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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Beating the Bushes

    Beating the Bushes

    $18.95

    Steven Bush is a man on a mission—to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins rule a country that, even today, after electing its ?rst African American president, still seems bent on world domination? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” (so the story goes), do to end the madness and redeem the family name?

    Ever since the bloodless coup that felled the Republic (the controversial American election of 2000), Steven Bush has been hard at work to prove—or disprove—his blood ties to those bad Bushes in the White House. Drawing on documents related to the Iran Contra scandal and other drugs, money, guns and oil shenanigans of the CIA, as well as bizarre stories from Bush ancestral lore, he presents the American Empire created by George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. as a clear and present danger to us all.

    Steven Bush’s one-man stand-up comedy, rant, political protest and call for the war-crimes trials of both George H.W. and George W. Bush is a brash theatrical tour de force that dares his audiences to accompany him on a personal quest for evidence of honesty, decency and complicity in a world of damning facts and murky conspiracy theories.

    Meticulously researched, including two pages of bibliography and twenty pages of footnotes to substantiate every wild allegation made during the show, and with a Postscript to the Reader that asks some sticky questions of America’s newest president, Barack Obama, this may well not be an attempt to ?ush the “Bushes” from their cover at all, but rather what Bembo Davies calls in his Afterword “an installation of self ” in a world gone mad—an installation that asks what “we the people” are going to do about regaining our collective sanity.

  • Beatrice

    Beatrice

    $18.95

    For the residents of Beatrice, the grain elevator reminds each person of the parts of them that exist in the past, still defining who they are today. For Colleen, an ill-fated teenage romance led her from Thunder Bay to Beatrice some seventeen years ago. Dale, Jr., tries to live up to his father’s example after he inherits the family farm. Dolores struggles to keep her life’s losses and disappointments at bay. Perry laments his son, lost to the city, and his wife, whose secret life Perry did not discover until long after her death.

  • Beautiful Beautiful

    Beautiful Beautiful

    $24.95

    Imbued with passion, creativity and insight, Brandon Reid’s debut novel is a wonderfully creative coming-of-age story exploring indigeneity, masculinity and cultural tradition.

    Twelve-year-old Derik Mormin travels with his father and a family friend to Bella Bella for his grandfather’s funeral. Along the way, he uncovers the traumatic history of his ancestors, considers his relationship to masculinity and explores the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles in hopes of reconciling the seemingly unreconcilable, the beauty of each the Indigenous and “Western” way of life—hence beautiful beautiful.

    He travails a storm, meets long-lost relatives, discovers his ancestral homeland; he suffers through catching fish, gains and loses companions, learns to heal trauma. In Beautiful Beautiful we delve into the mind of a gifted boy who struggles to find his role and persona through elusive circumstance, and—

    All right, that’s quite enough third-person pandering; you’re not fooling anyone. Redbird here, Derik’s babysitter, and narrator of this here story. Make sure to smash that like button. We’re here to bring light to an otherwise grave subject, friends. It’s only natural to laugh while crying. I bring story to life. One minute I’m a songbird singing from a bough, the next, I’m rapture. I connect you to the realm of spirit… Well, as best I can, given your mundane allocation.

    Follow us through primordial visions, dance with a cannibal (don’t worry, they’re friendly once tamed) and discover what it takes to be united. Together, we’ll have fun. Together, we are one. So tuck in, and believe what you’ll believe, for who knows what yesterday brings. Amen and all my relations, all my relations and amen.

  • Beautiful Chemical Waltz, The

    Beautiful Chemical Waltz, The

    $12.95

    “Every city has a poet who inhabits its heart and is somehow its resident spirit. He or she may not be the most public of that city’s poets, but, more than the visible ones, holds the secrets in a clandestine sort of way…It long ago struck me that the poet of English Montreal who best exemplified the city’s soul was Artie Gold…Unusual and sometimes brilliant images rise out of a poetic voice that manages to stay close to speech and yet sound absolutely individual.”—Allo Books

  • Beautiful Communions

    Beautiful Communions

    $18.95

    Chrissie Crosby is young, split-second smart and completely pissed off at just about everything. Ginger Flynn is pushing eighty and still seeking answers the way wise people do. These two have much to show each other. Years earlier, a charismatic young professor, Nigel Childes, captivated Ginger while she was one of his students. Their furtive romance and eventual wedding appalled Ginger’s disapproving parents, resulting in the family home, Stone House, falling into the hands of a questionable religious sect. After a dozen years of marriage, inexplicably, Nigel left his pregnant wife and child and was lost to them for what seemed like forever. The daughter, Irene, suffered deep wounds inflicted by her father’s abandonment. Her brother Peter was burdened by guilt and sorrow from a tragic accident for which he still blames himself. He and Chrissie will enact an unconventional confession and communion, as will Ginger and her daughter. As climax to a tumultuous year, Professor Childes reappears, knocking everything off kilter. Observing from the sidelines, Shep, border collie extraordinaire, maintains the bemused detachment appropriate for most human affairs. With short chapters and point of view shifting among the characters, this is a story of compassion and forgiveness and the intimate connectedness of birth and death

  • Beautiful Girl Thumb

    Beautiful Girl Thumb

    $16.95

    Melissa Steel’s characters are looking for love, but they’re willing to settle. They don’t dare to feel flat-out greed or lust or hate. Instead they wander around, repeating the mantra “everything is okay.” It isn’t.

  • Beautiful Man & Other Short Plays

    Beautiful Man & Other Short Plays

    $19.95

    Award-winning playwright Erin Shields has crafted three thought-provoking plays that centre on the inner lives of women, offering space for those who dare to listen.

    An eviscerating satire of gender roles in popular culture, Beautiful Man imagines a world in which women are the subjects and men the objects. As three women dissect the latest Hollywood blockbuster, narrative after narrative of strong female characters fold into each other, fusing into a brutally recognizable story.

    In Unit B-1717, a woman is trying to clean out her storage locker and say goodbye to the past, but an overwhelming feeling of dread forces her to confront the way she has historically subjugated herself to the needs of others.

    In And then there was you, a mother addresses her child as they both visit milestones that offered them each independence, and in the process explores how the profound connection between mother and child evolves.

  • Beautiful Unknown Future

    Beautiful Unknown Future

    Beautiful Unknown Future fires up the possibilities of labour, memory, and doubt amid the shifting realities of living, working, and parenting in times of increasing uncertainty. Haunted by the looming shadows of our compounding crises, these poems refuse false optimism, instead reflecting with candour and wit on the precarity we share with the nonhuman world. Written while Hubbard’s children were young, the poems hold space for messy feelings about motherhood and care, the climate crisis, family ghosts, and office dynamics. Beautiful Unknown Future layers the chaos of domestic life with the detachment of the corporate world to examine the joys and complexities of these competing spaces, looking critically to a future centred around tenderness, resilience, and love.

  • Beauty Beneath the Banyon

    Beauty Beneath the Banyon

    $22.95

    Three women, three countries, three stories–a Thai prisoner, a Cambodian entrepreneur and a Laotian Hmong refugee’s destinies are threaded together by the tears leftover from the Vietnam War. Beauty Beneath the Banyon introduces readers to the secret war waged in Laos and its devastating aftermath. It provides a rare literary space in which the reader will also encounter the atrocities of Pol Pot’sCambodia and the effects of these wars, as well as the Vietnam war on Thailand, where many displaced people from Laos and Cambodia sought refuge, and where American soldiers sought refuge of another kind, leading to the development of Thailand’s industry of sexual tourism. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation is used to unite six main characters, three of whom are dead. The dead consist of a Cambodian monk, an American soldier who fought in Vietnam and died in Thailand and an American pilot who flew bombing missions in Laos and died there. These three become dead companions who are watching over three women who are still living: a Laotian grandmother, a Cambodian woman who wants desperately to have a child and a Thai woman who murders her husband and goes to prison. The novel presents a timely look at our current global landscape, i.e., war and the effects of war on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to name a few, as well as the repetitive destructive foreign policy decisions that are still being made with repercussions of war and the lasting imprint this devastation leaves generations later.

  • Beaver Hills Forever

    Beaver Hills Forever

    $21.95

    An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life

    Conor Kerr’s 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada’s colonial education system and resource extraction industries.

    A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.

  • Beaverbrook

    Beaverbrook

    $19.95

    Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award and Best Atlantic Published Book Award
    Shortlisted, British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and National Business Book Award

    Were the Gallery’s treasures gifts or loans? Was Lord Beaverbrook careless or devious? Jacques Poitras sifts through the personal correspondence, takes stock of the witnesses and testimony at the 2006 arbitration hearings, and interviews the combatants of a bitter legal battle that rocked the art world on both sides of the Atlantic. Deftly connecting the pieces of this historic jigsaw puzzle, he tells a fascinating tale peopled with an arresting cast of characters — from the self-proclaimed “master propagandist” to the present-day heirs of the Beaverbrook legacy.

  • Beavers Eh to Bea

    Beavers Eh to Bea

    $14.95

    An Our Choice 2001 Selection (Canadian Children’s Book Centre).Two years of work, adventure, fun and sorrow see baby beaver Eh through to beaver adulthood and eventual release.”A whole new story about beavers that will endear them to every reader . . . an excellent resource for the classroom.”–Quill & Quire (starred review)

  • Bebías Into ?hndaa Ke

    Bebías Into ?hndaa Ke

    $28.00

    Bebías Into ?hndaa Ke: Queer Indigenous Knowledge for Land and Community is a powerful collection of essays, stories and conversations that provide us with a diverse roadmap for navigating and overcoming hate, supporting queer Indigenous kin, and revitalizing radical ethics of care for building healthy, inclusive, and self-determining lands and communities. A celebration of trans, queer, and Two-Spirit Indigenous brilliance, with an intentional inclusion of voices from the North (the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Inuvialuit and Nunatsiavut), the essays in this collection offer a wealth of queer Indigenous theory, experience, and practices, with a unique emphasis on the critical role of land in these conversations.

    The contributors, who range from young activists, artists, families, and both emerging and established scholars, provide insightful and transformative queer perspectives on a number of pertinent topics, including: knowledge reclamation, resurgence, nation-building, community life and governance, cultural revitalization, belonging, family relationships, creative practice, environmental degradation, mental health and wellbeing, youth empowerment, and Indigenous pedagogy. Amidst the ongoing violence of settler colonization, and its legacies of exclusion and erasure that continue to target queer, gender-diverse and Two-Spirit Indigenous people, this collection is an invaluable gift and resource for our communities, showing us that a different world is possible, and reminding us that queer Indigenous people have always belonged on the land and in community.

  • Bec and Call

    Bec and Call

    $18.95

    Rife with colloquialisms, irony and a healthy dose of sass, the poems collected in Bec and Call refuse to be silent or subtle; instead they delve into the explicit, the audacious, the boldly personal. Bec and Call subverts the notion of female sexuality as male appeasement, the French wordplay in the title using the meaning of “bec”—a kiss, mouthpiece or beak—to complicate notions of compliance and submission. The roles of Acadienne and feminist come with the responsibility of speaking up, and Bec and Call is a means of vocalizing the societal dérangement of Acadian culture amidst the difficulties women encounter as a result of rape culture and anti-feminism.These poems are fearless and precise in their aim, but are not without a sense of play:Menstrual synchrony’s a bitch in a household of women:some sheets never see the line, endometrial tissue Javexed and tumble-dried.To captains off-duty, solariums are wheelhouses.Antique binoculars magnify songbirds, deer and that one black squirrel.Close the blinds to neighbours. Girl, you’re bodied, full-bodied, embodied. 

  • Because

    Because

    $21.95

    An engrossing punk-rock novel about teenage daydreams and sibling dynamicsTeenaged brothers Hombre and Transformer spend their days locked up in their suburban bedroom, writing songs and dreaming of stardom on their own terms. The music of the early 80s is brimming with post-punk ethos and a disdain for classic rock, but closer to home the pair can’t find anyone else to join their band, Because, and frankly they don’t really want another member to enter the fray of their complicated sibling dynamic. Hombre, the younger one, is quiet, contemplative, and talented, a poet in the making. His older brother Transformer is stubborn, domineering, and secretly struggling with mental health issues. Their sequestered world is broken open one summer when their mother hires Spit, a girl from the local guitar shop, to help the boys improve their modest skills. But these good intentions set off a chain reaction with tragic consequences.

  • Because Somebody Asked Me To

    Because Somebody Asked Me To

    $25.95

    Canadian literary great Guy Vanderhaeghe’s eclectic and wryly insightful collection of nonfiction pieces spans his forty-year writing career.

    Many editors and publishers over the years have asked Guy Vanderhaeghe for his thoughts on books and writers, on history, literature, and his own specialty, the historical novel. Because Somebody Asked Me To has all the hallmarks of the author’s fiction: it is intelligent, wise, wry, and a pleasure to read. These essays, reviews and occasional pieces are about the difficult craft of fiction, about growing up on the prairies, and about the struggle to find his own voice as a writer, as well as about novels by writers he deeply admires. And, throughout, he casts a bemused eye on the entire human comedy.

    In 1982, when Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first book appeared, Canadian literature was beginning to be recognized at home and abroad as culturally engaging and significant. Because Somebody Asked Me To gives readers a glimpse into those beginnings and how they shaped the author and his generation of fiction writers. The book also examines how the Canadian literary scene has shifted during the course of his career — the economic, societal, and cultural changes that have made the old world of writing and publishing scarcely recognizable. Because Somebody Asked Me To invites readers to ponder the transformations Canadian writing has undergone, where it is now, and where it might go from here.