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All Books
All Books in this Collection
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Who Belongs in Quebec?
$18.95Are Quebecers less tolerant than other Canadians? Ongoing debate about secularism and religious symbols has led many observers to ask this very question. Premier François Legault denies that racism or Islamophobia exists in Quebec, even after a gunman opened fire in a Quebec City mosque in 2017, killing six people and wounding 19 others. Two years later, the Quebec government established Bill 21, a religious symbols ban for public employees. The province’s increasingly diverse new reality is sometimes embraced and sometimes met with hostility from alt-right groups and emboldened anti-immigrant sentiment.
What does diversity mean for the Quebec identity? Who gets to consider themselves a Quebecer? The author, a young journalist who moved to Quebec City from Saskatchewan, has some critical questions for the adopted province she loves.
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Who by Fire
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Who Is Kim Ondaatje?
$34.95This book is a biography of artist, film maker, and photographer, Kim Ondaatje, née Betty Jane Kimbark. Born into a wealthy family, Kim’s story is a reverse of the rags to riches narrative. She married two highly successful writers, Douglas Jones and Michael Ondaatje, had six children, and managed to carve a career as a respected artist whose works are in all major galleries/museums in Canada. Kim Ondaatje’s life is fascinating on many fronts. She is undoubtedly talented, and has contributed significantly to the Canadian art scene. One of her paintings from the Factory series hangs in the newly opened Canadian gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She continues to be creative as she approaches her nineties.
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Who Is The Doctor
$19.95The essential companion for everyone from casual viewer to avid fan
Doctor Who was already the world’s longest-running science fiction series when it returned in 2005 to huge success. An enormously popular series among genre fans in North America, Doctor Who encompasses horror, science fiction, comedy, action, and historical adventure and is loved for its uniquely British wit and clever scripting. It’s no wonder the series’ hero, monsters, and even its theme song are pop culture icons.
In Who Is The Doctor, experts Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? bring insights into all facets of Doctor Who’s triumphant return to television from the history of Daleks, Cybermen, and the eight classic series Doctors, to a guide to every episode of the new series. Covering the six seasons of the new series, this is the essential companion for the most avid fan as well as the more casual viewer. Allons-y!
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Who Is The Doctor 2
$24.95Travel with the Doctor in this essential companion for the modern Doctor Who era
Since its return to British television in 2005, through its 50th anniversary in 2013, to its historic casting of actress Jodie Whittaker in the title role, Doctor Who continues to be one of the most popular series in Britain and all over the world.
Who Is The Doctor 2 is a guide to the new series of Doctor Who starring Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, and Jodie Whittaker. Every episode in series 7 to 11, as well as the 50th anniversary specials, is examined, analyzed, and discussed in thoughtful detail, highlighting the exhilarating moments, the connections to Doctor Who lore, the story arcs, the relationships, the goofs, the accumulated trivia and much, much more. Designed for die-hard Whovians and Who newbies alike, Who Is The Doctor 2 explores time and space with the Doctor and chronicles the imagination that has made Doctor Who an iconic part of culture for over 50 years.
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Who Killed Janet Smith?
$24.00New Edition as part City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project, with a foreword by historian Daniel Francis
Who Killed Janet Smith? examines one of the most infamous and still unsolved murder cases in Canadian history: the 1924 murder of twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith. Originally published in 1984, and out of print for over a decade, this tale of intrigue, racism, privilege, and corruption in high places is a true-crime recreation that reads like a complex thriller.
We are pleased to be reissuing this title as part of the City of Vancouver’s Legacy Book Project. This new edition features a Foreword by historian Daniel Francis.
Praise for Who Killed Janet Smith?:
“… drug traffic, Roaring Twenties hedonism, official corruption, cutthroat competition among newspapers, a public taste for occultism, etc. – and entrust the whole works to a good storyteller, and you have one terrific political history of Vancouver.” (Geist Magazine)
“Starkins has written an engaging and well-crafted popular social history of Vancouver in the ostensibly hopeful, materially buoyant flapper era’ between the end of the slaughter of the Great War and the onset of the Depression. He reveals the serious fault-lines and profound anxieties of a community emerging in this decade from both its recent frontier past and a costly war into becoming a settled North American city. … this is a very worthwhile and informative case study, one that is likely to keep the conundrum in the title alive and encourage further research on the topic. … And who did kill Janet Smith and why? Despite the author’s attempt to follow up as many leads as he could find, the answer remains elusive. Despite the presence of a smoking gun, whose hand pressed the trigger is still a mystery, although in an updated afterword Starkins warms to one explanation. As with all mysteries, that should remain for now a mystery.” (BC Studies)
“Mr. Starkins excavates each layer of the story like an archaeologist with a trowel and camel-hair brush. He misses nothing. The result is one of those unputdownable reads that stays in your memory.” (Howard Engel)
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Who Killed Ty Conn
$19.95Who Killed Ty Conn is the brilliant investigative work of Linden MacIntyre and Theresa Burke, the current host and producer respectively of the CBC’s the fifth estate. It tells the tragic story of Ty Conn’s life of crime and misfortune. Originally published by Viking Canada in 2000, the book has been updated and reissued with a new afterword from the author and a new foreword by author and criminologist Elliott Leyton.
A classic in the literature of true crime, Who Killed Ty Conn portrays a man coming to terms with a life of rejection – and the social system that failed to save him.
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who knew grannie
$16.95Four cousins return to Jamaica in remembrance of the woman who raised them all. A lyrically powerful new play in dub by ahdri zhina mandiela.
In this lyrical masterpiece, four cousins reunite in Jamaica to mourn the passing of their grandmother and to celebrate the times they shared together. There’s vilma, an up-and-coming politician; kris, a celebrity chef; tyetye, who’s incarcerated; and likklebit, who’s immigrated to Canada. As the cousins reminisce about the woman who had such a strong role in rearing them, they uncover their troubles and begin to fulfill grannie’s last task: to bring them back in tune with themselves.
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Who Shot Estevan Light?
$26.00In this eclectic collection, Who Shot Estevan Light?: Tales from the Salish Sea and Beyond, author Douglas Hamilton shares stories of maritime history and local folklore: The Flying Dutchman, a notorious BC pirate reputed to have been part of Butch Cassidy’s gang and who eluded the police only to resurface on Lasqueti Island; a BC lighthouse that was shelled by a Japanese submarine in 1942; an undeservedly little-known French explorer who rivalled Captain Cook in the extent of his travels in the Pacific, and more.
Hamilton introduces us to a band of rumrunners who narrowly escaped police while using speed boats outfitted with WWI aircraft engines, and to the tragic history of the steamship Grappler. He takes us inside a horrendous maritime disaster event exacerbated by racism and greed, and he shares the tale of a Spanish map of “California Island” that looked suspiciously like Vancouver Island at a time when maps were state secrets or deliberate deceptions. As in his previous publication Accidental Eden, Hamilton treats the reader to tales of local west coast folklore, including the perils of moonshine, a mysterious disappearance, and a titillating intergenerational tale. Who Shot Estevan Light? offers an enthralling escape into the world of adventure, intrigue and timeless west coast maritime stories.
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Who We Thought We Were As We Fell
$18.95In this second poetry collection by Michael Lithgow, intimations of something numinous and larger than life jostle with the material demands of the everyday, sparking an uncertainty about what lurks at the edges of things, if anything at all. The poems drift in the tension between a pleasing suburban life simply lived and unsettling moments that pull against it, intrusions of the surreal.
Civic uncertainty in the wilderness gives way to more intimate modes of circumspection, a working-through of different kinds of grieving – for a parent who withers from cancer, for family members murdered in war, for the platforms of death on which common conveniences like grocery stores depend.
The poems weigh harsh realities against promises of life and renewal, struggling to put into words something that would rather not be named. They are a thought-provoking meditation on being haunted by darker and more beautiful shadows than are apparent on a life’s face level.
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Who’s 50
$22.95An enthusiastic guided tour through 50 years of Doctor Who
Doctor Who has been a television phenomenon since it began over five decades ago on November 23, 1963. But of all the hundreds of televised stories, which are the ones you must watch? Featuring 50 stories from all eleven Doctors, Who’s 50 is full of behind-the-scenes details, exhilarating moments, connections to Who lore, goofs, interesting trivia, and much, much more. Enthusiastically curated for newcomers and fans alike by Doctor Who experts Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? and released on the fiftieth anniversary of the series premiere, Who’s 50 tells the story of this global sensation: its successes, its tribulations, and its triumphant return.
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Why Am I Taller?
$22.95What happens in space that causes the body to change? Learn about life in space from astronauts
Is the human body built for Mars? NASA’s studies on the International Space Station show we need to fix a few things before sending people to the Red Planet. Astronauts go into space with good vision and come back needing eyeglasses. Cognition and DNA expression could be affected for years. And then there’s the discomfort of living in a tight space with crewmates, depression, and separation from the people you love.
Space doctors are on the case. You’ll meet the first twin to spend a year in space, the woman who racked up three physically challenging spacewalks in between 320 days of confinement, and the cosmonaut who was temporarily stranded on space station Mir while the Soviet Union broke up underneath him. What are we learning about the human body?
As astronauts target moon missions and eventual landings on Mars, one of the major questions is how the human body will behave in “partial gravity.” How does the human body change on another world, as opposed to floating freely in microgravity? What can studies on Earth and in space tell us about planetary exploration? These questions will be important to the future of space exploration and to related studies of seniors and people with reduced mobility on Earth.
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Why Cats Hate Birds
$18.95The title of Why Cats Hates Birds very much reflects the collection’s themes. Are we trapped by our nature? And what is our understanding of nature? What is black and white, straight and gay, reality and fantasy, Canadian and Barbadian? The stories in Why Cats Hate Birds are Armstrong’s way of saying that such distinctions are not natural but of our own construction. The work spans the length of Armstrong’s writing career. The earliest, ‘Flying in God’s Face,’ which inspired his novel Of Water and Rock, is set in the 1960’s, though the majority take place in a today familiar to us all. Three stories in particular are linked by the character Charles Blackette: ‘Kingdom of Fools,’ ‘Invention’ and ‘Blood is Thick.’ They explore Blackette’s life as a black man who battles his notion of self. But, at heart, all the stories in Why Cats Hate Birds, perceptive, resonant, emotionally honest, are an attempt to break those silos that separate us, and make us realize that other people’s stories are our stories.
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Why Cats Hate Birds HC
$34.95The title of Why Cats Hates Birds very much reflects the collection’s themes. Are we trapped by our nature? And what is our understanding of nature? What is black and white, straight and gay, reality and fantasy, Canadian and Barbadian? The stories in Why Cats Hate Birds are Armstrong’s way of saying that such distinctions are not natural but of our own construction. The work spans the length of Armstrong’s writing career. The earliest, ‘Flying in God’s Face,’ which inspired his novel Of Water and Rock, is set in the 1960’s, though the majority take place in a today familiar to us all. Three stories in particular are linked by the character Charles Blackette: ‘Kingdom of Fools,’ ‘Invention’ and ‘Blood is Thick.’ They explore Blackette’s life as a black man who battles his notion of self. But, at heart, all the stories in Why Cats Hate Birds, perceptive, resonant, emotionally honest, are an attempt to break those silos that separate us, and make us realize that other people’s stories are our stories.
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Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl?
$20.00Making coal patties. Selling liquid soap. Shopping at a glittering shoe mecca. She’s done them all living half her life in deprived-post-war-communist-Vietnam-turned-free-market. It’s life in a vacuum when strange types of brainwashing happened. Part memoir and part social criticism, Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? is a provocative read about a full-fledged bilingual who fights to get free from the dead past and her ancestors’ sins.
The story starts with her grandmother’s prison visit and moves to a journey through the jungle carried out for family reunion. Drawing strength from her, Hoàng completes her transformation in America from an international student to a free naturalized being. As she sheds her adoration for the impeccable American logic, oscillates between languages, and crosses oceans, she confronts the power play and biases, cultural inhibitors and prejudices that condition human behaviors, be it in Vietnam, America or Thailand. All along, she claims justice for her under-appreciated grandma, straightens male and white patronization, tears down tradition and brainwashing, uncovers the Asian submission to western iconography, and resists the attraction of a white guy. In lucid prose and with a hint of quiet humor, Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? is an unflinching pursuit of questions about family, finding one’s voice, home, and freedom.
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Why I Was Late
$20.00With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch’s debut collection of poems offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places.
Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. Fierce, tender, convention re-inventing–Petch works hard. And whether it’s as a film union lighting technician, a hospital bed allocator, a Toronto hot dog vendor, or a performer/player of the musical saw, the work is survival. Heroes are found in unexpected places, elevated by both large and small gestures of kindness, accountability and acceptance. No subject–grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence–is off limits.
A poet so good at drag they had everyone convinced that they were a woman for the first forty years of their life, Petch has somehow brought the stage and its attendant thrills into the book. Better late than. And better.
“Charlie Petch’s Why I Was Late is a poetic debut with the wisdom of a sage and the emotional range of an expert comedian. … Do yourself a favor and read this book. This is a master at work.”–Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World