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Showing 9185–9200 of 9248 results
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Yes, Miss Thompson
$19.95When plain, outspoken Yorkshire schoolgirl Marjory Thompson immigrates with her rambunctious family to Canada in 1904, her parents are convinced that fortune awaits in the flat farmland of Manitoba. Before long, the impatient Marjory realizes her parents have got it all wrong: nothing but hard work, loneliness, and boredom lie before them. Desperate to escape, Marjory takes one rural teaching post after another, scrimping and saving, until she can afford to attend university. After graduation, she is employed as a high school principal, a rare feat for a woman in the 1930s. What comes next, at the dawn of the feminist age, is not deserved success but a single act of terrible judgement that will haunt Marjory the rest of her life. With insight and imagination, Amy Boyes brings her great-grandmother’s past alive in this tale of immigration, struggle, and the long reach of history.
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Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon
$19.95Nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Translation
Yesterday, on my way back from the museum: my head is full of images of storms. A boundless sea of paintings and photographs. Other storms I build like a backdrop, with sombre and anonymous characters, impossible to identify. I remain thus all evening, pressed up against the existence of a storm without feeling threatened. Waiting. After a few moments I become, I am, the storm, the disruption, the precipitation, the agitation that puts reality in peril.
Carla Carlson is at the Hotel Clarendon in Quebec City trying to finish a novel. Nearby, a woman, preoccupied with sadness and infatuated with her boss, catalogues antiquities at the Museum of Civilization. Every night, the two women meet at the hotel bar and talk – about childhood and parents and landscapes, about time and art, about Descartes and Francis Bacon and writing.
When Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon appeared in French (as Hier), the media called it the pinnacle of Brossard’s remarkable forty-year literary career. From its intersection of four women emerges a kind of art installation, a lively read in which life and death and the vertigo of ruins tangle themselves together to say something about history and desire and art.
‘Hier is a book in which the love of language, authorial anxiety and the generosity of a writer who has dedicated herself to the craft of writing are truly revealed.’
– Le Devoir
‘An explorer of language, Brossard has, for many years, pursued a demanding and unarguably original oeuvre. Hier, her latest book, is a kind of sum or synthesis of her research and her meditations.’
– Lettres Québécoises
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Yesterday’s People
$22.95Yesterday’s People
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Yesterdays
$22.95A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head.
After years of suffering at the hands of white missionaries trying to convert Trinidadians to Christianity, Poonwa has decided, as payback, to go to Canada and start a Hindu mission. His father, Choonilal, doesn’t want to borrow the money Poonwa needs from the corrupt local priest. The whole village gets dragged into the fight, a distraction from the usual arguments over latrines and sexual dalliances.
First published in 1974, Yesterdays is a ribald, outrageous portrait of Trinidadian village life, and a prescient proto-parody of what would become the archetypal immigrant story. Sacred cows both literal and figurative are skewered in a series of increasingly absurd encounters between villagers who can’t keep their noses – and other body parts – out of their neighbours’ business.
A foreword by Kevin Jared Hosein contextualizes this important book, which was politically and aesthetically ahead of its time but lost after the untimely death of Harold Sonny Ladoo.
“Yesterdays upends conventional narratives that find sexual liberation in the postindustrial city. Ladoo’s agrarian villagers inhabit the fullness of their complex humanities in audaciously funny and often uncomfortable ways, and are radically at ease with their fluid sexual appetites. An under-appreciated gem, his novel is as much a testament to Ladoo’s skillful observation and rendering of the world that surrounded him as it is to the value of being tellers of our own stories.” – Andil Gosine, author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean
“Yesterdays is the novel, underappreciated on its initial release and since forgotten, that should have charted a deviant, audacious path through the staid self-seriousness of Canadian literature. Let’s hope there’s still time.” – Pasha Malla, author of All You Can Kill
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YICHUD (Seclusion)
$16.95Rachel and Chaim are Orthodox Jews living in Toronto. They have requested an arranged marriage and today is their wedding day. The Yichud Room is the place where the bride and groom go to be alone immediately following the wedding ceremony. In the case of Rachel and Chaim, who have only had a handful of chaperoned dates, this is the first time they have ever been alone together. In another part of the synagogue, tensions rise between the groom’s older brothers, Ephraim and Menachem, rival Torah scholars who haven’t seen each other in four years. Meanwhile, the bride’s parents, Mordechai and Malka, are secretly planning to divorce after the wedding. YICHUD (Seclusion) directly confronts the tensions that exist in the Orthodox Jewish world between tradition and modernity, powerfully dramatizing issues of love, marriage, respect, sex, honour, and duty.
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You Are Among Monsters
$19.95We call it a transfer? It?s important to use the terms, to distance yourself. It?s a dead guy in the back of a van, really, but the words can be something else. Dead bodies, Rum-runners, Murdered mothers. Small-town Alberta is home to Ian, a transfer agent who removes dead bodies all day and who has forgotten how to talk to the living; Becky, a failed academic looking to invent a violent history to escape her mundane present; and Athene, a young woman who witnessed her mother?s murder and now seeks answers from the man who took her mother?s body away. In You Are Among Monsters, the dead have stories left to tell. But who gets to do the telling?
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You Are Here
$14.95You are about to meet Alison, who searches her life for meaning in nthis remarkable and powerful play. In a series of luminous moments and encounters, we’re drawn into Alison’s world: love that fades, hopes that die, and enduring friendship that offers the promise of redemption. In You Are Here, MacIvor shows us, and our emotional reality is in this moment, now. Carol Bolt once wrote that Daniel MacIvor’s theatre is “Öa world of poetry, ceremony and mystery.” You AreHere is a daring, intimate and profound theatrical experience.
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You Are Here: Selected Stories
$26.95Gathering the best twenty stories from Cynthia Flood’s career, these spare, stylistically inventive stories explore subjects ranging from the domestic to the political.
In this collection, Flood navigates a wide range of subject matter with a writing style which gradually becomes more intense, tighter, and sometimes experimental with each story. Most themes are familiar—love, hate, children, the natural world, parents, failure, despair, anger, regret. Other stories are more unusual, dealing with topics such as far-left political activity. Containing what may be some of Flood’s most poignant work, You Are Here is a sharp and engaging exploration of the world today.
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You Are Not Needed Now
$20.00You Are Not Needed Now is a brilliant new collection of stories from Annette Lapointe, author of the Giller-nominated novel Stolen.
Often set within the small towns of the Canadian prairies, the stories in You Are Not Needed Now dissect and examine the illusion of appearances, the myth of normalcy, and the allure of artifice. Lapointe presents characters who are extraordinarily real. They are often strange, vulgar, or messy: collecting blood-stained cotton pads and hairs from shower drains, slicing through skin to get more urgent medical treatment for testosterone withdrawal, storing the heart of a dead infant in a glass jar, kneeling on the dirty wet floors of a bathroom stall to perform oral sex.
Despite the diversity, strangeness, and complexity of her characters, Lapointe illustrates a remarkable understanding of each one. She knows them so intimately, and gives her reader the gift of knowing them, too. Lapointe is adept at looking closely, and exposes her characters’ faults and vulnerabilities, humiliations and vanities, in illuminating and surprising ways. Trapped in this inescapable place-life-her characters linger somewhere between apathy and obsession, compassion and disregard, conflict and avoidance.
This is a bold collection of stories, rich with nuance, originality, and depth.
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You Break It You Buy It
$20.00You Break It, You Buy It features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want
$19.95A “straight-dope, tell-all account” of touring with two of the world’s greatest bands of the 60s and 70s — A “fast-moving narrative of rock-n-roll excess.” (Publishers Weekly)
Sam draws intimate portraits of other stars of the psychedelic circus that was the music industry in the sixties and seventies, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton
In this all-access memoir of the psychedelic era, Sam Cutler recounts his life as a tour manager for the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead — whom he calls the yin and yang of bands. After working with the Rolling Stones at their historic Hyde Park concert in 1969, Sam managed their American tour later that year, when he famously dubbed them “The Greatest Rock Band in the World.” And he was caught in the middle as their triumph took a tragic turn during a free concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, where a man in the crowd was killed by the Hell’s Angels.
After that, Sam took up with the fun-loving Grateful Dead, managing their tours and finances, and taking part in their endless hijinks on the road. With intimate portraits of other stars of the time — including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Band, the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton — this memoir is a treasure trove of insights and anecdotes that bring some of rock’s greatest legends to life.
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You can’t bury them all
$18.95Poetry that is at once harrowing, angry, and achingly beautiful
Patrick Woodcock has spent the past seven years engaging with and being shaped by the people, politics, and landscapes of the Kurdish north of Iraq, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories, and Azerbaijan. His powerful new collection offers a poetry that simultaneously explores hope and horror while documenting the transformative processes of coping. You can’t bury them all follows the narratives we construct to survive the tragic failures of our humanity to their very end: everything that’s buried by snow, dirt, and ash, just like everything that’s buried by politics, homophobia, sexism, racism, religion; and history is resurrected, demanding to be heard and addressed.
In Woodcock’s poetry, how we deal with what resurfaces is the key. What do those who suffer really mean to those who have abandoned them to small, conscience-soothing charitable donations or the occasional tweet? How can the poet, or anyone else, sleep at night knowing homosexuals are being thrown off building tops, after one steps into a hole and finds an abandoned corpse in an Azeri cemetery, or after the elders of an Aboriginal community are left helpless against those who only want to exploit them? Still, You can’t bury them all demonstrates that the world is not just the horrific place the media often portrays. In each of the worlds he touches, Woodcock discovers a spirit and strength to celebrate.
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YOU comma Idiot
$29.95Winner, Quiddity Award for Best Book Trailer
Shortlisted, Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and QWF First Book Prize“You’re the kind of guy who falls in love after one date.”
Marginalized and alienated, perennial fuck-up Lee Goodstone is a resounding zero: a low-rent hash-dealer with delusions of inadequacy. He’s content to while away the hours of his life drinking, smoking, hanging out, playing the occasional game of hockey, and generally ignoring the world outside his tiny neighbourhood.
But Lee’s near-idyllic existence is about to grind into second gear. His friend Henry has been accused of kidnapping and Lee’s been cornered by the local media. Another friend has decided to shoehorn his way into Lee’s drug business. And he’s just made it with his best friend’s girlfriend. Clearly, Lee needs a Plan B — not easy for a guy who long ago decided that the correct plan of action is to have no plan at all.
A hip, comedic novel, Doug Harris’s YOU comma Idiot is a dark, demented, deeply delightful excursion into youthful alienation and ennui.
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You Could Lose an Eye
$22.95A fond and funny memoir, this account of a Jewish immigrant household in Montreal traces the family’s journey from wretched oppression to middle class comfort. Arriving Canada in the early 1920s, they struggle to learn two new languages and adapt to a new political, economic, and not always welcoming social culture. It recounts how, undeterred, Ma establishes her dynasty at home and Pa builds his business, and by the time their son embarks on his architectural career, they are firm believers in freedom and aspiration—and in keeping alive in memory those Jews who were denied such joys.
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You Crushed It
$24.95With the caustic daring of Bret Easton Ellis and the offbeat, psychological insight of Douglas Coupland, You Crushed It is a captivating exploration of love and the corroding nature of power in creative industries.
Raph Massi is crushing it. A young up-and-coming comedian, he’s successfully navigating the internal cosmos of the stand-up industry and burying long-borne insecurities with each successful gig. He does so with the support of his girlfriend, Laurie, who narrates the book, sharing their sensual, mundane moments of new love and the creative collaborations that follow.
But, when Laurie dumps him, Raph’s heartbreak metastasizes into paranoia, cruelty, and a path that is as lonely as it is destructive. Baril Guérard shares an exacting portrayal of the innermost thoughts we hide from the world and from ourselves. The result is a devastating critique of the soft underbelly of toxic masculinity and the complicated ferocity of those who protect it.
You Crushed It is an eminently readable, witty reflection on artistic prowess, community, and the intoxication of success.
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You Don’t Get to Be a Saint
$9.95You Don’t Get to Be a Saint is a sharp-edged collage full of the echoes of human movement and voice”Patrick Friesen is one of the poets we can’t do without.”–Dennis Lee