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All Books in this Collection
Showing 8881–8896 of 9481 results
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Variations on Herb
$11.95Variations on Herb is the latest in a lengthening series of books that emanate from the south-western Ontario farm of John B. Lee’s childhood. The focus of Variations is Herb Lee, John B’s grandfather (and an absolutely unforgettable curmudgeon) but the background of rural Ontario is also made palpable entirely without indulgent explanation. This grain, this rich vein that appears in book after book, may well be inexhaustible; the cumulative effect certainly has few parallels in Canadian writing.
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Variations on Hölderlin
$10.00
Variations on Hölderlin is informed by a particular etymology of the verb “to translate”: to move the dead from one place to another. The corpse in question here belongs to Friedrich Hölderlin, the schizophrenic Romantic poet subsequently canonized by such figures as Nietzsche and Heidegger. But whereas these theorists all too often arrest his corpus in order to conduct their critical autopsies, the Variations resurrect Hölderlin to the modern day, where his schizophrenic obsessions with the gods are now updated through contemporary celestial phenomena: astronauts, radio transmissions and satellites provide a new context above, while the underground churns with the sounds of subways and cloud chambers. Caught between these two levels, Hölderlin’s poetry is reconfigured not through an accurate reproduction of his work, but rather through the fluidity of variations: “I am not mad / chronology just made me look that way.” The Variations remind us that poetry is, above all, an ongoing conversation between the dead and the living. -
Veal
$24.95Delores “Lawrence” Franklin is a failed capitalist and a runaway headcase. Following a corporate meltdown, she decides to start fresh in Mistaken Point, a small town known for two things — Mistaken Point University, where she and her best friend, Anastasia Lanes, are now enrolled, and the grisly murders of countless young women.
At her new part-time arcade job, Lawrence meets Francesca “Franky” Delores — gritty, off-putting, and chronically serious, as opposite to Lawrence as her name would suggest. Soon, Lawrence discovers Franky is convinced there is a monster on the loose, a patchwork creature born of hatred and responsible for the supposedly solved string of violence haunting the town.
Against the advice of Franky’s closest friend, Pippa, Lawrence, and Stasia join Franky in a sticky, summertime search for a yellow-eyed monster between classes, shifts at the arcade, and eating popsicles by the pool. Motivated mostly by her unquenchable attraction to Franky, Lawrence allows herself to be pulled in strange directions, trying to appease Franky’s mania. Through the trials of hunting a monster only some of them believe in, Pippa, Lawrence, Stasia, and Franky discover truths about womanhood, relationships, and the reliability of urban legends.
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Vegas or Bust
$19.95Can a former semi-pro win against the best poker players in the world?
In 2006, Johnny’s pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming world champion were dashed when his kings ran into aces in the World Series of Poker Main Event. But lady luck was with him when he met Amy, the woman of his dreams, who soon became his wife.
Like many players, he drifted away from the game after Congress passed a law later that year that cut off funds to online poker and harkened the decline of the game. But even as Johnny returned to the working world, the itch remained.
A decade later, now with two small kids in tow, Johnny convinces Amy to take a six-week family trip from their home in rural Alabama to Las Vegas, where he will risk his $10,000 bankroll in hopes of playing in the Main Event again and winning millions. Along the way, he examines how the game has changed since 2006. Although the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was the beginning of the end of the poker boom, the game still thrives, and WSOP is Exhibit A. Johnny also muses on the outlandishness of the adult fairyland that is Vegas.
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Vehicle Poets Now, The
$18.9525 years ago, the Montreal poetry scene experienced an unprecedented eruption of activity that resulted in collaborative poems, simultaneous readings, multimedia performances, videopoems, poetry on the city’s buses, English poetry programs on French CBC, concrete poems, a dozen issues of poetry magazines and more than a dozen books. This and more was the result of the individual and collective effort of Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Tom Konyves, Claudia (Cel) Lapp, Stephen Morrissey, John McAuley and Ken Norris who became labelled the Vehicule Poets. The Vehicule Poets came together to form the most cohesive poetry movement in Canada since the TISH days of the early 1960s. Their work tended toward the fresh and the experimental as they shared a spirit of collectivity and collaboration. They were the leading proponents of literary community and poetic experimentation. One of the results of this collaborative work was the publication of The Vehicule Poets in 1979. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of this important book, The Muses’ Company is publishing The Vehicule Poets Now. This is not a nostalgic look back but a view of the present. The poems in this anthology reveal a still very vibrant and vital body of work. These poems continue to push boundaries and test limits.
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Vehicule Days
$16.95This group of poets who gathered in the mid-70s around the alternative gallery Vehicule Art Inc. and the printing operation Vehicule Press was initially interested in gaining access to the means of production. But a funny thing happened on the way to print. The various poets coalesced into a group, feeding off each other’s experiences and innovations. Inspired by the experimental environment of the gallery, the Vehicule Poets worked at the cutting edge of mixed media, poetry and video art. They took poetry out of the closet and put it on the buses, in the parks, on the dance floor and in the subway.
The Vehicule Poets were an irreverent, adventurous lot, provoking both praise and vitriol from the public and the critics. Vehicule Days is an important record of literary and cultural history. The collection includes articles, essays and interviews, as well as a sampling from the works of the Vehicule Poets then and now.
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Venera Dreams
$25.00Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. It is divided in three sections. The first, The Lure of Vermilion, describes the impact of Venera’s lure on various characters. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, ranges from the Roman Empire’s invasion of Venera and an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dalí’s ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade’s relationship to Venera. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.
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Venus of Dublin
$14.95In Venus of Dublin Marianne Ackerman has spun a spellbinding tale about an actor, a painter and their muse. The play was inspired by a famous portrait of the actor Edmund Kean that hangs in London?s Garrick Club. In it, Kean is depicted as a Huron prince, Alanienouidet, wearing a costume which the chiefs of a small community near Quebec City gave him when he visited in 1826. The chiefs, him on what became known as Kean?s lost weekend in the wilderness. Five years later, while on tour in Dublin, the once-great, untamable stage performer Edmund Kean hires a local renegade to paint his portrait. As Kean relives his encounters with the Huron of Quebec, the spirits of the wilderness inhabit him and unleash a mystical and surprising portrait of desire. What results is an entirely unexpected rendering of the artist. Venus of Dublin is a poignant tale about the personal cost and public inspiration of an artist?s quest for immortality. The play premiered at Montreal?s Centaur Theatre in April, 2000.
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Venus’ Daughter
$15.95Venus’ Daughter is inspired by the life of Sara “Saartjie” Baartman, who was known as “The Hottentot Venus”. Baartman was a Khoisan woman taken from South Africa to be displayed on London stages from 1810 to 1815, and was then posthumously displayed at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, France until 2002. The story follows Denise, a young Black woman guided by an ancestor to begin her journey into self-love. Exploring the intersection of myth, fable, and the reality of how women and their bodies are viewed, Venus’ Daughter peels back the layers of pop culture’s obsession with the Black female form and the silence around the infamous figure, making connections through the centuries.
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Verbal Violence
Verbal Violence unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class. Here the master’s house and tools are in flames, fire fanned from within, as their colosseum is turned quarry. Critically straining the email thread, the Freedom of Information Request, and the white paper through an aesthetics of anger that appropriates their last gasps at relevancy, Verbal Violence registers the absurdities of a purposeless people “just doing their job.” Hacking up neoliberal doublespeak, ideological reproduction, and progressive-except-Palestine rhetoric, La France spits it out time and time again, scheduling a meeting to verbalize the what and the who liberal democratic institutions systematically shut down. Verbal Violence confronts capitalism’s managerial style guide for saying nothing at all with the fiery and empathetic conscience of the managed, their cri de cœur cracking the straight-faced bureaucracy of our most banal communications.
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Vermeer’s Light
$19.95George Bowering has always maintained many of his poems are germinated in secret ways—secrets he has, until now, assiduously kept to himself. In suddenly giving most of those secrets away, Vermeer’s Light, much of it written while Bowering was “in office” as Canada’s first poet laureate, constitutes an extraordinary gesture of generosity from a poet to his readership who has so honoured him. Its alphabet series A, You’re Adorable, by “Ellen Field,” a pseudonym Bowering often used in the nineties; Imaginary Poems for AMB , addressed to his late wife Angela; He Is Not, a micro-translation of Shelley’s Adonais; Q&A, which dares to take on the most fundamental questions of the human condition with levelheaded honesty and wit—the list of revelations and the pyrotechnics of Bowering’s craft presented here are spellbinding.
But the greatest astonishment about this celebratory collection from a poet at the height of his powers is that it contains all eight variations of “Grandfather,” Bowering’s most anthologized poem to date, set into an essay, Rewriting My Grandfather, like eight jewels in a crown at the end of the book. It is here that the poet presents his readers with a voyage of discovery; that the buried treasure of his invisible but adamantine craft is to be found; and the gift of entrance into how George Bowering creates his work is revealed.
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Vermin
$18.00Vermin is a collection of diverse poems, matter-of-fact daydreams of body parts, money, family life, murder, children, and animals. Whimsical, unsettling, or creepy, depending on the reader’s mood, the poems are united by an urge to crawl out from the suffocating spells of late capitalism, and take a look around.
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Vern Thiessen: Two Plays
$19.95Apple
Andy is in trouble. Downsized from his job, his marriage in crisis, he meets a mysterious young woman who he looks to for salvation. But when his wife becomes seriously ill, Andy must make a choice: care for an estranged wife, or run away with a woman he knows little about. A haunting tale of sex, secrets, and second chances.
Winner of the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Outstanding New Play (2002) and winner of the Alberta Play Competition (2001).
“A belief in the power, or at least the grace, of silence is one of the pluses of Apple, a tightly knotted, carefully crafted play where the concept of love gets dissected and scrutinized like a renegade cell under a microscope…” —Edmonton Journal
Blowfish
“…we all have to eat… we all have to die….” What do food, funerals, the Edmonton tornado, and Mila Mulroney have in common? Join the elegant and debonair caterer Lumiere as he serves up a whole new eating experience.
“The dramatic fabric Thiessen has woven is a tight accumulation of emotional and narrative threads… a life picture that entertains… that frequently moves, that engages, that disturbs.” —The Ottawa Citizen
“Let’s just say that it’s black. It’s creepy. It’s deliciously morbid and delectably dark.” —Vue Weekly -
Vernacular Muse
$14.95The Vernacular Muse tackles head-on conservative Canadian critical theory and practice. Personal and provocative, Cooley’s lucid essays in The Vernacular Muse range from the vernacular in Prairie poetry, thepoetics of the line break, and the poetry of eye versus ear to substantial readings of texts by Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Laurence, Michael Ondaatje, Sinclair Ross and Robert Duncan. The first collection of critical essays from a central figure in the making and recognition of prairie writing.
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Vers de nouveaux sommets
$50.00Lawren S. Harris doit sa renommée à ses paysages emblématiques pénétrés d’un force tranquille résolument canadienne. Dans les années 1920, un monde intérieur audacieux et coloré commence à se manifester dans son œuvre, et en 1934, contre toute attente, il entreprend une carrière de peintre abstrait outre-frontière.
Le milieu social, intellectuel et esthétique du transcendantalisme américain sert de modèle à un mouvement d’art abstrait en Amérique du Nord. Inspirés par les idées de Kandinsky et les écrits d’Emerson et Whitman, Harris et ses contemporains américains — Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Katherine Dreier et Raymond Jonson — se tournent vers l’abstraction pour exprimer des états de conscience plus élevés.
Aspirant à s’élever au-dessus des choses terrestres, Harris délaisse le paysage au profit du spirituel et de l’intériorité. Ce magnifique ouvrage reproduit plus de 75 peintures réalisées par Harris et ses contemporains. Les essais de Roald Nasgaard et Gwendolyn Owens analysent l’exploration de la modernité chez Lawren Harris et l’évolution de son œuvre vers une abstraction qui se nourrit du dynamisme de la culture visuelle ambiante.
Vers de nouveaux sommets : Lawren Harris et ses contemporains américains accompagne une exposition organisée par la Collection McMichael d’art canadien qui prendra l’affiche en février 2017. L’exposition sera présentée également au Musée Glenbow, à Calgary, dans le cadre d’une tournée canadienne.
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Very Good Butter
$14.95Dark, bizarre: new stories, new beginnings. In Very Good Butter, John Lavery’s debut story collection, characters are like electrons. As they spin they attempt to overcome their potential differences, they move in and out of each other’s orbits, emitting, as they do, a few photons of light. Their efforts, however, are constantly altered, and even undermined, by the unpredictable influence of the outside world’s chemical activity. Touching, terrifying, and funny, Lavery’s stories are about people trying to understand their place in the world.
Like those who believe we dream backwards, that the mind reconstructs a dream from the moment of waking, the stories in Very Good Butter lead toward possible beginnings. They are attempts, in the deepest sense, to keep the reader reading, dreaming wakefully — attempts to construct a destiny that is appropriate to the essential mystery behind the first encounter of the principals. For Lavery, it doesn’t matter whether stories span minutes or years: everything is enclosed within a first, germinal instant.