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Showing 8833–8848 of 9312 results
Walls
$19.95Winner, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Shortlisted, Dolman Travel Book Award
Longlisted, Alberta Readers’ Choice Award, BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-FictionIn this ambitious blend of travel and reportage, Marcello Di Cintio travels to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire and answer the question: What does it mean to live against the walls? Di Cintio shares tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco’s desert wall. He meets with illegal Punjabi migrants who have circumvented the fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He visits fenced-in villages in northeast India, walks Arizona’s migrant trails, and travels to Palestinian villages to witness the protests against Israel’s security barrier.
From Native American reservations on the US-Mexico border and the “Great Wall of Montreal” to Cyprus’s divided capital and the Peace Lines of Belfast, Di Cintio seeks to understand what these structures say about those who build them and how they influence the cultures that they surround. Some walls define “us” from “them” with medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate. Others kill. And every wall inspires its own subversion, whether by the infiltrators who dare to go over, under or around them, or by the artists who transform them.
Walls of a Mind
$18.95With fourteen towns and forty villages in her purview, Chief Inspector Aliette Nouvelle had been busy enough since taking over in February, fulfilling her new role quietly and efficiently, learning the lay of the land. The romance of wine country did not mean people were less nasty, brutal or just plain stupid than their fellow humans anywhere else. Yes, the beat was different: apart from gypsy house-breaking rings, there were no gangs. Gangs were in the city and stayed there. So no extorting and breaking knees. No people-smuggling; illegals came in through the ports and her patch stopped well short of the sea. No white collars siphoning, laundering or otherwise defrauding. Not yet. Make no mistake: wives were bashed, children were abused and abducted, houses were robbed and vandalized, garages torched. Drugs were being dealt. There had been two rapes. A Belgian wintering in his summer retreat had been seriously beaten by a neighbour when he complained a little too loudly about the man’s yapping dogs. An armed robbery in Causses had turned into a tense stand-off and negotiation at a cabin in the woods before two sad men surrendered. And these were all serious crimes requiring her expertise. But in almost half a year on the job, not one person had been murdered. Now someone had, and high-profile, to boot.
One does not wish for murders, but it is natural for a cop to yearn for a challenge befitting her skills. And of course, this was coupled with a need to prove herself to her new peers. Aliette was eager. And puzzled: The victim was a Joël Guatto, thirty-three, from a prominent wine-producing family. The media were playing up the political angle. The politics of wine. Six weeks before, Guatto had run in the regional elections representing CPNT (Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Tradition), also known as the Hunting & Fishing party. He hadn’t made it past the first round, garnering less than one percent of the vote. Yesterday he had been shot dead: one well-placed bullet through the head, according to the morning reports. Joël Guatto lived on the family domaine twenty minutes from Saint-Brin, well within Aliette Nouvelle’s allotted territory. But he was gunned down on the same stretch of beach where she herself had been enjoying some sunny oblivion a few hours earlier. The beach, twenty minutes from downtown, was city jurisdiction. And scene of the crime was the bottom-line criterion where it came to the choice of lead investigator. So why had they called her?
Walsh
$18.95A historical documentary of Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn. The play examines Sitting Bull’s relationship with superintendent Walsh of the North West Mounted Police and is the study of the disillusionment of a man who believes in his government’s integrity but who is betrayed by that government.“This is the law,” Walsh declares, “but where is the justice?” Premiered at Theatre Calgary. Subsequently performed at Stratford’s Third Stage.
Wanda’s War
$24.95Shortlisted, Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize (Non-Fiction)
What does it mean to be exiled? For the landmarks of your past to disappear?
In 1943, Wanda Gizmunt was ripped from her family home in Poland and deported to a forced labour camp in Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, she became one of millions of displaced Europeans awaiting resettlement.
Unwilling to return to then-Soviet-occupied Poland, Wanda became one of 100 young Polish women brought to Canada in 1947 to address a labour shortage at a Quebec textile mill. But rather than arriving to long-awaited freedom, the women found themselves captives to their Canadian employer. Their treatment eventually became a national controversy, prompting scrutiny of Canada’s utilitarian immigration policy.
Wanda seized the opportunity to leave the mill in the midst of a strike in 1948. She never looked back, but she remained silent about her wartime experience. Only after her death did her daughter-in-law assemble the pieces of Wanda’s life in Poland, Nazi Germany, and finally, Canada. In this masterful account of a hidden episode of history, Faubert chronicles the tragedy of exile and the meaning of silence for those whose traumas were never fully recognized.
Wanderlust
$19.95Where did passports come from? Why did 1930s stewardesses carry wrenches? And how did teetotalers shape the modern vacation? Wanderlust answers these questions and more, as author Laura Byrne Paquet delves into the social history of travel. Now a multi-billion dollar industry, travel is also one of the world’s oldest.
Paquet follows hypochondriac Greeks to the Oracle of Delphi, checks out the bedbugs in medieval coaching inns, enjoys a Finnish sauna with a group of well-bred Victorian ladies, and relaxes on a transatlantic liner with some of England’s Bright Young Things from the 1920s. In breezy style, she explains the difference between a traveller and a tourist and explores the future of travel, from grand plans for commercial space travel to underwater hotels. As the book reveals, we’ve always loved to travel — the only thing that keeps changing is how we get from here to there.
Wanderlust: Stories on the Move
$20.00Readers of Wanderlust, an anthology of travel stories, will at once feel that need to roam, the longing for surprise, the thrill of just recognizing the threat of danger, and the nomadic impulse simply to move oneself for the sake of moving, that restless and endless quest for a new beginning — even if it means the end of one life and the start of a new one.
In every story a character embarks on a journey of discovery. They travel through the Nordic Viking age, experience family life in Italy, interpret the Lascaux Caves in France, climb Nicaragua’s volcanoes, undertake a road trip through the villages of Mexico, and finally are brought back to the Canadian prairies. Editor and contributor Byrna Barclay draws inspiration from the philosophers who expounded on the theory that, rather than change, a person simply becomes more of what he or she already was at birth.
Anthology Contributors:
Byrna Barclay
Brenda Niskala
Linda Biasotto
James Trettwer
Shelley Banks
Kelley-Anne Riess
Annette Bower
Wangechi Mutu
$35.00Black women: ideas of beauty, ideas of strength, unapologetic.
A thumb pushes on teeth. Jewelled eyes, misplaced lips, and masks of black glitter expose the complexity and falsity of the modern representational world.
Born in Nairobi, living in New York, Wangechi Mutu is known for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work in which she does anything but shy away from critiquing the modern gaze. Rather, she focuses squarely on calling a spade a spade: the Orientalist way the West looks at the African-American woman, the exaltation of consumerism, and the role of technology (and its intersection with humanity) in the modern age.
Mutu is neither neutral nor exploratory; at times, she offers the visual equivalent of an indictment. Mutu’s protagonists, tribal and technological, wonderfully proud yet ceaselessly oppressed, both blossom and collapse. Driven by contradiction, they draw us in.
Published in 2010 to accompany Mutu’s first major exhibition in North America, This You Call Civilization? features reproductions of her major works on paper, large-scale installations, and stills from videos as well as essays by David Moos, Jennifer Gonzales, Michelle Jacques, Odili Donald Odita, Raphael Rubinstein, Carol Thompson, and Rinaldo Walcott. Interleaved between the essays are excerpts from books, selected by Mutu, about brutal colonial repression, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Rwandan genocide.
waniskātota kā pē wāpahk
$16.95waniskātota kā pē wāpahk, a Cree translation of Rising with a Distant Dawn, is a powerful poetry collection which stretches across the boundaries to give a voice to the lives and experiences of ordinary Indigenous people. The poems embrace anguish, pride, and hope. They come from the woodlands and the plains, they speak of love, of war, and of the known and the mysterious, they strike with wisdom, joy, and sadness, bringing us closer than ever before to the heart of urban Indigenous life.
Want
$9.99Delphine Almquist and her husband Hugo are living the hobby farm life of her dreams on the Canadian Prairies, far from the world of climate change concerns and global conflict. The only thing missing is a spectacular new kitchen, a tiny bistro to call their own. When she accidentally orders one online, her attempts to remedy the situation threaten her marriage to Hugo. The pressure explodes when her brother Paul arrives with end-of-the-world paranoia and plans to save the whole family on his hidden rustic homestead. As Del’s comfortable little world falls apart, she, Paul, and Hugo must work through layers of family conflict to reveal the secret that has entangled her family for generations. Funny and crisp, Want is the brilliantly relatable story of a woman who has to choose between the lifestyle she’s always wanted and the one that just may mean her family’s survival. Barbara Langhorst’s Want will keep you laughing and guessing until the end.
Want
$17.95Finalist: 2019 Book of the Year Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.