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Showing 1025–1040 of 9481 results
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Big Reader
$22.95A book about memory, loss, and a love of books from one of Canada’s finest essayists
Ever since childhood, Susan Olding has been a big reader, never without a book on the go. Not surprising, then, that she turns to the library to read her own life. From the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner’s daughter, from discovering Toronto as a young undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind: through every experience, Olding crafts exquisite, searingly honest essays about what it means to be human, to be a woman–and to be a reader.
Big Reader is a brilliant, achingly beautiful collection about the slipperiness of memory and identity, the enduring legacy of loss, and the nuanced disappointments and joys of a reading life.
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Big Rig
$12.95Come along for a ride with big rig truckers as they…
– experience life on the road as a rookie behind the big wheel.
– meet colorful dudes like Lonesome Len, The Pistol Packin’ Partner, Zorro, Chrome Stack, Yabba Dabba, and “Little” John.
– battle wild weather and treacherous terrain, face soft roads, bone-shattering pot holes, and unknown destinations.
– find themselves in goofy situations — from practical jokes gone awry to “Tiny” getting stuck in the back of his cab.
– heroically rescue wayward travelers, including two determined old ladies who refuse to leave their ancient Ford in a snow storm. -
Big Rig 2
$14.95Join McTavish and his fellow haulers as they…
– hunt down and retrieve a stolen rig.
– sweat bullets hauling burning boxcars and molten steel.
– park a bulldozer in a living room to keep it warm.
– slip, slide, and spin up and down icy inclines and muddy trails.
– reveal the secrets of real trucking life in a step-by-step haul.
– pass on wisdom and warnings about the ins and outs of life on the highway. -
Big Shadow
$23.00In an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be.
There is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming “Big Shadow.” Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a “has-been” fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.
Judy’s visits to his apartment in New York bring hopes of belonging to the city’s cultural world and making a living as a video artist. With each trip and frustrated promise, however, she feels the creeping realization that there is a price to pay for her golden ticket entry into this insular and moribund scene. Judy must navigate the shifting power dynamics with her aging gatekeeper and the possibility of building an early adult identity alone.
An affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we’ll make to edge closer to what we want… or what we think we want.
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Big Sky Falling
$17.95In her first book, Kelsey Andrews moves from the big skies of Grande Prairie, Alberta and her family home, to the smaller skies hemmed in by mountains and skyscrapers of Vancouver. As she tries to adjust from a thirsty countryside filled with little wonders, to a lush cityscape with fewer miracles, the sky falls in as depression comes on. The weight of loneliness and past secrets that remain unsayable are a driving force, yet these poems fill the lonely places for the reader. She finds a way to befriend rather than beat depression with the help of a natural world populated by winged things, animals, trees, water, and sky. Her poems contain earthy whimsy and playfulness, though they are not without gristle and little violences – the moon’s ancient bruises, gargoyles that shriek and moan, and the thunk when you split a chicken. Themes of girl blending with nature, bodies the right (and wrong) shape, looking for new family through new relationships, and the question of what is wildness are explored. From snails to suicide and picking blackberries to killing flies, through it all, Kelsey finds beauty and the light that persists.
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Biking to Blissville
$14.95Over highways and byways and converted railway roadbeds, Biking to Blissville gives maps and precise directions for about forty bicycle rides through the most scenic areas of Maritime Canada. Most of the trips are loops. Each leads from a country inn, motel, or campground through uncrowded countryside, and author Kent Thompson has tested them all for fun, safety, and degree of difficulty. Thompson also suggests accomodations that fit cyclists tastes and purses, and the vagaries of the weather, from rustic campgrounds to opulent country inns, from old-time sporting camps to cozy bed-and-breakfasts.
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bill bissett and His Works
$9.95An examination of the anti-conventional Canadian poet Bill Bissett and his body of work.
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Billion Dollar Start-Up
$29.95It only took five years for two brothers-in-law to create a billion-dollar, award-winning, take-no-prisoners cannabis company called HEXO. How did they do it? That’s the story.
From early roadblocks and devastating personal and financial setbacks to explosive growth and some of the biggest cannabis deals in global history, Billion Dollar Start-Up not only recounts the HEXO story but the history of Canada’s momentous road to legalization.
In this part fast-paced memoir, part high-octane business book, writer and journalist Julie Beun gives us an intimate look at the life of a start-up and the ferocious entrepreneurial drive it takes to succeed — written in real-time, as the story unfolded.
Throughout history, there have been fewer than 100 Canadians who have started a company and lived to see it become worth one billion dollars. Adam Miron and Sébastien St-Louis are two of them. This is their story.
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Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition
$17.95One of Canada’s most successful and enduring musical plays, Billy Bishop Goes to War was first published in 1982 and went on to win the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award and the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In 2010, the celebrated story of the World War One flying ace – credited with seventy-two victories and billed as the top pilot in the British Empire – was revised to frame the original play as a retrospective. It is the same play it always was – the difference is in the telling. Billy Bishop now appears in his later years, reflecting on his wartime exploits, and on the business of war and hero making. Bishop’s reminiscence is not so much about the horror and death of war as it is about being young and intensely alive. “The prime of life / The best of men,” Bishop sings, “It will never be / Like this again.”
A memory play about war, Billy Bishop has been going into battle onstage for more than thirty years. The Canadian classic is revisited in this second edition, where war is still a terrible thing, but some men say it was the greatest time of their lives. It’s about the ironies and the price of survival.
The play format is deceptively simple with a solo narrator who assumes multiple roles while his piano-playing sidekick offers sardonic musical comments.
Cast of 2 men.
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Billy Crawford’s Double Play
$24.00Everything is legal – if you can get away with it.
Billy Crawford is a hero. The star of the Rose City Rounders, the baseball player has been thrilling fans of the city for years. But Billy’s not as young as he used to be and his tendency to play hard is catching up with him. A string of losses for the Rounders puts his position at risk as the team’s owner, local developer Carroll Miller, doesn’t like being associated with anything that loses. Miller’s thinking of making changes, and not just at the team. When he decides to enter politics Billy suddenly finds himself facing an offer he can’t refuse.
In this wise-cracking, fast-paced novel, Brad Smith lampoons today’s scandal-ridden politics and politicians. But among the laughter, Smith also shows us there can be hope, and even integrity, where we least expect it.
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Billy Tinker
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Billy Twinkle
$16.95Standing at the edge of the ship, contemplating a watery demise, Billy is called back to reality when his dead mentor Sid Diamond appears as a handpuppet. Sid forces Billy to re-enact his life as a puppet show, rekindling the passion Billy once had for puppets, people, and the dream of a life that sparkles. For anyone stuck in the middle—mid-career, mid-love, mid-life—this requiem for a golden boy shines a little light on the wonder of youth meeting the wisdom of age.
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Bindy’s Moon
$18.95In a series of reflections focussed on his uneducated yet hard-working Mennonite family and touching on childhood exploits from shoplifting and go-kart racing to the juvenile fear of dying (which spontaneously arises during the rehearsal for an elementary school Christmas concert), Lloyd Ratzlaff takes readers on a journey from youth to philosophical maturity. Combining elegy and joyful nostalgia in a series of poetic essays, Ratzlaff recounts the struggles of his youth before analyzing his first marriage, his time at seminary school and as a minister, and examining life as the parent of adult children and closest confidante of a terminally ill friend.
Never straying far from his spiritual probing, the essays are informed largely by nature and the changing seasons which influence Ratzlaff’s life in seemingly magical ways. Small enlightenments arise from his interactions with the natural world, ranging from a spring equinox marking the seventh anniversary of his father’s death to the author’s ritual of waking to the songs of a robin who comes each spring to live on the riverbank across St. Henry Avenue. Even a small gopher scurrying off and standing like a signpost between graves signals an exploration of mortality.
Humour and honesty define this spiritual journey, as the boy who grew up speaking an ethnically Mennonite language discovers that the very rigidity and unease of this tongue will become, in part, the catalyst for his own writing and part of his spiritual movement as he “treads his endless path toward the present.” Bindy’s Moon invites readers to experience the challenges posed by scepticism and the simultaneous desire to believe, weighing the darkness of doctrinarism against the endless energy of the spirt. Ratzlaff gives us a unique example of what so many have experienced, combining humour, quiet reflection, and pearls of carefully considered wisdom, in a poignant prairie coming-of-age autobiography. -
Birch Split Bark
$16.95Winner of the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book PrizeIn her debut collection of poems, Birch Split Bark, Diane Guichon uses a quintessentially Canadian image — a birch bark canoe — to speak of those private waters that make us universally human. By writing in the first person of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, she bridges age to gender, myth to memory and hatred to reconciliation. These poems are brave and brilliantly voiced and her descriptions are as haunting as a loon’s concerto on a silent summer lake. Guichon’s characters speak to the plurality of Canadian identity; in four distinct voices, Guichon pulls apart the myths that have created us and continue to dictate who we must be. Birch Split Bark proves that canoes will always write history upon their waters just as poets will write humanity upon the page.
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Birchy Maid, The
$19.95If Shakespeare’s Cordelia met Andy Jones’s Jack, the resulting offspring might be The Birchy Maid, a saucy, sensible, self-reliant heroine for the modern age. When a merchant prince sails into her life, she sets some very unusual conditions for marriage. This is a fairy tale for all ages, full of humour and wisdom.
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Bird Shadows
$22.95Bird Shadows is a playful tale of eccentricities, misconceptions, and misogyny. While working on a personal spiritual project, an irreverent artist encourages her religious sister to rethink the marriage that seems to be killing her soul.
The people in the quaint little Bay of Fundy fishing village of Brood Bay will not soon forget the events of 1995. It was an outrage! A good Christian family was torn apart by the wicked influence of a mentally unbalanced, morally challenged artist. Pastor Wallace was appalled by the improper, if not downright evil, behaviour that had taken place right under his nose. His sympathies were most certainly with the abandoned husband, Warren, deacon of the church, generous and innocent man of God. But was Warren as innocent as he appeared?
Not according to his sister-in-law, Rube. She had always seen through the posing and the praying, As Rube sifted through her dreams, panning for God, her sister, Helen, was forced to acknowledge that her fundamentalist husband was not very Godly.