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Showing 9153–9168 of 9492 results
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When the World Was Twice as Big
$23.95From Amazon Canada First Novel Award finalist and Leacock Medal for Humour nominee, an endearing story about a young man confronting a long-buried family secret, his tumultuous relationship with his father—and the girl who connects it all.
In between the pages of his grief, Bill placed a single flower plucked from a bouquet of all the things that were my fault. This one flower was special because written on its petals was this: I was the reason my mother was gone.
After young Freddy defends his childhood friend Saskia in a fist fight, he suddenly realizes that the story of his mother’s disappearance is a lie. Not only that, but Saskia is connected—the girl he loves was there the day his mother left, ten years earlier.
As Freddy tries to understand how he and Saskia are connected by an accident in their childhood, his relationship with his father, Bill, becomes increasingly fraught. Unable to accept the truth of his family’s most stubborn secrets, Freddy leaves home, determined to live a solitary life. He hides out in a remote bush camp, small town diners and a lowly East Vancouver apartment with a view of the mountains. But as the years go by, the unanswered questions about that accident weigh on Freddy and he realizes that peace will require reconnecting with the loved ones he’s tried to forget.
Through witty and heartfelt prose, Drake returns to characters Freddy and Saskia from his novel Do You Think This Is Strange? and explores the trap of false narratives, the complexity of family secrets and the hope found in a world of honed truths.
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When Things Get Back to Normal
$16.95One Friday, Walter Dohaney, novelist M.T. (Jean) Dohaney’s husband, went out as usual to play hockey with his friends. She never saw him alive again. Without warning, Jean was plunged into the most painful and disorienting experience of her life. Faced with a tumult of emotions and sudden responsibilities, she turned to her writing for solace and began a journal. In her journal, Dohaney’s sharp sense of humour and her impatience with conventional pieties lay bare the depth of her bereavement, yet at the same time they express the life force within her. She is frank about her anger at Walt for playing hockey despite his heart condition and for not being there to take care of the house and family; she faces her annoyance at sincere well-wishers who say exactly the wrong thing; and she exposes her distressing loneliness.
When Things Get Back to Normal is a compassionate yet bracing companion for those struck down by loss, which indirectly gives practical advice about the changes that come with widowhood. Two years after her husband’s death, Jean agreed to publish her journal. When Things Get Back to Normal gained critical acclaim when it was first published in 1989, but its finest praise came from the dozens of people who wrote and called to tell the author how it had helped them through their own grief. When Jean’s novel A Fit Month for Dying was released in 2000, the publicity surrounding the book prompted a flurry of phone calls to the publisher from people seeking copies of When Things Get Back to Normal.
During the next year Goose Lane Editions sought out and acquired the book and the new edition was released, due in no small part to the many readers who took the book, and Jean Dohaney, into their hearts. Author Helen Fogwill Porter was one of the many that found strength in When Things Get Back to Normal when her husband died, and her introduction to this new edition offers her own experience of “normalcy.” Jean Dohaney’s new afterword tells where she is now, fifteen years after Walt’s death.
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When This World Comes to an End
$20.00Poems that journey through a tapestry of myths, archetypes and fables; of histories invented and revisited.
Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?
Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.Ê
Be the horse. Be patient and simple, blind
to anything beyond this moment, step out
on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that
there is something behind this, something
that sustains, propels, repeats.
(from “The White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908”) -
When Tish Happens
$19.95?In the early 1960s, a group of students at UBC started a magazine called Tish. The name was purposefully an anagram of shit, in order to demonstrate their youthful and iconoclastic attitude. In many ways, Tish, and its editors, became the clear break from older Canadian poets and styles. At the heart of the magazine, and the “movement,” was Frank Davey. And it is Davey who has written this definitive history.
Davey has organized the material as a memoir, starting from his own early days in Abbotsford, B.C., and gradually introducing the other poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah, despite the fact that Davey doesn’t meet them until they all arrive at UBC. Much of the theory of the Tish poets derives from the Black Mountain poets, an American movement that incorporated the writings of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan — who suggested the name itself. The Black Mountain poets believed that writing should be locally based and should grow out of the author’s own breathing patterns. The more specific to a locale, the better.
The poets are introduced as characters in a play, and when Fred Wah says, “Let’s start a magazine,” things happen. The first 19 issues became the calling card for a new type of poetry, but inevitably the writers began to go their own way. It is Davey’s commitment that holds the group together, despite their geographical separation.
The Tish movement provided the impetus to create a new, more contemporary Canadian poetry. And here, Frank Davey reveals how it started, grew, and became a lasting force.
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When Variety Was King
$17.95A television producer’s fascinating memoir of the golden age of the variety show
“Full of behind-the-scenes stories . . . For fans of TV history, there’s a gold mine here.” — Booklist
A humble Canadian boy who grew up to create iconic American TV shows featuring the Hollywood celebrities of the day, Frank Peppiatt made his breakthrough by developing the rock TV show Hullabuloo with his partner, John Aylesworth. That led to a writing gig for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé — and then to the long-running smash hit Hee Haw.
In this autobiography, he recounts a career that spanned from the 1950s to the 1980s, writing comedy and turning entertainers into household names on variety shows hosted by Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Sonny and Cher, and Perry Como. This anecdote-filled memoir of a bygone era will enthrall anyone interested in the early decades of television.
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When Variety Was King
$26.95He created Hee Haw, the number-one show on TV. He wrote and produced variety shows for Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Sonny and Cher, and Perry Como. He invented the rock TV show Hullabaloo. He was the most popular producer of his time — a time when variety television was king.
With his writing/producing partner John Aylesworth, Frank Peppiatt developed dozens of TV shows but their career began on air in the initial days of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, alongside other talented newcomers like Norman Jewison and Arthur Hiller. Then came a call from New York to write for the Eydie Gorme/Steve Lawrence show in 1958, and quickly “A & P” became the most in-demand writing and producing team around.
Peppiatt, a man who spent his life behind the scenes writing comedy and turning entertainers into household names, now recounts his own remarkable life story: a humble Canadian boy who grew up to create iconic American TV shows amid a cast of Hollywood celebrities. When Variety Was King captures the early days of TV with humour and spice.
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When Water Became Blue
$24.95Annie Ernaux meets Annie Dillard in this sultry story of a woman’s obsession with a painter — and a river.
A woman is on an artists’ retreat on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, taking time away from her partner and her daughter to write. There she encounters a painter who spends his days with his easel set up on the shore trying to capture the blue of the water. They are drawn to each other, and their desire builds, through conversations about art and the colour blue, into a passionate extramarital affair, both deep and fleeting.
Savage in its beauty, this new work from Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a novel of resilience and longing, staking out the territory of female desire, exploring how it’s been regarded through the ages and how it’s reflected in art and nature.
Following the bestselling Suzanne and To the Forest, this latest offering in a series of novels about women by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette captures the power and beauty of desire set against the power and beauty of nature. An accomplished filmmaker, Barbeau-Lavalette writes with a visual flair, embodying both the calm and the turbulence of the river that runs through the story.
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When We Were Old
$18.00At every stage of life, there are moments when we are old: moments of stunning, tragic, sardonic clarity, when the confusion of our existence settles to the ground and the world is made manifest to us in all its pitilessness and absurdity.
When We Were Old is a parade of such moments, whether they arise in the midst of domestic hurly-burly, midlife sex on a wilderness camping trip, or an accidental brush with atrocities on the internet; in a memory of childhood fear or youthful folly, a solitary reckoning in the mirror, or a stranger’s letter written from a nursing home. Terrible things happen to people and life goes on; the dead go on, sometimes mingling with the living: an unstoppable vitality keeps the world turning, and we take heart from “the bright lights in the eyes of the children.”
Unwin’s is a unique poetic voice, infusing worldly-wise world-weariness with dark humour and an amazing buoyant energy. It’s as if he’s looking at the world through a distanced enough lens to make the unbearable bearable, to set it in perspective as part of the human story and to find that story a source of endless wonderment. The book’s title hints at a voice from beyond the grave, looking back with equanimity and even a kind of tenderness at the way life runs roughshod over us and the way we keep rallying for as long as we can.
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When Words Sing
$29.95Meet the creators behind the words of Canadian opera in this exciting new collection of contemporary libretti. Featuring Ours by Robert Chafe, Rocking Horse Winner by Anna Chatterton, Beatrice Chancy by George Elliott Clarke, Missing by Marie Clements, Nigredo Hotel by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Shelter by Julie Salverson, and Dog Days by Royce Vavrek, When Words Sing turns the spotlight on everything that goes into writing libretti, answering frequently asked questions along the way.
Through supplementary interviews, essays, and illustrations, the book will examine the role of the librettist; how a libretto can inspire a composer, director, and designer; and how the relationship between words, music, sound, and design coalesces into an ageless theatrical form.
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Whenever You’re Ready
$22.95Backstage with one of Canada’s greatest stage managers
Whenever You’re Ready is an intimate account of the career of Nora Polley, who — in her 52 years at the Stratford Festival — has learned from, worked with, and cared for some of the greatest directors, actors, stage managers, and productions in Canadian theatrical history. In so doing, Nora became one of the greatest stage managers this country has ever seen.
Here is an account of the Stratford Festival’s history like no other. From her childhood forays into a theater her father, Victor, worked tirelessly to help maintain, to her unexpected apprenticeship and the equally unexpected 40 years of stage management it ushered in, this is the Stratford Festival seen exclusively through Nora’s eyes. Here is an immersive account of a life spent in service of the theater, told from the ground floor: where actors struggle with lines and anxieties, where directors lose themselves in the work, where the next season is always uncertain, and where Nora — a stage manager, a custodian, a confidante, a pillar, a rock — finds her rhythm, her patience, her perseverance, her love, her consistency, and her invisibility. These are the qualities that make a stage manager great and, whenever you’re ready, this book will show you why.
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Where Bodies Fall
$20.00Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal. Taylor Sanderson is the only daughter of affluent Trevor Sanderson, a legal partner on the Corruption Commission and a member of the Montreal ‘clan of influence.’ ‘I want the bastard who shoved my daughter down a hole and left her there to die alone!’ That discovery will shatter Trevor Sanderson and Lieutenant Detective Damiano, cutting its way through both their lives.
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Where Calling Birds Gather
$17.00Where Calling Birds Gather is a poetic journey spanning continents. From the Canadian Prairies we are wisked away to Australia and Ethiopia in search of exotic birds. Like the migrational patterns of the narrator’s quarry, the poems crisscross and overlap, they are pulled across the land as they search for new tastes, smells, lives and loves. And as the hyena’s cackle in the night and the Cassowary’s peck at the side of the road, the memory of the open prairie calls. When the reader finally “tacks” for home they only have to wait until the next migration.
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Where I Fall, Where She Rises
$22.95Where I Fall, Where She Rises is a novel that follows two women on opposite ends of a terrorist kidnapping. While one woman suffers and falls at the hands of her captors, the other exploits the fame of such a publicized event to secure a future for her unborn child. Lea Ironstone is a Canadian freelance journalist who recalls her time spent in the very dangerous red zone of Baghdad, after the 2003 U.S. invasion. A self-destructive addict, she refuses to relegate herself to the safer green zone, where most mainstream news journalists like Paul Shell are protected. Desperately seeking a more controversial story to re-establish his fame as a television journalist for GNN, Paul Shell contacts Lea and agrees to meet her in the red zone for a recent finding. They are kidnapped by an insurgent terrorist sect and tortured repeatedly. Carol Shell, Paul Shell’s wife lives in New York. Eight months pregnant, Carol is approached by Timothy Abel, her husband’s agent. Timothy wishes to represent her “victimhood,” which he sees as a very marketable and exploitable asset. Her appetite for fame and celebrity eclipses her familial priorities and she is coerced into a lifestyle that hinges on personal promotion. Lea and Paul find themselves incarcerated in a basement dungeon expecting their next “artistic” torture, while Carol makes her next public appearance to further her star. Lea and Paul’s relationship evolves into a mutual understanding of their united fate, while Carol, on the other side of the world, rises in public stature. The novel evolves into an emotional satire, which depicts two strong women who attack the consequences of war on two different fronts.
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Where I Wanted To Be
$18.95Dispirited by his performance review, Will Gough sets out to redeem himself by updating his company’s quality control procedures, while casting a hopeful eye toward other career opportunities. Despite his best intentions, his work troubles follow him home–to his wife and two sons, where empty yogurt containers are half-sacred, technology a source of childhood wonder, and the business of the world bumps against the quiet walls that protect the rhythms of family life. It’s difficult to pull off a portrait of a nice guy in ordinary circumstances, going through the stress of daily living and tensions surrounding job and career opportunities, and he does it very well in simple, understated prose. No sensationalism or alien beings or suicidal desperation or academic angst or terrorist attacks or other assorted rampages and violations: just a life without earthshaking incident, but subtly humourous and convincing.
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Where It Hurts
$19.95Finalist for the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Awards–Non-Fiction!
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the 2018 BC Book Prizes!Where It Hurts is a highly charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw’s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and expose what–and who–goes missing.
With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has known and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known–emotionally, physically, psychologically–with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw’s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.
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Where Seas and Fables Meet
$20.00A book that is an open door, a current, an open window, a breeze over uncut grass, a dance of morning light on an old ruined sundial, a set of waves flowing up on a strange shore. This is a book that asks why do we give in to the psychotic and invasive Structure (and its many names)? A book that mingles witticisms and provocations so that the reader may settle into his or her soul and reflect. A book that works in associations, echoes, pulses, images, returns, vibrations, thought-experiments, dreams, visions and revisions. This is a book that should have an ellipse on the front page with an image of a shock of light