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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Where the Winds Dwell

    Where the Winds Dwell

    $18.95

    Where the Winds Dwell is a letter from a father to his daughter. It is Patricia’s inheritance; her family history, which takes root in Iceland, blossoms in North America, and spans more than a century. But a family myth is more than a shoebox of letters and papers. Patricia’s father, a world-class opera singer, has given melody to their family’s journey from Iceland.

  • Where the Words Come From

    Where the Words Come From

    $22.95

    In April, 2000, when the celebrated Canadian poet Al Purdy died, Alberta writer Tim Bowling decided that the best way to pay homage to Purdy would be to devote an entire book to the many fine poets still living and writing in Canada. Where the Words Come From is a comprehensive collection of eighteen interviews, in each of which a younger, less widely known poet questions an older, more established peer on a wide range of issues related to what Chaucer called “the craft so long to learn.” Why does a person become a poet? Where do the ideas for poems originate? How do poets feel about such matters as publication, reviews and prizes? What influences and interests drive a poet’s creativity? And what value does poetry have for the individual and for the community at large?Poets are rarely given such an opportunity to discuss what matters to them most in their art, and this alone makes Where the Words Come From an important contribution to Canadian culture. But, in addition, the bringing together of generations, from poets in their late twenties to those in their mid eighties, and including all the decades in between, makes this gathering of voices a unique representation of the past, present, and future of poetry in Canada.Among the poets interviewed are many of the most honoured who have ever published in this country: P.K. Page, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Don Coles, Don McKay, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Patrick Lane. And the poets asking the questions form the nucleus of Canada’s poetry future, including Stephanie Bolster, Carmine Starnino, Ken Babstock, Helen Humphreys, David O’Meara and Julie Bruck.A highly readable treasure trove of talk and insight for affirmed fans of Canadian poetry, as well as for anyone interested in learning more about this most intriguing of art forms, Where the Words Come From celebrates over a half-century of wonderful writing while it looks ahead to a future that promises continued excitement and excellence.

  • Where There`s Life, There`s Lawsuits

    Where There`s Life, There`s Lawsuits

    $17.95

    Where There`s Life, There`s Lawsuits

  • Where There’s Smoke…

    Where There’s Smoke…

    $22.95

    One of the most iconic villains in the history of television, the enigmatic Cigarette Smoking Man fascinated legions of fans of the 1990s’ hit TV series, The X-Files. Best known as “Cancerman,” he was voted Television’s Favourite Villain by the readers of TV Guide. The man behind the villain, William B. Davis, is a Canadian actor and director, whose revelations in this memoir will entertain and intrigue the millions of X-Files aficionados
    worldwide.

    But there is more to Davis’s story than just The X-Files.

    Davis’s extensive acting experience began when he was a child in Ontario in the 1950s, and grew to encompass radio, theatre, film, and television. At the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy, he turned his hand to directing, a move that took him to theatre school in Britain and a directing career. There, he reconnected with his undergraduate colleague, Donald Sutherland, and worked at the National Theatre, with such notables as Sir Laurence Olivier, Dame Maggie Smith, and Albert Finney.

    Those who love the theatre will delight in his recollections of the Straw Hat Players in Ontario or the trials and tribulations of an artistic director of repertory theatre in Dundee, Scotland, or his valiant attempt to create a theatre in Quebec devoted to the Canadian repertoire. Those who love history will relive with Davis those “golden years” of Canadian radio drama and theatre, not to mention enjoying an inside look at the National Theatre School of Canada where he directed the English Acting Program in the ’60s. Those who love a bit of scandalous gossip will not be disappointed.

    Written in an easy conversational style, this memoir truly is “The Musings of the Cigarette Smoking Man” – as William B. Davis reflects on his loves, his losses, his hopes, his fears, and his accomplishments in this unique and engaging autobiography.

  • Where They Stood

    Where They Stood

    $21.95

    A collaborative work by young Black writers and the Black Community Resource Centre, Where They Stood examines history beyond racism and slavery to reveal the inspiring story of Montreal’s English-speaking Black community. In this collection, nine writers explore the rich histories of the immigrants, labourers and activists who built the cultural, social and political community that exists to this day. By highlighting Black achievement and perseverance, these essays reimagine what possibilities may lie ahead. Where They Stood is a story of positivity, triumph, and joy.

  • Where We Buried the Sun

    Where We Buried the Sun

    $25.95

    The memoir of a young woman who&#44 in 1951 at the age of 17&#44 was arrested for her involvement with an underground organization demanding alternatives to Stalinist rule and&#44 as a result&#44 spent five years in the Soviet prison system&#46Tumanov belonged to group of young people who believed in freedom and equality&#44 and were willing to stand up for their beliefs&#46

  • Where Words Like Monarchs Fly

    Where Words Like Monarchs Fly

    $14.95

    Where Words Like Monarchs Fly brings Mexican poetry to the fullness of its senses in English with all the music of the meaning, richness of metaphor and humour. It introduces Jose Emilio Pacheco, Gabriel Zaid, Homero Aridjis and Elsa Cross – born in the thirties and the forties – along with the fifties generation they have inspired. Covering twenty-five years of development and ten poets in full representation by each, this book is essential for understanding the immediacies of new Mexican verse. In translation by prize-winning Canadian poets Kate Braid, Sylvia Dorling, George McWhirter, Caroline Davis Goodwin, Karen Cooper, Arthur Lipman, Iona Whishaw and Raul Peschiera, the English versions have already attracted a wide readership in The New Republic, Modern Poetry in Translation, PRISM International, London Magazine and others.

    Praise for Where Words Like Monarchs Fly:

    “The most important assembly of Mexican poetry in translation in three decades.” (This Magazine)
    “This earthly vision of potential and possibility spoken through a strongly committed social conscience makes Where Words Like Monarchs Fly a testament to the vitality of poetry and the poetic spirit needed to break free from the current global paradigm of domination and exploitation. While Canadians and Mexicans are pitted together and against each other in the economic battles provoked by NAFTA and free market trends in general, Canadians now have in this anthology another aperture on Mexican perspectives that will strike a resonant chord in many readers.” (Dr. Martha J. Nandorfy, Books in Canada)

    “How rare and wonderful to read such exquisite translations of the new poetry of Mexico. This book is a gift just as the Monarch butterflies are a gift as they fly between our two countries, fragile wings, amazing distances to fly. My life was changed in the Sixties by the translations of poets like Neruda and Paz. Now we have these new voices and we are changed again.” (Patrick Lane)

  • Where You Are

    Where You Are

    $15.95

    The place is a porch in Little Current on Manitoulin Island, where city-transplants Glenda and Suzanne have lived together since Suzanne arrived single, penniless and pregnant thirty-three years previous, moving in with Glenda and her late husband, Mark. While one is warm and industrious and the other brash and prone to late mornings, the sisters are nevertheless devoted to one another and spend laughter-filled days swapping stories about the locals and roping their appealing veterinarian neighbour, Patrick into various chores. This summer, an imminent visit from Suzanne’s daughter, Beth, a doctor from Toronto, is about to complicate things. Not only do Suzanne and Beth clash over everything, starting with Beth’s choice of pants, the sisters have recently been harbouring a weighty secret. When Beth arrives, it becomes clear that they aren’t the only ones. Amid a busy reunion week that includes a wild wedding, medicinal experimentation and a budding romance between the two doctors, the women are eventually forced to confront truths that will change all four lives forever. Where You Are is a hilarious and honest exploration of family, forgiveness and falling in love.

  • Where, the Mile End

    Where, the Mile End

    $18.00

    Where, the Mile End, Irish poet Julie Morrissy’s debut collection, embodies an energetic lyricism that whips through Europe and North America with humour, curiosity and a distinct edginess. Morrissy’s lines track emotional, physical, and geographical change, as she intimately links the vitality of two continents: the snow, the streets, the sensual memories. Where, the Mile End reimagines the places we inhabit, the moments we remember, the things we long for.

  • Where’s Bob?

    Where’s Bob?

    $19.95

    Newly divorced, Lydia’s life is in a downward spiral. Looking for respite, she takes off on a vacation to Mexico with her formerly estranged mother. But instead of sun and sand, what she finds beyond the hotel’s miniature jungles and Mayan statuary and folk dancing is a country where the people, many of whom serve her and her mother at the resort, live in fear, their lives dominated by cartels and corruption, and where journalists and politicians are made to disappear for even poking around the truth. But it’s also where she finds Bob, a mysterious man from Detroit who works all the angles.

    Peeling away the fantasy veneer of the tourists’ Mexico to reveal a real life underworld of money laundering, political intimidation, and murder, Where’s Bob? offers up a fast-paced tragicomic page-turner about mothers and daughters and the callous blindness of tourists, and how easy it is to slip from one world into the other.

  • Wherever We Mean To Be

    Wherever We Mean To Be

    $19.95

    A four-decade retrospective from the winner of the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.

    Spanning forty years and ten previously published collections, Wherever We Mean to Be is the first substantial selection of Robyn Sarah’s poems since 1992. Chosen by the author, the 97 poems in this new volume highlight the versatility of a poet who moves easily between free verse, traditional forms, and prose poems. Familiar favourites are here, along with lesser-known poems that collectively round out a retrospective of the themes and concerns that have characterized this poet’s work from the start.

    Warm, direct, and intimate, accessible even at their most enigmatic, seemingly effortless in their musicality, the poems are a meditation on the passage of time, transience, and mortality. Natural and seasonal cycles are a backdrop to human hopes and longings, to the mystery and grace to be found in ordinary moments, and the pleasures, sorrows, and puzzlements of being human in the world.

  • Whereverville

    Whereverville

    $15.95

    Dragging Newfoundland “kicking and screaming into the 20th century” (a quote attributed to Joey Smallwood), resettlement was a carrot-and-stick approach to depopulating the province’s fishing outports. Communities were encouraged to abandon themselves in exchange for financial aid and the promise of better services in centralized “growth” towns. Between 1954 and 1975, the Federal and Provincial governments brought about the move of more than 300 communities and 30,000 people. First and foremost, Whereverville is a work of fiction and its setting, the imaginary community of Loam Bay, does not appear on any map—tellingly, however, neither do many of the 300 communities by which this play was inspired.

    Set in a one-room school house during the decisive evening of the community’s vote on whether to stay or leave, Josh MacDonald’s play is an intriguing reversal of and homage to Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. While in Brecht’s play, the conclusion of the conflict over a community is that “those best able to take care of the land should possess it,” in Whereverville the conclusion is that “those no longer able to take care of the land should leave it.”

    In both plays, it is the heart and mind of a young woman bereft of her future on which the action turns. It is Loam Bay’s schoolteacher, Abby Shea, herself “from away,” who holds the deciding vote as she struggles with her own phantom attachment to the community, its citizens, and its ghosts of times past, and it is she who must learn that sometimes, in order to keep what we hold most dear, we must give it away—that “nothing lasts.”

  • While Supplies Last

    While Supplies Last

    $19.95

    Anita Lahey writes the kind of rigorously observed, emotionally charged poetry few can match. In While Supplies Last, her first collection in eleven years, Lahey throws herself on the mercy of a changing climate, takes refuge in art and revels in everyday wonders. In the final section, about a forest fire that devastated the Cape Breton village of Main-à-dieu in 1976, she becomes a custodian of local histories. No matter the subject, whether traffic reports during the pandemic, a fossilized baby mammoth, or Toronto’s iconic Don River, Lahey extends the sense of what language can do and say. This is tour de force writing: mischievous, unpredictable, urgent, never boring. In While Supplies Last, Lahey comes fully into her own.

  • While the Music Lasts

    While the Music Lasts

    $18.95

    When a world-famous rock star convicted of murdering his film star lover returns to his country retreat near the town of Saint-Brin after serving his time, this quiet community in the heart of wine country where Chief Inspector Aliette Nouvelle is based reacts with cool suspicion. Aliette is disturbed by the undercurrent of bitter moral outrage. When the disgraced Luc Malarmé begins to sing again, moral outrage boils over into violent acts, building to a murder.

  • While the Sun Is Above Us

    While the Sun Is Above Us

    $21.95

    While The Sun Is Above Us takes readers deep into the extraordinary world of Sudan through the intertwined narratives of two women. In the midst of a bloody civil war, Adut is brutally captured and held as a slave for eight years. Sandra, fleeing her life in Canada, travels to South Sudan as an aid worker but soon finds herself unwittingly embroiled in a violent local conflict. When chance brings Adut and Sandra together in a brief but profound moment, their lives change forever.

    In captivating prose, Melanie Schnell offers imaginative insight into the lives of innocents in a land at war, rendering horrific experiences with exquisite clarity. While The Sun Is Above Us explores the immense power of the imagination, the human desire for connection, and the endurance of hope.

  • While We’re Young

    While We’re Young

    $16.95

    A young soldier goes to Afghanistan, another to Passchendaele. A family splits in two when a Protestant falls in love with a Catholic; one hundred and twenty years later, it could happen all over again for a whole new set of reasons.

    From the University of Alberta’s inaugural Lee Playwright-in-Residence.