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Showing 8913–8928 of 9248 results
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When it Rains
$15.95When it Rains is the story of four people, two marriages, and one increasingly improbable series of events. As misfortune mounts, communication fractures, relationships crumble, behaviour becomes absurd. People sing, get naked, give up, lose control, have sex with strangers. Some kind of God intervenes. Or observes. Or something. Or nothing. When it Rains is by turns blackly funny social satire, heartbreaking drama, existentialist graphic novel, and post-modern Job story.
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When it Rains: A Mystery
$14.95Restless and bored with the lightweight stories she continues to be assigned, reporter Cait Whyte seizes upon the opportunity to cover the gruesome murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in her own neighbourhood. When her story is later found at the scene of another murder Cait becomes convinced that the two murders are connected and takes it upon herself to track down the killer. Against the advice of herfriends, and her own better judgement, shefollows the murderer’s trail deep into Vancouver’s dark pornography subculture–a painful secret from her own past compelling her forward.
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When the Bottom Falls Out
$22.95The past sits uneasily on the characters of these stories, whether on their native Isabella Island or in Montreal, where some of them now live. Life is ultimately lived according to the choices that were made, and retribution does not always go where it belongs. The wealthy and proper Higginsons have lived a lie that eventually must come out. Jen and Edwin are passionately in love, but can they shake off the shadow that hangs over their lives? In his quiet and subtle way, Thomas continues to bring alive a Caribbean island, giving depth and complexity to its characters.
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When the Dikes Breached
$19.95For sixteen-year-old Klara, a devastating flood reveals a dark family secret.
It is February 1953 in the Netherlands and Klara is expected to marry the son of a prominent farmer. In this small island community, steeped in tradition, the Church controls the lives of its citizens but Klara longs to escape for adventure on far away shores. When a spring tide merges with a brutal northwestern storm it causes the dikes to breach, unleashing death and destruction that will expose a dark family secret. -
When the Great Red Dawn Is Shining
$19.95On their march towards the Somme, and Beaumont Hamel, the young men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment raised their voices to sing “When the Great Red Dawn is Shining,” a song about returning home to the people they love. Howard Morry was one of the young men who managed to make it back. And now, one hundred years after the events that changed his life, we hear Morry’s voice, in these pages, rising from the silence to recount his days with the famed Regiment. In memoirs expertly selected and contextualized by Christopher Morry, When the Great Red Dawn Is Shining offers a rare first-hand account of life on the front lines as told by a soldier preserving his memories for generations to come.
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When the Sky Comes Looking For You
$21.00Come along for another trip down Thunder Road. Since Ted Callan’s fateful encounter with a roomful of Dwarves his world has exploded with Gods and monsters, Giants, Witches, and more.
When the Sky Comes Looking for You expands upon the Thunder Road trilogy with a series of short stories, both loved and brand new, from acclaimed author Chadwick Ginther.
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When the Spirits Dance
$16.95When Lawrence’s father goes overseas with the Canadian Army during the Second World War, the young Cree boy struggles to grow up while wrestling with the meaning of war. With Papa gone, Mama raises the children alone. Traditional foods such as wild meat and fish are scarce, and many other foods are rationed.
Angry about the changes and confused about the future, Lawrence misses his father and his teachings about their natural way of life. When army runaways threaten the family, Lawrence’s courage and knowledge of traditional skills are called upon to keep them safe. With guidance from his grandfather and encouragement from his grandmother, Lawrence faces his challenges, becomes wiser and stronger, and earns the respect of his Elders.
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When the World Is Not Our Home
$16.95When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems illustrate an agile poet sifting the everyday through a fine mythical screen. They reveal a woman with multiple roles, and her emergence as a highly sought-after Canadian poet.
Known for her rebellious voice, Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death. Musgrave positions the reader in “the thin membrane between self and world”, and it is in this space that she provokes us with her gripping imagination.
“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali – she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.”
– The Globe and Mail“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone else’s collected poems! ” – BC Bookworld
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When Things Get Back to Normal
$16.95One Friday, Walter Dohaney, novelist M.T. (Jean) Dohaney’s husband, went out as usual to play hockey with his friends. She never saw him alive again. Without warning, Jean was plunged into the most painful and disorienting experience of her life. Faced with a tumult of emotions and sudden responsibilities, she turned to her writing for solace and began a journal. In her journal, Dohaney’s sharp sense of humour and her impatience with conventional pieties lay bare the depth of her bereavement, yet at the same time they express the life force within her. She is frank about her anger at Walt for playing hockey despite his heart condition and for not being there to take care of the house and family; she faces her annoyance at sincere well-wishers who say exactly the wrong thing; and she exposes her distressing loneliness.
When Things Get Back to Normal is a compassionate yet bracing companion for those struck down by loss, which indirectly gives practical advice about the changes that come with widowhood. Two years after her husband’s death, Jean agreed to publish her journal. When Things Get Back to Normal gained critical acclaim when it was first published in 1989, but its finest praise came from the dozens of people who wrote and called to tell the author how it had helped them through their own grief. When Jean’s novel A Fit Month for Dying was released in 2000, the publicity surrounding the book prompted a flurry of phone calls to the publisher from people seeking copies of When Things Get Back to Normal.
During the next year Goose Lane Editions sought out and acquired the book and the new edition was released, due in no small part to the many readers who took the book, and Jean Dohaney, into their hearts. Author Helen Fogwill Porter was one of the many that found strength in When Things Get Back to Normal when her husband died, and her introduction to this new edition offers her own experience of “normalcy.” Jean Dohaney’s new afterword tells where she is now, fifteen years after Walt’s death.
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When This World Comes to an End
$20.00Poems that journey through a tapestry of myths, archetypes and fables; of histories invented and revisited.
Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?
Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.Ê
Be the horse. Be patient and simple, blind
to anything beyond this moment, step out
on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that
there is something behind this, something
that sustains, propels, repeats.
(from “The White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908”) -
When Tish Happens
$19.95?In the early 1960s, a group of students at UBC started a magazine called Tish. The name was purposefully an anagram of shit, in order to demonstrate their youthful and iconoclastic attitude. In many ways, Tish, and its editors, became the clear break from older Canadian poets and styles. At the heart of the magazine, and the “movement,” was Frank Davey. And it is Davey who has written this definitive history.
Davey has organized the material as a memoir, starting from his own early days in Abbotsford, B.C., and gradually introducing the other poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah, despite the fact that Davey doesn’t meet them until they all arrive at UBC. Much of the theory of the Tish poets derives from the Black Mountain poets, an American movement that incorporated the writings of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan — who suggested the name itself. The Black Mountain poets believed that writing should be locally based and should grow out of the author’s own breathing patterns. The more specific to a locale, the better.
The poets are introduced as characters in a play, and when Fred Wah says, “Let’s start a magazine,” things happen. The first 19 issues became the calling card for a new type of poetry, but inevitably the writers began to go their own way. It is Davey’s commitment that holds the group together, despite their geographical separation.
The Tish movement provided the impetus to create a new, more contemporary Canadian poetry. And here, Frank Davey reveals how it started, grew, and became a lasting force.
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When Variety Was King
$17.95A television producer’s fascinating memoir of the golden age of the variety show
“Full of behind-the-scenes stories . . . For fans of TV history, there’s a gold mine here.” — Booklist
A humble Canadian boy who grew up to create iconic American TV shows featuring the Hollywood celebrities of the day, Frank Peppiatt made his breakthrough by developing the rock TV show Hullabuloo with his partner, John Aylesworth. That led to a writing gig for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé — and then to the long-running smash hit Hee Haw.
In this autobiography, he recounts a career that spanned from the 1950s to the 1980s, writing comedy and turning entertainers into household names on variety shows hosted by Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Sonny and Cher, and Perry Como. This anecdote-filled memoir of a bygone era will enthrall anyone interested in the early decades of television.
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When Variety Was King
$26.95He created Hee Haw, the number-one show on TV. He wrote and produced variety shows for Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Sonny and Cher, and Perry Como. He invented the rock TV show Hullabaloo. He was the most popular producer of his time — a time when variety television was king.
With his writing/producing partner John Aylesworth, Frank Peppiatt developed dozens of TV shows but their career began on air in the initial days of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, alongside other talented newcomers like Norman Jewison and Arthur Hiller. Then came a call from New York to write for the Eydie Gorme/Steve Lawrence show in 1958, and quickly “A & P” became the most in-demand writing and producing team around.
Peppiatt, a man who spent his life behind the scenes writing comedy and turning entertainers into household names, now recounts his own remarkable life story: a humble Canadian boy who grew up to create iconic American TV shows amid a cast of Hollywood celebrities. When Variety Was King captures the early days of TV with humour and spice.
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When We Were Old
$18.00At every stage of life, there are moments when we are old: moments of stunning, tragic, sardonic clarity, when the confusion of our existence settles to the ground and the world is made manifest to us in all its pitilessness and absurdity.
When We Were Old is a parade of such moments, whether they arise in the midst of domestic hurly-burly, midlife sex on a wilderness camping trip, or an accidental brush with atrocities on the internet; in a memory of childhood fear or youthful folly, a solitary reckoning in the mirror, or a stranger’s letter written from a nursing home. Terrible things happen to people and life goes on; the dead go on, sometimes mingling with the living: an unstoppable vitality keeps the world turning, and we take heart from “the bright lights in the eyes of the children.”
Unwin’s is a unique poetic voice, infusing worldly-wise world-weariness with dark humour and an amazing buoyant energy. It’s as if he’s looking at the world through a distanced enough lens to make the unbearable bearable, to set it in perspective as part of the human story and to find that story a source of endless wonderment. The book’s title hints at a voice from beyond the grave, looking back with equanimity and even a kind of tenderness at the way life runs roughshod over us and the way we keep rallying for as long as we can.
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When Words Sing
$29.95Meet the creators behind the words of Canadian opera in this exciting new collection of contemporary libretti. Featuring Ours by Robert Chafe, Rocking Horse Winner by Anna Chatterton, Beatrice Chancy by George Elliott Clarke, Missing by Marie Clements, Nigredo Hotel by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Shelter by Julie Salverson, and Dog Days by Royce Vavrek, When Words Sing turns the spotlight on everything that goes into writing libretti, answering frequently asked questions along the way.
Through supplementary interviews, essays, and illustrations, the book will examine the role of the librettist; how a libretto can inspire a composer, director, and designer; and how the relationship between words, music, sound, and design coalesces into an ageless theatrical form.
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Whenever You’re Ready
$22.95Backstage with one of Canada’s greatest stage managers
Whenever You’re Ready is an intimate account of the career of Nora Polley, who — in her 52 years at the Stratford Festival — has learned from, worked with, and cared for some of the greatest directors, actors, stage managers, and productions in Canadian theatrical history. In so doing, Nora became one of the greatest stage managers this country has ever seen.
Here is an account of the Stratford Festival’s history like no other. From her childhood forays into a theater her father, Victor, worked tirelessly to help maintain, to her unexpected apprenticeship and the equally unexpected 40 years of stage management it ushered in, this is the Stratford Festival seen exclusively through Nora’s eyes. Here is an immersive account of a life spent in service of the theater, told from the ground floor: where actors struggle with lines and anxieties, where directors lose themselves in the work, where the next season is always uncertain, and where Nora — a stage manager, a custodian, a confidante, a pillar, a rock — finds her rhythm, her patience, her perseverance, her love, her consistency, and her invisibility. These are the qualities that make a stage manager great and, whenever you’re ready, this book will show you why.