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Showing 1057–1072 of 9481 results
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Bittersweet Sands
$19.95In Bittersweet Sands, Rick Ranson recounts a twenty-four-day shift at an oilsands operation undergoing a shutdown, giving us a glimpse at a world most of us only know from the evening news. Along the way, he encounters a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband-and-wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line.
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Bizarre Winery Tragedy
$12.00Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a book of lyric poems about country folk, city folk, alcohol and urbanism. These poems continue Neff’s quest to explore the modern-day juxtaposition of urban and rural landscapes, and the lines of power between the countryside and the metropolis-firewood, dams and the WiFi-enabled grid. Deeper insights emerge in this, the author’s third published collection. Bizarre Winery Tragedy is 21st-century poetry that juggles death and technology and finds some nasty laughs in the process. Think of it as a strange and tragic road trip through British Columbia’s wine-consuming regions, with Neff at the wheel.
Praise for Bizarre Winery Tragedy:
“The speakers in Neff’s poems tend to rant, but they do so with intelligence and wit, and the poems sizzle with energy . . . Reading Bizarre Winery Tragedy is a bit like getting caught with that mad yapper in the pub, except Neff has a thousand different stories to tell and nearly as many figures through which to tell them. Although I began to feel a bit too much of a muchness about these poems, their energy and directness will keep a reader engaged.” (Canadian Literature)
“This is a poet who [… ] maintains a sense of wit and skill as he pursues his native landscape. Whether waiting for the warmth of the no. 14 bus, or wandering half-cut down East Hastings, Neff never shies away from the roughest his city has to offer. Here is a poet who knows Vancouver from the sidewalk up, the pull of its streets through the dark.” (Books in Canada)
Praise for Lyle Neff:
“These poems pack a wallop. They’re full of outrage and bravado, tempered by amazing insights and a highly developed musical sensibility. They steam and churn’ with the energy of the city, they burn with this young poet’s hottest fire of sight’.” (Lorna Crozier)
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Bjork Wow and Flutter
$19.95The first major biography of one of the most important musicians of the last decade, Björk: Wow and Flutter is an exhaustive and revealing look at the life, music, and philosophy of one of modern music’s most compelling innovators. Contains a detailed songbook and over 30 exclusive interviews with Björk’s associates, family members, and industry professionals.
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Black Alley
$19.95Black Alley
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Black and Blue
$21.95Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic “Strange Fruit” made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?” And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.Jazz is liberation music, from Fats Waller to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane who walked side by side with Martin Luther King with his piece “Alabama.” Péan shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip-hop to widen jazz’s audience. The intricate crisscross between Black musical forms, from Marvin Gaye to the Last Poets is explored, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process (with the exception of Spike Lee).
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Black and White and Blue
$22.95The films that society has termed pornographic movies have been with us for over a century now, since the first flickering kinetoscopes stumbled into life in 1889. Yet beyond a handful of scholarly tracts, and a few glancing references in certain Hollywood histories, there is no modern history of the subject available.
Black and White and Blue fills that void. Taking as its cut-off point the late 1970s, when the advent of the home VCR irrevocably changed the face of the adult film industry, Black and White and Blue celebrates a world of anonymously masked women and curiously black-sock-clad men, whose movie immortality was attained in the time it took to exhaust a roll of film. There were no artificial breasts when the first stags were made, no tattooed and pierced members, and no concept of trick photography. We revisit a time when dingy back street cinemas aired their wares beneath a “members only” sign, and a climate in which the police waited as patiently to bust the participants as audiences queued to watch them, while “polite society” looked on in (often hypocritical) disgust, unable to believe that filth like this even existed.
With exclusive interviews, descriptions of over 300 films, and a conversational style, this book will represent a complete and in-depth survey of the adult film, from shaky, flickering black-and-white silents to the first flowering of the lavish modern-day production.
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Black Beach
$19.95Included on Black Children’s Books and Authors’ 2020 list of ’10 YA Fiction Books by Black Authors for BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month’
Sixteen-year-old Tamera lives in La Cresta, a rural fishing community on a Caribbean island. Despite having the support of relatives, including her dad, Earl, her elder sister, Mary and her best friend and first cousin, Jan, she struggles to deal with her mom’s mental health issues and the absence of her boyfriend, Dalton who moves out of the village to work. Tamera’s life is further complicated after one of her classmates disappears, and weeks turn to months without any word of the missing girl’s whereabouts. Life gets even more challenging after Tamera suffers a personal loss. This difficulty draws her and Dalton closer, but his long absences remain a test the young couple must contend with. Tamera doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, but she feels as if her closest friends are moving ahead and leaving her behind. After an environmental disaster wreaks havoc in Tamera’s hometown, she longs to help, but doesn’t have any of the required skills to make an impact. With time on her hands to soul search, she makes a life changing decision that leads her in the path of potential danger. Tamera finds herself at the centre of the mystery of her classmate’s disappearance, the resolution of which shocks the people of La Cresta.
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Black Boys
$18.95Black Boys by Saga Collectif (Virgilia Griffith, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Tawiah M’Carthy, Thomas Antony Olajide, and Jonathan Seinen) uncovers the complex dynamics of the queer Black experience. Text, movement, and design portray the rhythm and vulnerability of three very different Black individuals who seek a deeper understanding of themselves, each other, and of how they encounter the world. As they explore their unique identities, their performances rigorously interrogate and playfully subvert the ways in which gender, sexuality, and race are read and performed.
Theatrical and intimate, Black Boys weaves together the ensemble’s own personal stories in search of an integrated self and a radical imagination while shining a light on new possibilities for young Black queer people.
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Black Bread
$19.95In the rough hill country of rural Catalonia, the Spanish Civil War is over and the villagers live under occupation by the fascist Civil Guard. With his father in jail, facing possible execution as a subversive, and his mother working long hours in a factory, eleven-year-old Andreu is sent to live with his relatives. His inquisitive, self-taught grandmother encourages him to study, but who will Andreu become? He doesn’t want to be a farmhand, or work in a factory, or flee into exile in France like his uncle and aunt. His cousin Núria invites him to play sex games in the woods, but Andreu cannot stop thinking about a young man he sees lying naked in a monastery garden.
One of the major novels of contemporary Spain, and the inspiration for the first film in the Catalan language to be nominated by Spain for an Academy Award, Black Bread brings to life a rural world of mythical force as it traces with piercing psychological insight, in gorgeous prose, the movements of a boy’s psyche as he moves from youth into adulthood.
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Black Creek
$24.95As a child, Kate Stong Smythe drew castles. Now, at thirty-five, she’s found herself
hard-edged and uncompromising, designing slick condos in Griffintown, a gentrified
working-class neighbourhood of Montreal.
When Kate’s mother dies, she calls out five mysterious names from her deathbed, propelling
Kate on a journey to unravel the mysterious dreams she’s had since childhood. She’s met with
a shock when she finds their names in her own family genealogy books, tied to faces she knows from her strange flashbacks. Who are these women, and why have they haunted her
dreams since she was a little girl?
Kate’s unsettling visions take her from her home in Montreal to an abandoned farmhouse in
the northern suburbs of Toronto, increasingly consumed by her ties to the past and the
ancestral hardness that is holding her hostage. -
Black Dog
$17.95The Breakfast Club meets Shirley Jackson in a fusion of live theatre and technology that tells a darkly comic but hopeful story of four teenage outsiders struggling with death, depression and the shadow of a black dog.
Two is fraught. While dealing with the impossible expectations of her parents, she is trying to understand why her brother, a bright and talented teenager, has taken his own life. It’s not until a fateful school detention that she meets three other students who all seem as lost as she is. There’s Three, a quiet, misunderstood guy who doesn’t quite know how to care for himself; Four, the fashionable, popular kid and class clown; and Five, a rebel ready to fight against everyone and everything. Despite their differences, they each grapple with depression and anxiety and become an unlikely source of comfort to one another. As the four unite to battle teachers, parents, therapists and their own demons, their promising futures begin to reveal themselves.
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Black Ice: The Val James Story
$19.95The first Black American in the NHL tells his story — now in trade paper
Val James received his first pair of skates for his 13th birthday and by 16, he left his home in New York to play in Canada, where he was the only black person on his junior team and, often, in the whole town. While popular for his tough play and winning personality, the teenager faced racist taunts at opposing arenas. The prejudice he encountered continued at all levels of the game. He became the first African American NHLer when he took to the ice with the Buffalo Sabres in 1982, and in 1987 he was the first black player of any nationality to skate for the Toronto Maple Leafs. In his two NHL stints, James defined himself as a team player known for his pugilistic skills.
As featured in a Fox News Black History Month documentary, on NHL.com, NPR’s Morning Edition, ESPN’s Olbermann, and in Newsday, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times, Black Ice is the untold story of a trail-blazing athlete who endured and overcame discrimination to realize his dreams and become an inspiration for future generations. This edition includes a new afterword that explores James’s legacy.
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Black Liquor
$16.95Dennis E. Bolen’s forthcoming volume of poetry, Black Liquor, continues his exploration of modern disconnection and the disparate paths taken by those railing against the austere landscape of their lives. Imbued with lyrical evocations of lost childhood, mature love and deep friendship contrasted against brutal depictions of grueling labour, industrial mishap, historical misfortune and often hilarious disappointment, Black Liquor progresses to an appreciation of being alive, against the odds. Bolen writes in the pacey cadences of contemporary speech, tough and tender. His quirky use of metaphorical story charged with biting imagery makes these deeply autobiographical poems an exhilaration.
As in his previous writings, five novels and two collections of short fiction-among them Stupid Crimes (originally published by Anvil Press), Stand in Hell (Random House), Kaspoit! (Anvil Press), and Anticipated Results (Arsenal Pulp Press)-this new book explores the varieties of disaffection, this time in poetry and this time as remembrance of things past.
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Black Matters
$22.00Halifax’s former Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya — a dialogue between image and text. Cooper translates Raussert’s photos into poetry, painting a profound image of what disembodied historical facts might look like when they are embodied in contemporary characters. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance.
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Black Rabbit
$15.00‘Black Rabbit & Other Stories’ is a debut collection of great intensity and versatility. The stories range from the fantastic to the gritty, from urban dystopias to worlds of dreamlike possibility. Even in their frequent explorations of brutality, the author remains honest and true to the motivations of his characters and the machinations of the worlds in which they find themselves. These are sure-footed narratives that move with a pre-destined deliberation into a universe that is oftenfraught with desperation and apparent hopelessness; but, ultimately, we find ourselves on a path to redemption, an acceptance of what is, in the final analysis, an incomprehensible matrix. Existential and reflective, brutal and honest, these are stories that will leave you questioning the essence of existence, your own humanity, and the humanity of those around you. This is deft storytelling from a talented new voice.
“Difalco is at his strongest when writing about relationships – focusing upon the inherent drama of tight-knit Italian families, couples on the rock, or even corpulent characters’ relationships to food and their own bodies. Let’s continue to hope he continues to mine the strange lives of his particular brand of disenfranchised heros. In all that roughness, there are diamonds.” – Quill & Quire
“These are thoughtful, enigmatic stories drawing the reader in with sharp detail, poetic phrasing and recognizable characters. Though we’re dealing with thugs, prostitutes and crack heads, they are all folks you’ll feel uncomfortably at home with. That’s Difalco’s magic: scrape characters from the bottom of society’s bowl and reveal them in literary daylight as powerless dreamers, failed mothers, caged creatures.” – Front & Centre
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Black River Road
$19.95Shortlisted, Arthur Ellis Best Non-Fiction Crime Book Award
In 1869, in the woods just outside of the bustling port city of Saint John, a group of teenaged berry pickers discovered several badly decomposed bodies. The authorities suspected foul play, but the identities of the victims were as mysterious as that of the perpetrator. From the twists and turns of a coroner’s inquest, an unlikely suspect emerged to stand trial for murder: John Munroe, a renowned architect, well-heeled family man, and pillar of the community.
Munroe was arguably the first in Canada’s fledgling judicial system to actively defend himself. His lawyer’s strategy was as simple as it was revolutionary: Munroe’s wealth, education, and exemplary character made him incapable of murder. The press and Saint John’s elite vocally supported Munroe, sparking a debate about character and murder that continues to this day. In re-examining a precedent-setting historical crime with fresh eyes, Komar addresses questions that still echo through the halls of justice more than a century later: is everyone capable of murder, and should character be treated as evidence in homicide trials?