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All Books

All Books in this Collection

  • Women Wide Awake

    Women Wide Awake

    $29.95

    Women 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.

  • Women’s Spirituality

    Women’s Spirituality

    $24.95

    Women’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.

  • Wonder World

    Wonder World

    $21.95

    WINNER, 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?

  • Wonderfull

    Wonderfull

    $22.95

    When 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.

  • Wood

    Wood

    $18.00

    Finalist, 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 function–how these poems speak to one another, echo one another, underline and overwrite–is 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

  • Wooden Ships & Iron Men

    Wooden Ships & Iron Men

    $18.95

    A 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.

  • Woodlands Canoeing

    Woodlands Canoeing

    $16.95

    A 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.

  • Woodshedding

    Woodshedding

    $18.00

    Adopting 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

  • Word, Woman and Place

    Word, Woman and Place

    $7.95

    Word, 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.

  • Words are the Worst

    Words are the Worst

    $17.95

    Born in 1968 in The Hague, Erik Lindner is one of the Netherland’s most acclaimed poets. Admired for a style that fuses simplicity with strangeness, Lindner builds his poems through a montage of descriptive images that, by fending off closure, generate extraordinary visionary power. Gathering together new work with a selection from his previous six collections, Words are the Worst offers a range of pleasures that have made him celebrated in his home country: an austere eloquence; a hard, unsparing precision; a restless and idiosyncratic eye. Best of all is how his intensely filmic observations transform haunted landscapes of windmills, birds, dogs and houseboats on canals into, as one critic put it, “Lindner-like” moments. Brilliantly translated by Francis R. Jones, with an introduction by Canadian poet David O’Meara, Words are the Worst introduces a leading Dutch voice to English readers.

  • Words Out There

    Words Out There

    $18.95

    “A book of women poets in Atlantic Canada – not a moment too soon.” –PK Page

  • Wordwings

    Wordwings

    $20.00

    In 1941, 12-year-old Rivka Rosenfeld lives in the Warsaw Ghetto with her grandfather and two sisters in a synagogue because housing is scarce. When German soldiers slash her grandfather’s beard, Rivka is compelled to write in between the pages of a library book by Hans Christian Andersen. Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the Underground Archive–a compilation of Warsaw Ghetto experiences, asks her to contribute her stories to the archives and Rivka agrees, imagining her words rising up from the ground on wings of their own.

  • Work to Be Done

    Work to Be Done

    $26.95

    Essays and critical writing drawn from a wide-ranging fifty-year career in letters

    Drawn from a body of essays and reviews written over the course of nearly fifty years, Work to Be Done showcases both the depth and breadth of Bruce Whiteman’s critical work. Widely published across Canada and the United States, Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar, and his broad interests have never been limited to any one subject area. He moves between classical and contemporary literature, and music, book and literary history, shifting seamlessly from the close reading of a poem to the consideration of the life and oeuvre of an artist.

    In these thirty-four selected essays, Whiteman demonstrates the cohesion of his varied body of work, which ranges from essays on such poets as Sappho, Goethe, Samuel Beckett, P.K. Page, Leonard Cohen and Philip Larkin, to insightful readings of the biographers and translators of such great writers as Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Work to Be Done is an erudite and eclectic tour of Whiteman’s finest critical investigations.

  • Work, The

    Work, The

    $19.95

    When aspiring stage-manager Rebecca Weir falls for the married director of the SenseInSound theatre company, she initiates a love triangle-and a working collaboration-which go on for two decades. Beginning in Toronto in the early 1980s, The Work traces the rise and fall of SenseInSound. The director has the status of a guru within the company, and his disciples call their method The Work. Is he pushing people to creative heights or abusing his power? Is The Work a cutting-edge artistic practice, a road to personal healing, or a cult? And as his top deputy, is Rebecca complicit, or merely loyal? A historian trying to write about the company, many years later, has little to go on but internet searches-that is, unless the women behind the man find a way to speak out.

  • Workbook

    Workbook

    $18.95

    Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.

    “I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves — readers — as well.”

    It’s in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time — and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself — that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.

  • Working for the Man, Playing in the Band

    Working for the Man, Playing in the Band

    $34.95

    A young, long-haired rock guitarist finds the funk on stage with the Godfather of Soul

    In this unvarnished account of toiling under one of popular music’s most notorious bosses, Damon Wood details his six years spent playing guitar for James Brown’s Soul Generals.

    In a memoir certain to fascinate Mr. Dynamite’s millions of fans, as well as musicians and industry insiders, Wood recalls how a chance encounter with James Brown led him to embrace soul and funk music under the tutelage of its greatest progenitor. Numerous interviews with bandmates provide multiple perspectives on James Brown’s complex character, his leadership of his band, the nature of soul and funk, and insights and sometimes harsh lessons learned along the way.

    This is a sideman’s story of the gritty reality of working close to the spotlight but rarely in it. Damon Wood describes life on the road — often on James Brown’s infamous tour bus — with one guitar, a change of clothes, and two dozen comrades-in-arms as they brought the funk to clubs, theaters, and the biggest music festivals on earth. Working for James Brown could be fear-inducing, inspiring, exhilarating, and exasperating — all in the space of a single performance.