about these charactersmuch to the relief, no doubt, of Louisa May Alcott, whose novel Little Women had enchanted me during a visit to my home state in South India. Then, in the early 1990s, Carol Shields’ short story ‘Soup du Jour’ inspired me to write and publish a long story called “Indian Cookery,” which brought to life an army major named Durga Kumar Mackenzie. To avoid worrying about her upcoming tour of duty with UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia, Durga thinks about an affair that her married sister is having with an unmarried doctor. Finally, one day in the late 1990s, Durga tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Ven, I never had a sister. I had a brother. Here’s what happened in our teens, when we moved from Canada to the States during the Vietnam War. Are you listening or what?’”
This book is a smyth-sewn paperback. The text is typeset in Rialto and printed offset on laid-finish paper making (estimated) 160 pages trimmed to 4.5 × 7 inches, bound into a paper cover and enfolded in an offset-printed jacket.
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Visible World, The
$16.95In language that is direct as the noon-day sun Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco returns to the wilderness terrain of his Trillium nominated The Dark Time of Angels to ask difficult questions of an acutely examined life. The Visible World is a metaphysical journey through the landscape of a traitor heart with its primal urgencies and infinite capacity for wonder. It is Di Cicco’s great gift to be able to cut away the assumptions of the material world and show the fine grain of existence in all its contradictory splendour. Di Cicco, as Dennis Lee has written,’has blazed one of the moving, exemplary paths in contemporary poetry.’ The Visible World will show once again whyhe must be considered one of today’s essential poets.
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Visiting Fellow
$19.00Poor Wally. It’s the mid-1990s, and middle-aged history professor Wally Baxter is recently divorced and looking for love. No easy task in this age of hyper-political correctness. Wally’s mind boggles at the complicated set of romantic rules that have sprung up in the last 20 years, but he manages to stumble his way into a budding romance with the young widow Carolyn.
Seeking respite from his ever-mutable ex-wife, Wally decides to take his brand new paramour on a short-term sabbatical to the University of Tasmania. Only time will tell if hapless Wally Baxter can get his life and love in order in the land down under.
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Vita
$14.95Angst, seduction, escape and extinction control these many tales–a whisper in the ear convinces a lady to take the plunge, another to take up surfing, and a young man to jump in front of a moving train–and there is joy in settling a score with despised neighbours and a conspiracy under the California sun. Some sketches are laced with passion and loss–a son comes to know his mother from a series of letters following her death, while a face transplant changes a man’s life, but with it comes the unwanted pursuit of the donor’s wife–while others show murderous aspirations and an irrepressible desire for release. Always vital, Vita opens wide the windows into our many lives.
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Vixen
$20.00Winner of the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Sandra Ridley’s latest book offers a breathtaking, harrowing immersion in cruelty behind different veils: the medieval hunt, ecological collapse, and intimate partner violence.
Sparked by a haunting chance encounter with a fox, and told in six chapters of varying form, Vixen is as visceral as it is mysterious, sensuous as it is terrifying.
“Thicket” introduces us to stalking being akin to hunting; the similar threat of terror and—too often—a violent end. “Twitchcraft” locates the hunt in the home, the wild in the domestic, while “Season of the Haunt” explores the unrelenting nature of hunting. “Stricken” asks common questions that often implicitly justify such violence: Is the harassment ‘bad enough’ to allow us to label it criminal? Has all control been taken? Is the fear reasonable?
Vixen propels us to examine the nature of empathy, what it means to be a compassionate witness, and what happens when brutality is so ever-present that we become numb. This is a beautiful, difficult, wild tapestry of defiance and survival.
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VMT
$19.99The bloody brainchild of William Simpson, VMT represents his unfiltered vision for a real vampire story. The man who knows that vampires sure don’t sparkle, kill their own lunch, and are rarely troubled by teenage angst, has created a new vampire comic series that spills the blood on vampires today. Someone is stringing up blood drained corpses across the city, in what appear to be ritual killings, leaving the cops searching for answers before too many more bodies build up. Meanwhile, Sun, a young woman recently added to the ranks of the blood sucking undead, feeds her hunger and rage on the men she feels deserve her wrath. Along with the police, more than one legendary vampire has their sites set on her too. What is the goal of figures from our legends the Marquis De Sade’s and weaver of tales,bScheherazade? A tale of blood, monsters, and those that walk amongst them seeking to help us all.
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Voice in the Wild
$24.95After plans to live in Africa shatter, young journalist Laurie Sarkadi moves to the Subarctic city of Yellowknife seeking wilderness and adventure. She covers the changing socio-political worlds of Dene and Inuit in the late ’80s, catching glimpses of their traditional, animal-dependent ways before settling into her own off-grid existence in the boreal forest. There, she experiences motherhood and its remarkable synchronicities with the lives of caribou, dragonflies and other creatures.
As a mother, and as a journalist, Sarkadi speaks up for abused women and children, creating controversies that entangle her in long, legal battles. When she looks to animals and the natural world for solace, she encounters magic. Lessons from the natural world arrive weekly, if not daily: black bears roam her dreams, as well as her deck, teaching introspection; wolves inspire her to persevere.
This evocative memoir explores a more than two-decade long physical and spiritual journey into the wild spaces of northern Canada, around the globe and deep within.
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Voice of Aliette Nouvelle, The
$16.95In his heyday, Jacques Normand was France’s Public Enemy Number One, a glamorous rogue who captured the imagination of the entire country. As he led the police on a merry chase, he also made the career of Commissaire Louis Moreau, former head of the Paris Anti-gangs unit…now the commander of a small Police Judiciare force in a sleepy border town.
After escaping from prison, Normand fled Paris and has been neither seen nor heard from for more than ten years. And because the Normand file has lain dormant since before she joined the force, Inspector Aliette Nouvelle has naturally assumed that everyone’s favourite outlaw is dead and the case closed. But one afternoon, Commissaire Moreau drops Normand’s file on her desk. The Commissaire is convinced that Normand is still very much alive and in the vicinity. Find him, he commands Aliette. Bring him in. Put him away for good.
Aliette Nouvelle is a new heroine for the 90s—smart, single and intuitive, but more interested in quietly and non-violently getting the job done than in receiving front-page coverage for her sometimes unorthodox methods of crime-solving. She knows she is regarded as a rising star in the force and believes that her years of hard work and her excellent record are about to bear fruit. She senses, rightly, that the soon-to-retire Commissaire has chosen to pass the torch on to her. And so, although she remains skeptical, Aliette accepts his challenge. She sets out to dig up a forgotten hero. Her only clues are those she finds in the outlaw’s out-of-print memoir, and in the gloomy face on a faded WANTED poster.
Thus the cat and mouse game begins, and what a chase it turns out to be!
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Voice-Over
$21.00After experiencing the disintegration of their parents’ marriage, Claudine and Janine Beaulieu’s lives are further complicated when their mother Odette remarries an Anglophone and they are forced to “turn English.”
Now, years later, Claudine has made a career out of documentary filmmaking, focusing on the painful lives of other women; Janine, a wife and mother, questions her feelings for her sister’s boyfriend; and Odette succumbs to her Valium and rum addiction in a luxury retirement villa in Jamaica. Shifting from Duplessis’s Montreal of the fifties to Toronto in the eighties, Voice-Over chronicles the lives of a mother and daughters struggling to find their voice in a bilingual country.
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Voiceless
$15.95Voiceless is a coming-of-age novel with a twist: it features a teen runaway who has no speaking voice.
Nicknamed Ghost, runaway teen Annabel’s interaction with her world is limited to how well she can convey her wants and feelings to others, and how intuitive the other characters are in interpreting her expressions and gestures.
Danger lurks in many places and she faces harrowing situations when she leaves her foster home with a tough and messed up boy and hitchhikes to the city.
Once there, the danger intensifies as she confronts a rounder who expects sex in return for shelter.
How she survives without her voice adds significant tension to the story.
What has driven Ghost to the road is love.
She misses her mother’s love, and felt her grandmother’s love was inadequate.
In her quest, she finds Mary who rescues her and other runaways, just as she rescues abused horses.
It is Mary who gives her a chance to rediscover the peace that can be found in nature and allows Ghost to discover her love of horses – but she seeks a more intimate love and mistakenly overlooks Tully who would protect her and respect her, in favour of Graydon who would do neither.
It is Graydon, damaged by an abusive past, who seeks the respect and approval of an older abusive rounder and in the process endangers Ghost both physically and emotionally.
Further conflict arises when another runaway begins to compete for Graydon’s attention and Ghost learns that life on the road is harsh, complicated and as confusing as the love she seeks.
As realization comes, so too does the understanding of why it is Tully she should be with and why Mary offers hope.
Learning to distinguish those who want to use her from those who offer genuine protection and care about her brings back Annabel’s clear voice permanently, and offers her a chance at a future. -
Voices From Kibuli Country
$20.95This collection results from the author’s experiences in Hamilton, Ontario, where he has a home, and his travels to several Caribbean islands and the United States as a person of multiple locations and origins: Canadian, African, and Ghanaian.
The Hamilton poems also look at the experiences of immigrants, their disrupted lives and loves, their broken dreams. The history of Africa Village in Hamilton Mountain, now known as Concession Street Housing finds its way into these poems. The Caribbean poems, based on visits to St. Croix, St. Martin/St. Maarten, and The Commonwealth of Dominica, as a West African person, questions the poet’s assumptions within the historical realities of these islands.
The poetry focuses on the present realities and how they are influenced by the past. The author’s visit to Athens, Ohio, enabled him to reflect on the Appalachian Mountains. Voices from Kibuli Country is profoundly inspired by the African experience both in the homeland and in the Americas, where many Ghanaians ended up.
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Voices in the Waterfall
$14.95Revised and re-released, this ethereal collection of poetry and prose is written in four distinct yet cohesive parts: Our Sacred Spaces, Invasion, Revolution and Return to Our Sacred Spaces. Through haunting and exquisite imagery, poet Beth Cuthand embarks on a lyrical journey heavy with both despair and tender hope. The words linger in your mind, while their essence permeates your soul and invites quiet contemplation. Voices in the Waterfall is an emotionally evocative work that resonates deeply and profoundly upon each reading and re-reading.
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Volta
$14.95A pink bathrobe turns into a kingfisher; a kitchen floor displays the stigmata of an oncoming storm; a Stone Age axe-head surfaces in France for someone from Newfoundland to stumble over; the covers of a book vibrate through broken intimacy. Here, friendship has the power to transform; love, to disembody. In a series of radical translations of the Earl of Surrey’s sixteenth-century sonnets, a garden of plastic delights uproots the pastoral scene; a gallant compliment on social pedigree translates as salacious appreciation for a chef’s handling of a ripe tomato. The poems of Volta turn place and time over on themselves, examining how we make what we call home, and what it is to be in relation: to people, to place, to history. A shape-shifting speaker rejects the idea of a singular self, and invites the reader to join a quest for that hypothetical meeting-place where community beckons but is never reached.
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Voluptuous Pleasure
$23.00Voluptuous Pleasure is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. Sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths-these stories take you into brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; they seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you’ve ever read-or even experienced. Put your trust in the language itself: you can’t trust reality, not anymore. If you’ve ever been confused about what “creative non-fiction’ is, look no further: this book defines the genre.