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Showing 9073–9088 of 9492 results
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Welcome to the Weird America
$25.00A.G. Pasquella’s Welcome to the Weird America brings together three of his brilliant, fabulist novellas, each of which is filled with strange language and extraordinary surprises. In Why Not a Spider Monkey Jesus?, written like a comic-book adventure without the images, a talking chimpanzee becomes a televangelist. In NewTown, the author’s love letter to science fiction, a teenage boy named Sammy joins a motley band of rebels intent on overthrowing the bungling admiral of a huge spaceship. And in The This & the That, Pasquella takes us back to the old weird America, an America of hucksters and hobos, cartoons and carnivals.
From questions about money and God to environmental collapse, to the intersection of humanity and technology, A.G. Pasquella tackles complex subjects with beautifully surreal prose and a deep delight in the tradition of weird fiction. These mesmerizing, upending stories will have readers setting off on a fascinating journey down an unknown road with no destination, or end, in sight.
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Welcoming
$18.95The poems included in this book explore many key contemporary issues, such as the relationship between the sexes; violence against girls and women; sexuality and gender identity; the relationship between human beings, animals and the environment; religion and spirituality; mental health and psychiatry; work, meaning, and exploitation; poverty and homelessness; multiculturalism; the value of children; and social community. The poet is also a professional philosopher, with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and so the book is informed by a lot of theoretical reading. However, while the insights of theoretical reading can often require much laborious study and be difficult to grasp and understand, this book is not itself theoretical but, rather, is highly accessible, able to be understood by a wide ranging readership. The writing is by turns innovative, playful, humorous, and visual, and engages readers in a number of ways.
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West End Murders
$12.95When a series of murders threatens the lives of an entire community in Vancouver, RCMP Corporal Paul Blakemore and Inspector Coswell team up once again to solve the case. What begins as an array of hate crimes suddenly culminates into a conspiracy against an American politician, and the lines between Canada and the United States are blurred as suspicions rise from both sides. To solve this case, both detectives must look beyond the powers of one culprit and instead focus on the ventures of an entire underground organization, all while protecting members of their own city. An intense thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end, West End Murders is a great bedside read that threatens to keep you up well into the night.
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West of Eden
$10.00These 17 essays ponder the character of prairie literature. What is prairie literature now, what has it been, and what is its future? That the prairies are “west of Eden” is an idea only, and a somewhat mischievous one. Is this spot distant from the glory of the garden? Writers have often pondered the ambiguous sanctity of the prairies, while those who recruited settlers certainly exploited the notion. These varied essays engage with Margaret Laurence, Rudy Wiebe, and Neil Young. They present analysis of NFB films and the gopher as icon. Here are strategies for teaching and views of the Canadian prairies from abroad. This is a significant collection of fresh views of prairie literature.
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West of Wawa
$22.95Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Numbing her pain with hard work, she self-medicates with prescription meds, and becomes involved in a series of increasingly dubious relationships with ill-suited unreliable men who lead her into danger. Cutting off all ties with normalized daily routines, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. During the bus trip she discovers junk food, cigarettes, hash and drinks a lot of alcohol. She confuses sexual attraction with love in a series of relationships with loser bad boys and continues to put herself in destructive, potentially dangerous situations. Hardcore, she travels for the most part by Greyhound bus, sinking deeper into the underbelly of a world that offers her the anonymity she seeks. Funny, aggressive, fearless and vulnerable, Benny is a road-warrior with a backpack of opiates, a map and a guileless sense of naiveté. In seventy-two days, she travels nearly ten thousand miles overland and more by flight and train; she’s a determined modern-day pioneer. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humour and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.
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West of West Indian
$20.95Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize, Poetry, 2025
Longlisted for the Hamilton Literary Awards, Poetry, 2025West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as simultaneously individual and collective, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. It collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey into queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing through the bodies and minds of its many subjects.
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Western Taxidermy
$19.95Roadkill stuffed and presented as art, an OB/GYN appointment gone horribly wrong, and government spies with a weakness for salmon bagels and Timmy Ho’s.Tender, satirical, and occasionally absurd, Barb Howard’s new story collection Western Taxidermy is a perfect introduction to one of Western Canada’s most high-spirited literary voices.In these sixteen stories, Howard effortlessly balances wry social commentary and prairie gothic, pairing humans and animals in clever and unexpected ways.
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Westray
$15.95When the Westray mine exploded, the human tragedy and suffering that resulted were chilling proof that the age-old price paid for coal is human blood. After the dead were laid to rest, the bureaucratic back-stabbing and corporate refusal of responsibility were all too familiar to followers of the history of mining and labour.
Andrew and Pam have a young son, and they have just purchased their first home. Even though conditions at Westray are nearly subhuman, and the mine is known to be dangerously mismanaged, Andy, alongside his co-workers, must descend under the ground again and again because the livelihood of his loved ones rests on his shoulders.
Cast of 2 women and 3 men.
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Wet Dream
$22.95Winner 2023 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.
“Erin Robinsong’s Wet Dream is an erotic epistemology of humors, the vital fluids linking bodies to cosmos. What does liquidity know?” — Lisa Robertson
“Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language — creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over.” — Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
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Whale in the Door
$24.95The hidden life of Howe Sound and the transformative power of Coast Salish culture and environmental science. An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman’s transformative experience of her adopted home. For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided abundant food, shelter, and stories, for the Squamish Nation. After a century of contamination from pulp mills, a chemical factory, and a copper mine, the Sound, a noisy, stinky, polluted place, contained many biologically dead zones. Marine life was severely diminished. But major efforts by the Squamish Nation, governments, and industry has produced dramatic returns of herring, dolphins, porpoises, orcas, and humpbacks.
Today, Howe Sound, a spectacular fjord in Vancouver’s backyard, is a popular recreation and tourism destination. The recovery, however, is fragile. The Sound is being inundated with proposals for re-industrialization-a controversial liquid natural gas plant, pipelines, super tankers, a gravel mine on a salmon-bearing estuary, and major residential and commercial developments.
Pauline Le Bel, a resident of Howe Sound, embarks on a journey of discovery to find out what is special about the Sound, its wild nature and its people, to witness the cultural and spiritual revivals taking place. Her research, her interviews, her travels on the land, the water, the skies of Howe Sound, compel her to abandon antiquated ideas about wilderness and community, and to arrive at a new appreciation for the genius of her home. Whale in the Door invites readers into a story of biological resilience as a community struggles to shape a vision for its future.
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Whale Riding Weather
$16.95A love story in which a faded old queen finds his life slipping away from him along with his young lover, who meets a new, younger man.
“One day when I was sitting in a tiny little basement bar I noticed a man sitting alone at the bar—an elegant old queen with snowy white hair perfectly sculpted around his translucent face. His eyes could have been any colour—they were empty. He remained very still, holding a brandy snifter with great reverence while a steady stream of tears flowed down his cheeks. I suddenly found myself inventing his history, wondering what it must have been like for him growing up gay—maybe in a small fishing village on the east coast.
Had he been ridiculed by his peers?
Disowned by his parents?
Did he run to a big city at too early an age?”
Cast of 3 men
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What a Fish Looks Like
$19.99What are the stories we need to survive?
In ten days, the last spaceship is leaving for a new planet. Some of us will stay on Earth. How do we decide?
#TeamEarth. Once upon a time, the oceans were full of fish and the forests dark with brambles. Seb read about it in a book of fairy tales, and memory means hope.
#TeamShip. Adaptation means knowing when to walk away. Jay is ready. So their ex, Seb, shows up on the dance floor, T-minus-10. What’s the harm in one last dance?
What if the stories themselves are evolving?
Told in margin notes, posters, letters scrawled on napkins, and six retellings of classic fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like gathers the stories of a queer community co-creating one another through the strange landscapes of climate change, wondering who is going to love us when there are not, in fact, plenty of fish in the sea.
And now this book belongs to you.
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What a Young Wife Ought to Know
$17.95Just don’t lie down and no child will come.
It’s Ottawa in the 1920s, pre-legalized birth control. Sophie, a young working-class girl, falls madly in love with and marries a stable-hand named Jonny. After two difficult childbirths, doctors tell Sophie she shouldn’t have any more children, but don’t tell her how to prevent it. When Sophie inevitably becomes pregnant again, she faces a grim dilemma.
In an unflinching look at love, sex, and fertility, and inspired by real stories of mothers during the Canadian birth-control movement of the early twentieth century, one of Canada’s most celebrated playwrights vividly recreates a couple’s struggles with reproduction.
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What birds can only whisper
$17.95Kendra Quillan, the leader of a feminist band in Toronto, journeys from imminent career success back into her past to confront her troubled childhood.”Bold is too heartless a word for Julie Brickman’s stunning first novel: brave. Fresh is too tame for her sizzling style–try spectacular. This novel takes us to the post-trauma depths of the psyche; it’s like being in a submarine whose searchlight makes us gasp at never-before-seen crevasses, life-forms, seams of fire–terrible and beautiful.”–Sena Jeter Naslund, author of The Animal Way to Love
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What Can You Do
$18.95In these twelve stories that unfold over a few hours or a weekend or five decades, adults deceive themselves about their motives—greed, desire for control, jealousy, fear, ambition. With unflinching realism reminiscent of William Trevor, Cynthia Flood exposes the failings of the human heart and, with a marvellous unsentimental brutality, leaves many a character unredeemed.
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What Can’t Be Undone
$18.95In her first collection of short fiction dee Hobsbawn-Smith creates protagonists struggling to navigate the domestic troubles common to life everywhere, including children attempting to make their parents proud, the disintegrating of romantic relationships, and dealing with death and loss. Her stories are rife with the disasters of homelessness, domestic violence, and child abuse, as she exposes the difficulties that arise in relationships between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and parents and children. Hobsbawn-Smith’s keen observation and the unflinching eye which she directs towards her characters’ flaws bring the land and its inhabitants into painful focus as they grapple with loss.
What Can’t Be Undone is a collection anchored in the Western Canadian landscape, and the natural imagery which has become synonymous to the area reigns supreme. These stories are strongly informed by local colour. Horses’ hooves echo from coulee walls, blue jays, crows, and eagles announce the seasons, and coyotes wail from distant valleys as Hobsbawn-Smith travels with her protagonists across rolling prairies, unforgiving mountain ranges, and along coastal highways.