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All Books
All Books in this Collection
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Women and the Gift Economy
$39.95Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.
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Women in a Globalizing World
$39.95An exciting Canadian collection of feminist articles that provide cutting-edge gender analysis for understanding diverse personal and political challenges and opportunities in our fast-changing global world. Canadian and international authors offer varied social justice, anti-racist, Indigenous, and subsistence perspectives on environmental, social, cultural, and political issues in women’s local and global struggles and visions for another world. The book combines articles by formative researchers in key areas with historically-specific reflections and analyses of Canadian and other feminist activists as they first face, come to understand, and learn to address (with their sisters around the world) emerging neo-liberalism’s impacts on women. This anthology, thus, uniquely situates current theory and activism in a rare historically-contextualized account of Canadian and global feminisms’ deepening engagement with these issues. Anyone concerned to understand Canadian and international neo-liberal policies’ impact on women and women’s growing understanding and resistance to these policies will be interested in this book. As well as women’s studies courses, this collection will be an indispensable resource for teachers seeking globally-informed, gender, race, class, and Indigenous aware Canadian resources for the study of sociology, international development, environmental studies, political economy, women’s human rights, labour studies, social policy, social work, international relations, migration/immigration, violence, poverty, militarism, colonialism and post-colonialism, social movements, global feminisms, peace, community organizing, sustainability and alternative possibilities.
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Women in a World at War
$24.95In 1999, poet and novelist Madeleine Gagnon undertook to document the experience of women in the many war zones at the end of a “century of ashes” through their own eyes and in their own words. Her record of those encounters boldly confronts the harshest realities of and asks the most difficult questions about not only the horrors of war, but also the quest for justice, the experience of love and compassion, the inextinguishable hope for the future, and the will to live—the humanity that endures against all odds.
Travelling to Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Gagnon talked with women of all ages and social classes: those who fought side-by-side with men in wars of independence; who suffered terrible abuse in war; who lost their men, their homes, their children, their entire families; women working to heal the survivors, and those involved in different peace movements. She explores why women themselves have not found a way to put an end to war, why they continue, from generation to generation, to raise sons who make war and oppress women, what stake women themselves might have in war. And she dares to look within herself for the answers to these questions and for the roots of all conflict, war, and destruction. Elle magazine of France described this book as “sublime … a long, strange poem that recalls the work of such giants of literary journalism as V.S. Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuscinski.
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Women of Saturn, The
$22.95“Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels meet Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women” in award-winning author Connie Guzzo-McParland’s highly anticipated sophomore novel, The Women of Saturn
The Women of Saturn chronicles the lives of three women of different generations, all living in Montreal in the 1980s, connected and haunted by the same Italian village of their pasts.
When high school teacher Cathy’s estranged childhood friend, Lucia is found beaten and abandoned in an apparent act of domestic violence, she takes Lucia’s teenage daughter, Angie, into her home. An aspiring writer, Cathy resolves herself to giving Lucia a voice through her writing–and in doing so, relives their journey from Calabria to Canada in 1957, her own family’s difficult years after their arrival in Montreal, and the exhilarating, corruption-ridden period of Expo 67.
Meanwhile, rumors swirl about Lucia’s family’s connections to the Montreal Mafia. Cathy’s live-in boyfriend, Sean, sees Angie’s presence in their home as a dangerous liability to his career in federal politics – not helped by the fact that Lucia’s husband, located in Italy, begins to hurl accusations of corruption against Lucia’s family and their business partner with ties to the Member of Parliament for whom Sean works. When these revelations are brought to the attention of Montreal tabloid journalist Antoine–Cathy’s former writing mentor, with whom she’s had a problematic relationship since her teens–Cathy becomes yet more determined to connect the village stories of the past with the drama of the present, culminating in a confrontation that will forever change her life.
Gripping and as satisfying as southern Italian cuisine, The Women of Saturn is an important and unforgettable story about the female immigrant experience, and the inescapable impact of the past on our post-modern present.
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Women of the Fur Trade, Second Edition
$19.95Finalist for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English and Winner of the 2018 Toronto Fringe Best New Play Contest
In eighteen hundred and something something, somewhere upon the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory, three very different women with a preference for twenty-first century slang sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel.
Marie-Angelique, a Metis Taurus, is determined to woo Louis (a Metis Libra)—who will be arriving soon—by sending him boldly flirtatious letters. Eugenia, an Ojibwe Sagittarius, brings news of rebellion back to the fort after trading, but isn’t impressed by Louis’s true mediocre nature. And Cecilia, a pregnant British Virgo, is anxiously waiting on her husband’s return from an expedition, but can’t resist pining over the heartthrob Thomas Scott (Irish Capricorn), who is actually the one secretly responding to Marie-Angelique’s letters. This will all go smoothly, right?
Updated after its sold-out run at the Stratford Festival and with a brand-new study guide, this lively historical satire of survival and cultural inheritance shifts perspectives from the male gaze onto women’s power in the past and present through the lens of the rapidly changing world of the Canadian fur trade.
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Women Rising
$17.95“Put them in jail and throw away the keys.” That’s how many Canadians feel about their fellow citizens convicted of crimes. But that’s not how all Canadians feel. This eye-opening and inspiring book shows how one organization, Prison Fellowship Canada, is helping women prisoners in particular to keep their families together while they are incarcerated and to build better lives once they’re out. Several women describe in riveting and heart-wrenching detail their violent pasts and subsequent incarceration. They describe how they’ve broken free from their criminal pasts, reintegrated themselves into society, and even helped other women avoid going down the path that took them to prison.
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Women Teaching, Women Learning
$24.95Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives is a collection of essays exploring aspects of women’s formal and informal education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subjects of the essays are women who teach and learn in such traditional institutional-based settings as schools and universities as well as in informal learning networks that arose from travel and involvement in social activism. The authors write in a variety of styles in order to focus on the complex interplay of women and education with education broadly conceptualized as occurring at home, at school, and in the community.
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Women Wide Awake
$29.95Women Wide Awake is a collection of stories, poems, and visual art exploring folklore from the region of Sindh, Pakistan. This multi-genre book features stories of women, witches, sea monsters, and mystical saints, accompanied by art and poetry. Collectively they explore themes that have resonated with people for centuries–acts of courage, strength, defiance, and love. Two sisters build a labyrinthine palace to test their suitors . . . a woman swims across a treacherous river at night to meet her forbidden lover . . . a bartendress makes a grave mistake. These folktales have persisted across generations and national boundaries through ritual storytelling and song. The sculptures were created using reclaimed materials: sari fabric, wedding invitations, flowers, shells, and animal bones.
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Women’s Spirituality
$24.95Women’s Spirituality: Contemporary Feminist Approaches to Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Goddess Worship comes directly out of women’s grassroots efforts to understand and transform their spiritual traditions. It is a comprehensive account of the discussions, arguments, perspectives and approaches of contemporary women in Canada toward spirituality and the monotheistic religions. The author presents a concise history of each religion, discusses normative practices and focuses on the roles, rituals and rights of contemporary women as they accommodate to and deal with their respective religions. Women’s Spirituality deals with women’s encounters with spirituality within the framework of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and outside of this framework within the new religions of contemporary Goddess worship. Women’s spirituality flourishes in all traditions, however male-dominated they may be. Somehow, women find, or make, space in which they can express their deepest spiritual feelings and thoughts. The aims of this book are to acquaint readers briefly with the range of expressions of women’s spirituality; to give an accessible report on feminist theology, the theology that takes into account women’s experiences; and, in particular, to examine how feminist theologians treat the central issues in three old traditions and one new one. An updated, and revised edition of Stuckey’s successful 1998 book, Feminist Spirituality: An Introduction to Feminist Theology in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Feminist Goddess Worship, this book will be useful to anyone unfamiliar with the work of feminists within any or all of the three monotheistic traditions that have been so crucial to shaping western attitudes to and treatment of women. The book an introduction to one of the fastest-growing new forms of women’s spirituality in the West: Feminist Goddess Worship.
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Wonder World
$21.95WINNER, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Wonder World is a look at a part of the country not often written about (Casey Plett’s work and Miriam Toews’ come to mind – these places do exist in literature, just not widely) and a wonderful contribution to the queer literary landscape. I’ll be on the lookout for what Byggdin writes next.” – Tara-Michelle Ziniuk, ROOM Magazine
Twenty-seven-year-old Isaac Funk is broke, drifting, and questioning his lonely existence on the East Coast. Having left his conservative hometown of Newfield, Manitoba full of piss and vinegar, Isaac’s dreams of studying music and embracing queer culture in Halifax have gradually fizzled out. When his grandfather dies and leaves him a substantial inheritance, Isaac is pulled back to the Prairies for the first time in ten years.
Finding his father Abe just as enigmatic and unreachable as always and his extended family more fragmented than ever, Isaac begins to wonder if there will ever be a place for him in Newfield.
Is the prodigal son home for good, or is it time to cut and run once more?
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Wonderfull
$22.95When Emma Brodie, local prophet and mother of three, steals a boat and exiles herself to the middle of the bay for seven days and seven nights, she sets about a chain of strange and wonderful events in the sleepy village of Garfax–a village no longer listed on any official government document. Radios begin to speak secrets and unintended confessions, a rainstorm occurs that lasts for months, a young boy dies mysteriously in the surrounding woods after following the dictates of his heart, and Caleb Anson, the village’s prodigal son, returns after a long absence with a grand design to bring Garfax into ‘the future’.
This magic realist tale, where dead relatives play dominoes in the houses of their loved ones, is told by Emma’s youngest son, Oswald, a shy, observant boy living in the shadow of his charismatic family. Wonderfull tells the story of Garfax–which has become the stuff of legends to outsiders–and reveals how this village’s unlikely past catches up to its inevitable future.
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Wood
$18.00Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes)
Wood is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers – the real, the mythical, the dreamed-up, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud in a tempting world of sex and vice. A young caregiver to a special needs child ponders her romantic future alongside the true meaning of Crimson & Clover. Bess Houdini, married to the world’s greatest magician, conjures the children she’ll never have. Mad Men’s Sally Draper, daughter of a philandering genius, grows up desperately trying to both defy her father and become him.
The poems in Wood are playful, surprising, tender, and brave… and universal in their emotional resonance.
Praise for Wood:
Poetry in Transit selection (poem from the book displayed on Vancouver city buses)
Favourite Poetry of 2013, 49th Shelf (Kerry Clare)
The Canadian Mad Men Reading List pick, 49th Shelf
“… drills to the core of the familiar and the fictional in a nuanced exploration of the makings of a person … Harper fills WOOD with questions of fertility and family, growth and failure, turning over in tensile language what it means to be real. Rooted, economical, and sharp, Harper’s poems blur the line between dramatic monologue and memoir, WOOD hammering out what it is we reach for, what it is we lack.” (Poetry is Dead)
“Wood is meticulously packaged, the trunk-ring design from the cover repeated on the endpapers.The package is important, first because it’s beautiful, but also because Wood is a project of parts rather than strictly a whole and how these parts fit together is a huge part of the book’s appeal. … Wood appears to have emerged from several different projects whose connections were secondary, and yet how these connections functionhow these poems speak to one another, echo one another, underline and overwriteis the book’s most compelling quality. It’s a kind of puzzle to discern how these pieces fit together, and each reread will unearth a new layer of understanding (or perhaps another ring in the grain?). Which is good reason then to stay up reading late into the night.” (Pickle Me This, blog)
“While the longings and fears of parents are captured in Wood, it is in the pain and perils of children – wanted or rejected, living up to expectations or running away from their parents – that Harper finds her most powerful voice. In allowing these characters to be glibly, gloriously fictionalized, their narratives become even more authentic.” (Quill & Quire)
“On Our Radar,” 49th Shelf
Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2013: Poetry, 49th Shelf
A selection from Wood, “The Sally Draper Poems,” has been featured in Slate to great acclaim
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Wooden Ships & Iron Men
$18.95A colourful account of the adventures of the schooner Fronie Myrtle (1935-1949) and her heroic, strong-willed crew as they fished the treacherous waters off Newfoundland and Labrador. Includes numerous photographs, historic documents, drawings and maps.
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Woodlands Canoeing
$16.95A recreational canoeman in his native Texas, Rick Sparkman thought he knew all about the sport when he moved to Nova Scotia in 1981. The swift, cold rivers and streams of his new home adjusted his thinking in the most personal way: he got dumped. That’s when he started learning to paddle in earnest.
Woodlands Canoeing explains the fundamentals of recreational canoeing in the woods of the Maritimes, New England, and anywhere else where the waterways are small, the water is swift and at times shallow, and canoeing varies with the seasons. It’s a guide to safe, comfortable recreation for those who already canoe a little and want to know more, as well as for people experienced in canoeing on lakes or on the more predictable rivers described in other canoeing books.
Woodlands Canoeing outlines the advantages of various kinds of equipment and describes canoeing and camping techniques in words, photos, and drawings, mixing practical information with anecdotes drawn from Sparkman’s years of family canoeing. Throughout, Sparkman concentrates on having fun, even when the expected summer shower becomes the tail of a hurricane or the canoe has to be inched over rocky shallows where only a few days earlier there was plenty of water. Keeping warm, dry, and well fed are crucial to Sparkman’s pleasure, and Woodlands Canoeing contains hints for packing, instructions for making camp, and recipes for delicious and satisfying meals.
Because of the region’s volatile climate and variable water conditions, Sparkman has learned how to canoe delightfully in all weathers, and in Woodlands Canoeing he passes his hard-won knowledge along. An enthusiastic winter canoeist, he even explains how to achieve this feat safely and — believe it or not — in comfort.
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Woodshedding
$18.00Adopting woodshedding — a jazz term for arduous, solitary rehearsal — as her writing practice, Venart has honed both her craft and a seeing heart.
Whatever their subject — the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events — S.E. Venart’s poems show us a kind of courage that is quotidian. Surviving childhood, surviving failed love, finding solace in the self, and reinvigorating that self: this is the world Venart reveals to us, in all its prescient detail. An honest and lyrical first book.
“Venart’s poetry reveals itself in the world of mysteries that lies between one bright orange next to one bright knife. Such is the domestic tension she creates, where home is turned inside out so the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Yet the power of her writing shows how simple things, observed with clarity, are lit from within. This is a book to read, then read again: once for the bright orange and once for the bright knife.”
— Anne Simpson
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Word, Woman and Place
$7.95Word, Woman and Place is McCarthy’s fourth collection of poetry. Selections from his earlier works are gathered together with recent poems into this powerful new book which demonstrates McCarthy’s range and achievement.