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Showing 8769–8784 of 9481 results
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Typographical Eras
$4.95A poet and publisher presents found poetry preserved from bygone days of manual page layout.
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Tyson’s Song
$18.95Best friends Bryan and Tyson are out for a bachelor-night bender in Toronto before Bryan leaves for Vancouver in the morning. But when they miss the late-night bus with a six-pack traveller in tow, everything the two men have bottled up about their friendship starts pouring out—like Bryan’s struggles as a husband and father or Tyson’s volatile outbursts since he got out of prison. As their moonlit vigil unfolds and an ominous police cruiser circles nearby, the ramifications of Bryan’s departure become heartbreakingly clear. Can they save their relationship—and maybe even their lives—before the next bus arrives?
Peter N. Bailey’s powerful debut illuminates the complex dynamics of Black masculinity and brotherhood in a world that too often denies Black men love, compassion, and care. A catalyst for vital conversations about men’s mental health, Tyson’s Song is a tender portrait of two souls in limbo and a rallying cry for a new kind of conversation—one born of trust and the courage to lay bare our humanity.
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U ALIVE
$19.95Fierce, clear-eyed poems that confront head on the struggle to have faith in some kind of future in our complex, ecologically challenged world.
U ALIVE, Chelsea Coupal’s second poetry collection, documents the cusp between young adulthood and new motherhood, between being responsible for no one but yourself — and having the responsibility of a newborn generation in your arms. And with parenthood comes a sharp new awareness of mortality and its ubiquitous threat.
The collection tracks the past through its many collisions with the present, as the speaker moves between her new existence as a mother and the tumult of her life as a single person in her 20s. The poems deal with being pregnant in the pandemic, and giving birth — while being unable to dismiss or forget the wild parties and romantic misadventures that came before settling into a life in the city with a partner. The collection is structured around innovative “calendar” poems taking us through a full year, in which the author explores intersections and transitions between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, between the death of grandparents and the birth of the great grandchild they will not meet. Many poems are based on a deep connection with the life and land in rural Saskatchewan, the beauty of the brilliant yellow canola fields contrasting harshly with the sometimes toxic and disheartening realities of agribusiness.
These poems are honest, visceral, sensual, and alight with startling rhythmic cadences. The collection will appeal to millennial readers, especially women, new mothers, and women in Western Canada, as well as readers who know the Prairies well, or who grew up or live rurally, as well as younger fans of Canadian poetry.
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U Girl
$19.95Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain’s second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square.
Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. “You’ve got to find the great love,” her new friend Dagmar tells her. But what makes it love instead of sex? And what kind of love bonds friends? She gleans surprising answers from Jack, a construction worker, Dwight, a mechanic and dope peddler, Carla, a bar waitress who’s seen better days, and her English professor and sailing friend, Nigel. U Girl blurs the line between fiction and reality as Frances begins to write a novel about the people she comes to know. With seamless metafictional play and an engagement with place that has come to be Quartermain’s definitive style, U Girl tells the story of a woman’s struggle to be taken seriously – to be equal to men despite her sexual attraction to them, and to dislodge accepted narratives of gender and class in the institution of the university during the “free love” era. In this sprawling and perceptive novel, Quartermain takes us through sexual experimentation, drugs, jobs, meditating on Wreck Beach, sailing up through Desolation Sound, and studying at the University of British Columbia.
U Girl is a story that pays homage to local haunts and literary influences in equal measure. Quartermain brings to Canadian literature a wholesome and vital female perspective in this long-awaited bildungsroman.
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Ubu Mayor
$20.00From playwright Adam Seelig, founder and director of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto, comes a new play of timely absurdity: Ubu Mayor: A Harmful Bit of Fun. This anti-musical is the result of intoxicatingly driving Alfred Jarry’s 1896 merde-filled masterpiece Ubu Roi head-first into the internationally renowned antics, absurdities and obscenities of Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug. Ubu Mayor tells the frolicsome tale of a mayor (Ubu) whose wife (Huhu) is having an affair with his older brother (Dudu). Ubu wants Huhu to love him again; Ubu wants what’s best for the city; but both his love and political ideals are foiled by brother Dudu’s machinations. Readers will enjoy the Fordish banter, presented in Seelig’s iconoclastic dramatic style, and enjoy dipping into the music for such ridiculously poignant tunes as “B-b-b-bacon,” “Etobicokaine,” and “Plenty to Eat at Home.” As Toronto stands at the brink of Ford More Years, everyone will want to read this harmful bit of fun just before the highly anticipated municipal elections. After all, because of everything Toronto has been through, if we don’t laugh we might just cry.
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UFC’s Ultimate Warriors
$19.95Everyone fights for something. These guys fight best.
UFC’s Ultimate Warriors profiles some of the world’s most phenomenal athletes in a sport that combines finesse and sportsmanship — and brutality and violence like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Jeremy Wall’s book details the struggles of the ten greatest fighters in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history to become mixed martial arts’ (MMA) “baddest dudes.” Far from being an official list, this book is designed instead to generate debate among MMA fans about who the greatest fighter is, by exploring the lives, careers, fights, and accomplishments of UFC’s most prominent athletes.
Just how influential was Royce Gracie’s jiu jitsu to the world of martial arts? How popular is Ken Shamrock really? Who else can compare to Randy Couture’s accomplishments in the UFC? How did Frank Shamrock influence the way athletes compete in MMA? These are kinds of questions explored in this book.
With each featured biography, a career is broken down and analyzed with a fine-toothed comb. This book is an exploration and celebration of mixed martial arts as both a sport and a business, defining what makes its greatest contributors — the legendary fighters — so great.
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Ugh! As If!
$19.95“Litt’s lively, original Ugh! As If! uses the brilliant teen movie Clueless as a lens to examine the broader cultural landscape with playfulness and depth.” — Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Cue the Sun!
We are majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with Clueless. In Ugh! As If!, Veronica Litt argues that this seemingly fluffy teen romp is the quintessential thinking woman’s movie, one in which audiences are asked to seriously consider the beauty and power of femininity and naïveté. Cher Horowitz, our wealthy, gorgeous, and frequently hapless protagonist, embodies the kind of privilege that no one expects to find endearing. Yet her gradual pivot from oblivious it girl to burgeoning activist is a powerful reminder that even the most unlikely people can change for the better and contribute to their communities. In this bright, shiny film, pursuing a more just society isn’t just possible — it’s enjoyable.
This fun, unabashedly girly movie is a counter-narrative to ’90s-era nihilism, a sunny refusal to give in to cynicism, hopelessness, and passivity. Almost without viewers noticing, Clueless teaches Cher, and us, how to become better. Like the film it examines, Ugh! As If! nudges even the most jaded viewer into feeling hopeful about the future.
About the Pop Classics Series
Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.
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Ugly Man
$12.95A hideously disfigured stranger, hired as a field hand on an isolated ranch filled with beautiful people who have disturbing scars of their own, brings their morbid depravity to the surface. An unforgettable play about the true evil that exists inside all people.
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Ukrainian Daughter’s Dance
$18.95The rich and varied poems in Ukrainian Daughter’s Dance speak to the heart as they document a woman’s life journey, as a Ukrainian-Canadian, and as a prairie woman, and her voyage of self-discovery. Her story can be anyone’s story. Poems explore issues of immigrant identity and voice in the prairies, and celebrate a cultural heritage expressed through song, dance, art, work and life.
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Ukrainian Portraits
$20.00At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Canadian author Marina Sonkina flew to the Ukrainian-Polish border to volunteer in a refugee camp using her knowledge of Russian and some Ukrainian. The suffering on a massive scale was beyond what she could possibly expect.
“Putin’s destruction of Ukraine left me with dismay and utter helplessness. The world order as we knew it, after WWII, was unraveling in Europe in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing about it. Evil always shouts loud; goodness is quiet. But when I came as a volunteer to a transition refugees centre at the Polish-Ukrainian border, I saw an outpour of good will on an unprecedented scale. This book is a celebration of magnanimity that lives in the heart of each of us and comes forth when called upon. It is also a homage to the millions of destitute Ukrainian women, faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and the lives of their children with patient courage, moral grace, and faith in the ultimate victory of goodness over evil.”
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Ukrainian Scorpions
$28.95Award-winning author Grand Chief Ron Derrickson tells the story of his personal fight against Ukrainian political and economic forces alongside the larger story of the wider struggle for Ukraine to end the corruption that has plagued the country since the 1990s
Ron Derrickson watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the country where he had spent much of the past 20 years, with a kind of anguish, knowing the country had been systematically shut out of the EU and left on its own. While doing business there, he had entered the rabbit hole of Ukrainian political and economic life, a land where gangsters controlled not only the heights of the economy but also the police, the courts, and the national parliament. At stake was his $28 million company stolen by a cast of characters that included a former governor and members of the national parliament.
In the end, Derrickson spent a dozen years fighting for justice in the courts, in political and diplomatic spheres, and even with automatic weapon-toting mercenaries. Ukranian Scorpions tells not only the story of his personal battles but the much wider struggle of Ukraine to find its footing and shake off the gangsterism that has plagued it since the 1990s. In the end, Derrickson searches for signs that after the recent cataclysm, a new Ukraine might rise from the ashes.
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Ultra Libris
$34.95The definitive policy overview of the book publishing industry in Canada
In a thorough exploration of Canada’s book industry, Ultra Libris provides a historical backdrop to understand modern events in book publishing. From the Massey Commission (1952) and the Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing (1971–72) to the explosion of national book publishing in the 1970s and the industry-government sparring over the next 30 years, Lorimer elucidates the necessary conditions for Canadian authors to thrive and for book publishers to contribute to Canadian culture.
While industry and government policy both focused on national survival in the face of globalization in the period from 1970 t ’90, Ultra Libris documents how, beginning in the mid-’90s, Ontario established an emphasis on financial stability for the cultural sector accompanied by stimulants to encourage vigorous participation in domestic and international markets. Coincident with that came an embrace of technology as both a business catalyst and transformative medium for creative expression, which held the potential to change the nature of book publishing and human understanding. In these contexts — technology and a growing creative economy — Ultra Libris concludes with a discourse on the future of books and book publishing in Canada and the world.
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Ultramarine
$23.95The poems in Ultramarine explore our relationship with the passage of time, both as individuals and as a species. Whether he’s examining the lost world of childhood through the long lens of memory, piecing together random fragments in the broken mosaics of his ‘tesserae’ poems, or wrestling to put the exile, isolation and vulnerability of the global pandemic into a more-than-human-world perspective, Thurston tracks “Light and occult, / the two realms we navigate,” trusting that the persistence of these “frail human signs” might still signal hope and possibility.
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Umbilical Cord
$20.00Dear Child
Once upon a time
Your baba fell in love with your dad
We got married and dreamt of having a baby
A roller coaster of emotions and feelings
We were always hopefulLambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winner Hasan Namir shares a joyful collection about parenting, fatherhood and hope. These warm free-verse poems document the journey that he and his husband took to have a child. Between love letters to their young son, Namir shares insight into his love story with his husband, the complexities of the IVF surrogacy process and the first year as a family of three. Umbilical Cord is a heartfelt book for parents or would-be parents, with a universal message of hope.
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Umbrella Mender, The
$22.00“In her haunting debut novel, The Umbrella Mender, Christine Fischer Guy transports us to 1950s Moose Factory, where the beleaguered staff of the local hospital are fighting to stem the tide of tuberculosis among the indigenous peoples of the North. At the heart of the novel is Hazel MacPherson, a promising young nurse who finds herself increasingly drawn to the surrounding wilderness, made manifest in the person of a troubled drifter named Gideon White.
Like her heroine, Fischer Guy is equally at home within the walls of the hospital and without. In language rich with sensual detail, she brings Hazel’s dualized experience into sharp focus, evoking the ghostly beauty of an X-ray one moment, the living presence of the Moose River the next.
The Umbrella Mender is a gorgeous book ? a moving meditation on human frailty, a sensitive portrait of conflicting cultures brought together in an uneasy truce, and a heartbreaking tale of unsanctioned love.”
? Alissa York, author of
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Un
$16.95The poems in Un interrogate the subjectivity of a western revolutionary socialist’s early-twenty-first-century masculinity against a backdrop of revolutionary legacies of moderate gains and terrible defeats. Thematically, the poems draw from the U.S. War on Terror and the disappearances of people extrajudicially apprehended from the Middle East and North Africa as a lament for the failure of the promises of socialism to deliver formerly colonized people out of imperialism’s terrible grasp. Throughout the text the metaphors of absence, negation, and unbeing repeat – the negativity of a global class struggle now forty years in retreat. But because the philosophical method in Un is dialectical, negation does not mean hopelessness or final defeat. Instead, Un hints at new revolutionary possibilities, the emergence of old, tidal syntheses, through the combination of historical difficulty with the arrival of unknown days ahead.