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Showing 8833–8848 of 9481 results
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Unorganized Territory
$25.95David Gurr returns with a witty and touching memoir of a boyhood in British Columbia.
Best known for his spy thrillers, here Gurr recalls his own youth in vivid prose. First, an unusual World War II boyhood in rural England, under the care of two aristocratic Victorian aunts who seem to have stepped out of a Trollope novel. Then, in 1948, he is relocated to the bush on Vancouver Island with his mother and father. The Island, in the 1950s, presents a hardscrabble life in a crowded cottage with a wood stove. On the surface, it’s an ideal setting for a restless adolescent hungry for adventure, but hovering over it all, unseen but not unfelt, is a dark family secret guarded closely by the author’s parents. Gurr tells the story of his topsy-turvy early life with great panache, an exceptional memory for colourful detail, and a wry sense of humour.
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Unravel
$16.00‘Unravel’ addresses our universal experiences of time and place, and how those places shape who and what we are. ‘Unravel’ challenges our sometimes-complacent perceptions and justifies what we all hold dear: an address and an identity.
“Armstrong pushes the potential of the lyric into darker places, inside the seams of bar booths, where things get lost.” – The Georgia Straight
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Unravelling
$20.00Told in alternating chapters that go back and forth between the 1990s and the present, Unravelling uncovers a story of corruption that connects the two small-town British Columbia protagonists whose worlds are irreparably damaged. Ruthless octogenarian Vivian Lennox fights her deteriorating mind as she defends the catastrophic decisions she made decades earlier. Armed only with her curiosity, 10-year-old Elena Reid is dangerously unaware of who or what she is about to expose as she searches for answers to her father’s disappearance, following an explosion at the sawmill. The parallel stories come to a head with the arrival of a newcomer who is determined to find out exactly what happened to the town more than 20 years earlier, and how deeply Vivian herself was involved.
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Unrehearsed Beauty
$17.95The Artist Formerly Known As Death Waits christens his new public persona with the release of ‘a series of theatrical proposals to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author’s moral ambivalence.’
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Unrest
$18.00Winner of the 43rd Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest
Mortician Mylène Andrews spends her days dealing with death, but has never quite figured out how to live. After her estranged mother passes away, adult-orphaned Mylène sets out in her hearse to see the graveyards her mother visited before her death, guided by a collection of unsent postcards and the residual wake of a tragedy long-considered buried.
With an aversion to black, a colourful vintage wardrobe, and a caustic sense of humour, Mylène has always subverted expectations of how a funeral director should be. Over the course of her trip this helps her become an unlikely media sensation, as she encounters a smattering of strange characters and settings, including intrepid reporters, pesky rodents, and burial sites requiring scuba gear.
Brisk, observational, and darkly comic, Unrest is both a road trip story and a touching eulogy on life, death, and what we leave behind.
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Unruly Voices
$21.95Unruly Voices
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Unseen World, The
$14.95The poems in The Unseen World wander just below the surface under water and under the moon, beneath fields and cities, love and family. They bump into dead Spanish poets in bus station gift shops, take coffee with Søren Kierkegaard at IKEA and spot Henry Miller emerging from the 14th Street subway. Cameo appearances include two bullfighters, a bear out shopping for a pair of pants, a dental assistant’s ovaries and a voting pig named Victoria. All the while, the action is being filmed by Robert Frank from his perch in Cape Breton to a soundtrack of the distant barking of dogs.
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Unsettled
$29.95The fascinating story of the Red River Settlement, now Winnipeg, in the years 1813 to 1816, told with archival journals, reports, and lettersUnsettled tells the story of two hundred Highlanders who flee the Scottish Clearances in 1813 to establish a settlement on the Red River in what eventually became Winnipeg. They are sponsored by the Earl of Selkirk, a man who has never been west of Montreal. Families who have never left their Highland crofts take an epic journey over ocean, up wild rivers, and through boundless wilderness, surviving disease and brutal winter only to face the determined opposition of fur barons who want no sodbusters threatening their trade and are prepared to stop at nothing to destroy their dream.The “empty” land they’ve been promised is also anything but, already occupied by First Nations bands and the beginnings of that proud nation soon to be called Métis, whom they must befriend or fight.Unsettled takes you inside the experience, relying on journals, reports, and letters to bring these days of soaring hope, crushing despair, and heroic determination to life — to bring their present into ours.
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Unsettling the Commons
$14.95Drawing on interviews with 51 anti-authoritarian organizers to investigates what it means to struggle for “the commons” within a settler colonial context, Unsettling the Commons interrogates a very important debatethat took place within Occupy camps and is taking place in a multitude of movements in North America around what it means to claim “the commons” on stolen land. Travelling back in history to show the ways in which radical left movements have often either erased or come into clear conflict with Indigenous practices of sovereignty and self-determination–all in the name of the “struggle for the commons”, the book argues that there are multiple commons or conceptualizations of how land, relationships, and resources are shared, produced, consumed, and distributed in any given society. As opposed to the liberal politics of recognition, a political practice of unsettling and a recognition of the incommensurability of political goals that claim access to space/territory on stolen land is put forward as a more desirable way forward.
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Unsnarling String
$6.95A tour de force of comic ingenuity, Unsnarling String features the infamous Everett Coogler poem series.
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Unsun
$19.95In his fifth poetry volume, American poet Andrew Zawacki expands his inquiry into the possibilities and dangers of a ‘global pastoral,’ exploring geographies alternately enhanced and flattened out by digital networks, international transit, the uneven and invisible movements of capital, and the unrelenting feedback loops of data surveillance, weather disaster, war. Wheeling interference patterns of systems of meaning, from radio signals and runway signage to foreign phrases and babytalk, interact with the ‘langscape’ of English, while punctuation is retrofitted as coding. In creating a politically committed lyric form that opens all the dimensions of language – sonic and semantic, syntactic and graphic – Unsun sustains an oblique conversation with Paul Celan’s Fadensonnen, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, and Michael Palmer’s Sun. Loosely structured by the settings of analog photography, the book features a suite of the author’s black-and-white, large format images alongside an adaptation of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei and a series of fractured sonnets for – and from – his young daughter.
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Untethered
$24.95Petal Wolffe has something to celebrate: she’s successfully completed her PhD. But her celebrations are interrupted by a crisis involving her twin sister, Rose. Petal rushes home to Toronto, part concerned about her sister’s well-being, and part annoyed: Rose always did have a way of stealing the spotlight.
Untethered tells the story of Rose and Petal’s lives, from their childhood and a teenage adventure abroad, to their diverging paths as free-spirited Rose becomes enraptured with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community while Petal, burdened by responsibility, plunges into clinical depression that manifests itself in self-destructive behaviour.
Petal finds refuge on a kibbutz, turns her life around, and returns to her schooling. Rose marries a man Petal deems unworthy.
Untethered provides context and insights into orthodoxy, post-war experience, mental illness, generational trauma, and grief while laying the foundations for understanding and a path toward healing.
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Unthinkable
$24.95The Unthinkable has devastated the west coast, turning thriving towns into debris-filled wastelands. Lorry Martens, a former special operations medic struggling with PTSD and living in a reclusive barge community, has long repressed her lethal combat and interrogation skills. All she wants is a simple, peaceful life, but after Neil is murdered, she uncovers his role in an ancient conspiracy. Lorry is pursued into the shattered landscape by the deadly shadows of his secret life, and is forced to rediscover—and confront—the darkest parts of herself.
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Until They Sleep
$25.00Frona is convinced she’s the most sinful person in her Greek mountain village. When her parents arrange her marriage with a distant stranger, she is determined to suppress her impulses and become a dutiful wife and mother. But things don’t go as planned: A furious fetus, a friend’s secret wish, a man finding new life in an empty well, a lecherous priest, an unorthodox wandering daughter, invading soldiers, and a wayward ghost attempting reparations all erode the stories Frona has been telling herself about what it means to be a good person. A darkly comedic fairy tale with a magical feminist bent, Until They Sleep confronts the horrors of a world that tries to narrowly define womanhood and sexuality.
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Untimely Passages
$29.95These essays emerge from years of reading, writing, and teaching through the exemplary controversies, commitments, and atmosphere of the crises of modernism that accompany the author’s reading of European literature as a world literature. The author imagines the collection through the image of the Colporteur, who appears along the streets and waysides, walking the arcades of cities with books. One reads books, teaches them, speaks them, and they speak through us, then we write about them, and, if we are fortunate, we read them not just once but again and again. As a teacher of literature, the author is one of the fortunate ones. Untimely Passages is organized into “Dossiers,” which are the imaginary bridges over the literary river crossings. The collection shows a life in writing by crossing rivers to the “other shores.” While it is true, according to Heraclitus, that we can’t “step into the same river twice,” we can cross to the other shores and watch the rivers flowing, and even cross back again and again by rereading and writing by often posing the question of literacy: “Why Write?” The bridges become the authors we read, and we learn to listen to the noises coming from our bookcases.
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Untold: Volume One
$22.95Brought together for the first time, the remarkable and mostly unacknowledged contributions, experiences, and remembrances of warfare by the people of Northeastern Ontario.