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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Wipe Under a Love

    Wipe Under a Love

    $12.95

    Margaret Christakos’ fourth poetry collection playfully filters the refrains of domestic experience through an ever-shifting procedural sieve, rendering a series of ground-out texts which lift the vernacular to the plane of exuberant bliss. A woman’s kaleidoscopic self-image emerges where memory and culture double back on each other amidst the practical realities of needing to leave the scene of mothering in order to write at all. The lover within the mother is invited throughout to speak and deliver herself through a series of impassioned memoirs to an exhilerating and complex embrace of the present.

  • Wire-Thin Bride

    Wire-Thin Bride

    $8.95

    The Wire-Thin Bride, Cornelia Hoogland’s first book of poetry, displays a major new talent. Hoogland offers a compassionate reading of the female experience, of lineage, love, family and death, with singular lyric intensity and emotion. Highly sophisticated, delicately wrought, these poems are the graceful affirmation of a woman’s responding spirit and profound communion with the living past.

  • Wiseman’s Wager

    Wiseman’s Wager

    $21.95

    From an emergency room in Calgary, where an intern hears his poorly timed joke about suicide, Zan winds up on the psychologist’s couch. But the doctor’s efforts to investigate Zan’s mental state are constantly stymied by his misfiring memory, his wry delivery, and his novelist’s tendency to embellish. Is he misremembering, misrepresenting, crafting a better story or all of the above? Through the streets of Strike-era Winnipeg, Toronto during the Depression, and the 1980s Calgary of Zan’s new life, Dave Margoshes’s compellingly unreliable narrator treats the reader to a magnificent meditation on aging, family ties, faith, and the liquid concept of the truth.

  • Wish Book

    Wish Book

    $15.95

    No other form of amusement has ever been devised that appeals as strongly to the public and raises the excitement to the highest pitch as Wish Book.

    Popular and fascinating, this book is a high class article, not a cheap junky affair. A varied collection of the best and latest rube jokes, tramp stories, monologues, funny sayings, etc., Wish Book will attract and hold the reader, and is far more popular thanthe ordinary book. Order today. This book makes a hit anywhere. A very good souvenir or favour. Always a big seller. Always popular. Collapsible. The author of this successful book is one of the most prolific authors of his generation.

  • Wishipedia

    Wishipedia

    $17.00

    In 1982 Pier Giorgio Di Cicco entered a monastery and didn’t break publishing silence for fifteen years. In 2004 he was elected Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto and went on to become a renowned speaker on urban design and the future of cities. In 2017 he moved into the oldest haunted church rectory in Canada, from where he mapped a cyber-cosmology for our times with wizardly humor, holographic abandon and a litany of blessings across dimensions. The former monk became the ghost of St. Columbkille

    Enclosed in this book are catalogues and inventories of wish fulfillment, and a fascinating “virtual game” in which the “player” becomes master of an imagination not his own, where past and present and future find a trajectory that makes faster-than-light travel look old-fashioned.

    Wishipedia is the public code to the private space that is both mythic and stunningly contemporary.

  • Witchdoctor’s Bones, The

    Witchdoctor’s Bones, The

    $22.95

    In The Witchdoctor’s Bones a group of tourists gather in Namibia. Some have come to holiday, others to murder. Canadian Kate ditches her two-timing boyfriend and heads to Africa on a whim, hoping for adventure, encountering the unexpected and proving an intrepid adversary to mayhem. The tour is led by Jono, a Zimbabwean historian and philosopher, and the travellers follow him from Cape Town into the Namib desert, learning ancient secrets of the Bushmen, the power of witchcraft and superstition, and even the origins of Nazi evil. A ragged bunch ranging from teenagers to retired couples, each member of the group faces their own challenges as third world Africa pits against first world greed, murderous intent and thwarted desire. The battle between goaded vanity and frustrated appetite culminates in a surprising conclusion with shocking twists. With the bones of consequence easily buried in the shifting sands, a holiday becomes a test of moral character. Unpredictable, flawed, fun-loving, courageous, bizarre, weak, kind-hearted and loathsome; the individuals in this novel exist beyond the page and into real life. Seamlessly weaving history and folklore into a plot of loss, passion and intrigue, the reader is kept informed and entertained as this psychological thriller unfolds.

  • Witches and Idiots

    Witches and Idiots

    $9.95

    Poems by Order of Canada inductee and founder of Grain magazine Ken Mitchell.

  • Witching Hours, The

    Witching Hours, The

    $19.99

    The Witching Hours is an anthology of comics about magic- al women written, illustrated and edited by women and non-binary persons. It explores the range of what a witch can be and celebrates powerful and magical women. The book features 11 stories ranging from fantasy to horror to slice of life; including a history of the medieval witch trials, a folk story from the Philippines, and even a recipe for herb strawberry bread.

  • With a Closed Fist

    With a Closed Fist

    $22.95

    In the Point St. Charles of the author’s childhood people move for one of two reasons: their apartment is on fire, or the rent is due. Starting in 1968, eight-year-old Kathy Dobson shares her early years growing up in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal (now in the process of gentrification). She offers a glimpse into the culture of extreme poverty, giving an insider’s view into a neighbourhood then described as the “toughest in Canada.”

    When student social workers and medical students from McGill University invade the Point, Kathy and her five sisters witness their mother transform from a defeated welfare recipient to an angry and confrontational community organizer who joins in the fight against a city that has turned a blind eye on some of its most vulnerable citizens. When her mother wins the right for Kathy and her two older sisters to attend schools in one of Montreal’s richest neighbourhoods,Kathy is thrown into a foreign world with a completely different set of rules, leading to disastrous results.

  • With All Her Might

    With All Her Might

    $17.95

    Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in single file on the street close to the curb as passersby stared and shouted rude remarks. It was a poster-parade of Militant Suffragettes demanding votes for women; after more than two decades of mild action, the Suffragettes were on the warpath.

    Gertrude Harding couldn’t wait to join them. After a short initiation, Harding and a comrade-in-arms hit conservative Englishmen in a very tender spot: they smashed up the orchid house at Kew Gardens. Then, to counter government violence, Harding organized a cadre of women who learned jujitsu and wore Indian clubs on their belts. This bodyguard had two jobs: to deter the policemen who tried to haul Suffragettes off to prison, and to arrange escapes for Suffragettes on the run. When the politicians changed tactics and the bodyguard’s work decreased, Harding served as a private secretary to Christabel Pankhurst, the movement’s strategist. Then, as World War I intensified, Harding became the publisher of the Suffragette newspaper, again staying one jump ahead of the police. During the War, Harding found her second career: she became a social worker among women labourers in a munitions plant. Afterwards, she did social work in industrial New Jersey.

    When she retired, she gardened and sold jam, and she also wrote her memoirs, which she illustrated with sketches and snapshots. Finally, old and ill, she returned to Rothesay, New Brunswick, where she died in 1977.

  • With Bated Breath

    With Bated Breath

    $17.95

    With Bated Breath asks questions about memory—how and why it plays such a prominent role in our lives: how time affects it, how it fractures, how we often reinvent it depending on the situation—and why it is that certain things stay with us with a blistering clarity, while the shadows of other people and events simply slip away, only to reveal themselves again later in our lives when we least expect them.

    This is the provocative tale of Willy, a troubled but charismatic gay kid who flees Cape Breton Island for Montreal with hopes of forgetting a newly broken heart by starting a new life in the big city. There, hopelessly awkward and naïve, caught up in the cynical and brutalizing cash-economy of the city’s red light district, he retreats ever further into a world of fantasy and anonymity, and soon goes missing without a trace. Willy, in one way or another, has had a profound effect on the lives of the people he has touched. As rumours fly, secrets explode and reality blurs with fantasy, he is both remembered and reinvented by each of the play’s characters in their own way.

    Though Willy’s self-appointed, newfound and worldly wise mentor had cautioned him, “There’s nothing safe. We’re never safe. If you ever thought you were, you were in denial,” it’s too late for this dreamer who ignored the best advice he ever got from those who cared for him: “You just don’t find a soul mate—you have to invent them. Cuz love at first sight sure don’t last.” What lasts at the end of the day is memory—the necessary tale we tell ourselves to both make sense of our past and to give ourselves hope for a future without having to lose those we have loved.

  • With English Subtitles

    With English Subtitles

    $18.95

    With English Subtitles is Carmine Starnino at his most inventive. The poems in this collection are exceptionally focused, musical and inviting. Household objects, Italian relatives, Yukon landscapes, worst-case scenarios and relationships are pushed onto the page with new-found urgency and delight. Here for the first time, Starnino has set aside the restraint of his earlier work in favour of a bold swagger and forthright musicality.

    Starnino’s fascination with old objects is translated into poems that combine history and close scrutiny with lively personification and corresponding sound. These poems capture the true energy and anima of supposedly inanimate items. The aged suitcase exudes an air of hurry and persistence, “still champing to be off.” The iron gives a “suspirating hush as it catches its breath.” For each of these items, Starnino locates a pulse and charts the specifics of its breathing. Coupled with this energy is a focus on the process of decay and the beauty contained therein. Junkyard, charity auction, failed relationship and autumn all center on the varied and tenuous aesthetic of rust.

    The poems in this collection are sensual, abundant and rushing. Starnino builds towers of sound and rhythm, introducing all the whim and decadence of bygone days to modern pragmatics and speech. His inventive use of language and personable interruptions draw readers inside an understanding of the world that is both grounded and imaginative. The result is a watertight and satisfying collection: poetry that proves resoundingly that art and life depend on one another for inspiration.

    This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with cover flaps. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Octavian and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper. The cover is hand-printed letterpress.

    Winner of the 2004 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2006 F.G. Bressani Literary Prize.

  • With My Back to the World

    With My Back to the World

    $22.00

    In an ambitious, yet intimate novel set in Taos, New Mexico, and Hamilton, Ontario, Sally Cooper explores unexpected motherhood, creativity, race, love and faith. With My Back to the World tells the stories of three women: Rudie, who is editing a documentary in Hamilton in 2010; historical artist Agnes Martin, who decides in 1974 after seven years’ exile in New Mexico to begin painting again; and Ellen, a black woman burying her husband in 1870 on an Ontario homestead. Each of these women is waiting for the arrival of an unexpected child and their interconnected stories explore how society’s, and our own, ideas of what it means to be a woman, a mother and an artist change over time. Evocative and introspective, With My Back to the World tells the complicated stories of how different women find faith in themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

  • With Unfailing Dedication

    With Unfailing Dedication

    $24.00

    The sequel to With Unshakeable Persistence&#46 McLachlan takes us into the next decade&#44 relating with vivid&#44 sometimes shocking detail&#44 the experiences of prairie teachers during and after the second world war&#46

  • With Unshakeable Persistence

    With Unshakeable Persistence

    $24.00

    A compilation of individual stories based on the author&#146s interviews and correspondence with several depression era teachers&#46

  • Within the Glass

    Within the Glass

    $15.95

    Two very different couples meet after a critical mistake at a fertility clinic: a fertilized egg has been implanted into the wrong woman. Over the course of an awkward and absurd evening, they fight to determine the uncertain future of their IVF child. The situation forces each of them to reassess their relationships, the depths of their desire to parent, and their hopes for the future.