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Showing 1073–1088 of 9481 results
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Black Star
$20.00Winner, the CAA Fred Kerner Book Award.
Del Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she’s also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life.Black Star is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid. Medved’s new novel is a searing critique of a world we all know too well, one of sexual exploitation, manipulation, and the subtle machinations of power that Black Star filters through the lens of academia. It is at once poetic, tragic, disturbing and funny.
PRAISE FOR BLACK STAR:
“A “hideous narrative” about bad behaviour, Black Star elicits frequent guffaws. Philosopher-fools, what’s not to like?” (Toronto Star)“The scholarly life has lent itself to fiction and satire for decades now (centuries, if you want to go back to Chaucer). … Delorosa Hanks, the chaotic narrator of Black Star, is the latest heir in this line. By the second sentence of the scalding new novel by Vancouver author Maureen Medved, Hanks is referring to her academic rival as ‘a lesion of carcinogenic proportions capable of rotting and destroying departments’. It just gets darker, funnier, and more acidic from there.” (The Georgia Straight)
“Maureen Medved masterfully explores her protagonists in all their spangled, fallible glory. Black Star plunges the reader into frantic academic rivalry. Is it paranoia or master manipulation? Every twist and turn will lead you down Medved’s darkly compelling rabbit hole.” (Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster)
“This wild novel is a powerful exploration of imposter syndrome taken to extremes and a story of how the sadistic, competitive world of academia intersects with one woman’s unraveling sense of self. Suspenseful and beautifully written.” (Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People, Giller Prize Finalist)
“You can read this slender swift novel as a comedy of manners, or a sly take on the corrosions of academe, but on its lower frequencies Maureen Medved’s brilliant new book is about the death of dreams and our lost hold on truth and reality, an often funny but finally harrowing look at a dystopia that’s come to reside in each of our souls.” (Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering)
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Black Suede Cave
$15.00The poems in Black Suede Cave meditate on the space inside us, where darkness and imagination animate the unknowable. They illuminate the shadows of memory that slip into our darker corners, reveal by lamplight the furtive nightscape of Toronto, and ponder how loss creates its own places of reflection about what we have loved.
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Black Taxi
$19.95In 1993, Kendall Hunter travelled to Jahannesburg, South Africa, as a volunteer photojournalist for the South African newspaper, New Nation. She immersed herself in the lives of the South African people and witnessed firsthand the country’s most monumental changes, including the demis of apartheid legislation and Nelson Mandela’s ascent to the presidency. As a photojournalist, her life was often at risk, but her photographs of this difficult and violent time were published internationally. She also made many freindships, and grew to lobe South Agrica and its people.Black Taxi is Kendall Hunter’s personal account, in words and photographs, of her year spent working, living, and documenting South Africa’s journey to freedom.
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Black Teeth
$18.95Black Teeth is a compelling collection of linked stories that explore growing up in Winnipeg’s famously multicultural North End through its 1960s Golden Age and beyond, examining the strange dual legacy of that experience.
While urban ethnic mixes and immigrant populations shift over time and place, every city has its foreign part, that transition zone where strangers, freaks, and outsiders —the Other —reside. Whether it’s called “the East Side,” “Cabbage Town,” or “Chinatown,” the questions remain the same: How do you fit in when you’re defined as different, a “dirty DP”? Does the language you speak change the self? How do you become normal? How can you belong? Or can you?
The pieces that make up Black Teeth move from the challenge of penetrating a new language, goofy pangs of first love, beautiful nuns, ugly guns, the dangers of teen ennui, and the quirky pleasures of interpreting culture through food, to a son’s struggle for connection with his remote, mysterious father, and the wrenching loss of a parent to madness.
Throughout, the doubled vision of those who live and write in a second language pervades this collage-portrait of a unique place, and of the immigrant experience that lies at the dark heart of Canada.
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Black Tulips
$11.95Bruce Eason moves his characters through a stark landscape, lone figures whose paths often cross but seldom converge. His stories are full of heart and muscle, telling contemporary truths about misaligned relationships and modern antidotes for ancient wounds. A therapist uses anger to mask his fear of a young boy’s unfathomable paintings, two strangers substitute desire for love after witnessing a death; humour is the language of humiliation for a man intimaidatedby his womenfolk. The rage, lonliness and passion in these lives are etched in Eason’s tough, tender prose and stained by his ironic vision.
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Black Women Under State
$24.00The lives and conditions of Black women are inseparable from, and inextricably linked to, all dimensions of social and political life. Black Women Under State centres on the realities of Black women, both in-process and theory, who are living at the intersections of race, poverty, surveillance, and social services. Abdillahi, who is uniquely positioned as a community organizer, practitioner, public intellectual, and scholar, engaged twenty women living at these life intersections in the greater Toronto area.
The text undertakes a deep and studied inquiry into these women?s subjective experiences of surveillance while on the province of Ontario?s social assistance program Ontario Works and interrogates the dimensional effects of those experiences. Offering a timely and crucial contribution to the discourse around abolition, Abdillahi makes explicit the ways in which social systems are made opaque so that we don?t connect them to the carceral state; this concept of carceral care talks to abolition as the broad concept that it is a fully-embraced understanding that abolition dismantles systems of policing that extend beyond the institution we call the police.
Three major themes emerge through her inquiry: surveillance, poverty, and morality each interconnected to a larger social and public policy discourse. Abdillahi employs Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist Thought as primary theoretical lenses as she animates the lives of these women, alongside and in conversation with existing research, theory and practice, revealing direct links among their experience, in order to demonstrate the shared, longstanding, and ongoing historicity of the interconnectedness of Black women?s experience globally.
The vast majority of the book?s citations are from Black Canadians, giving the text its own narrative around citational practice. Through a dynamic interlacing of contemporary critical thought and lived experience, Black Women Under State contributes to filling a gap in social policy literature, which has typically disregarded the subjective experiences of Black women or treated them as a mere addendum.
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Blackbirds
$19.95When young Sharon Lacey travels from Canada to England in the spring of 1940 in search of the father she never knew, she finds herself called upon to participate in a much larger and more dangerous mission. For at eighteen, she is a gifted flier in an England desperate for pilots to fend off the impending attack from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. In the months that follow, Sharon will be tested in ways that will affect the rest of her life–should she survive.
With Blackbirds, award-winning mystery novelist Garry Ryan turns his hand towards historical fiction, vividly evoking the fear and uncertainty of wartime England, as well as the spirit of camaraderie and adventure shared by the men–and women–who stepped forward to defend it.
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Blackbodying
$21.95Blackbodying recounts the first-hand exile stories of two Lebanese citizens and their routes to Canada. Both have been forced to leave their homeland as a result of civil war, but only the first is afforded the opportunities the second so badly wants. His exile, at a very young age, has afforded him an international childhood, an American education, cultural affluence, and the ability to assimilate into almost any society he enters. The second, a destitute, beyond-his-prime optimist named Sameer Gerdak, is afforded nothing of the kind. To think that an Arab foreigner without North American credentials can penetrate this prosperous Canadian reality is a well-worn fiction. So Sameer Gerdak believes. The two protagonists’ paths intersect only slightly, but the result of their meeting is at once profound and chilling. Blackbodying speaks to the most personal ramifications of civil war, telling the stories of those who can’t shake the idea that something better must exist. Surrounded by bed-wetters, child actors, bisexual dads, dead horses, independent film-makers, prostitutes, taxi drivers, and one of the most indelible and lecherous villains in recent memory, John Spier, a low-level pimp with no hands, Sameer Gerdak and his youthful, anonymous counterpart weave a portrait of humanity that simultaneously attests to our best and worst intentions.
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Blacklion
$24.95Bloody Sunday (1972) catapulted the Irish “troubles” onto the world stage, exacerbating suspicion in US intelligence circles that the IRA might turn to the Soviets for guns. South Boston native Raymond Daly, just off a CIA stint in Laos, is sent to Ireland to re-establish a line running guns to the IRA. He deftly earns the trust of gunrunner Slowey, a tough money-making South Boston native, who introduces him to an IRA splinter group operating near Blacklion, a town bordering on Northern Ireland.
Ray begins to manipulate Aoife, an Irish woman, in order to gain the trust of the community and embed himself in the organization. After the British Special Air Services raid a safehouse, Ray finds himself involved in executing an informant and his wife. But he also finds himself getting soft on some of those he was sent to infiltrate and becoming more like his cover, “an Irish American gunrunner with a romantic attachment to the Cause,” and less like an obedient CIA operative.
Events spiral, culminating in a shootout with the British army that compels Ray to make a Faustian decision on his future and that of Aoife and the others he was assigned to manipulate.
Inspired by complex, real-life political events with far-reaching consequences, Luke Beirne plays with and destabilizes the traditional spy tale. He also ponders the diabolic power invested in intelligence operatives.
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Blackout
$18.95In February 1969, hundreds of students occupied a computer centre at what is now Montréal’s Concordia University to protest the mismanagement of a racism complaint lodged by Caribbean students against their biology professor. When an agreement to end the occupation fell through, riot police were called in, resulting in widespread damage, a mysterious fire, and nearly a hundred arrests. Created and devised by some of Montréal’s most prolific artists, Blackout re-examines the events that led to the occupation and protests, asking how race relations have changed in Québec and Canada.
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Blackouts to Bright Lights
$21.95These Canadian war bride stories recount one of the great untold epics of World War II. Approximately 48,000 British and European women married Canadian servicemen during the war and made the adventurous crossing from “blackouts to bright lights.” In time for the 50th anniversary of the end of war, Barbara Ladouceur and Phyllis Spence interviewed over thirty war brides and recorded their individual stories.
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Blame it on the Spruce Budworm
$17.95Diana Cummings is from Toronto, so when she needed a quiet, slow-paced place to finish her movie script and consider her failing marriage, Nova Scotia’s Rossignol Valley seemed the perfect retreat. She couldn’t have been more wrong! After answering an advertisement in the local newspaper, Diana becomes the “Extraordinary Secretary” for the Prince County Woodlot Owners Associationa rag-tag gang of woodsmen and farmers embroiled in a losing battle over the government’s forestry policies.
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Blasphemer’s Wheel
$12.95Winner of the 1994 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards).Blasphemer’s Wheel is a representative collection of Patrick Friesen’s work, including selections from The Shunning, Flicker and Hawk, Unearthly Horses and You Don’t Get to Be a Saint.”With his customary stateliness and elegance of mind, Friesen engages us to think ‘somewhere between yes and no’–a place, as it turns out, filled with the voices of friends.”–Sharon Thesen
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BLEED
$24.95“A brilliant, blistering read.” — Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
A scorching examination of how we treat endometriosis today
Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That feeling better just takes yoga, CBD oil, and the blood of a unicorn on a full moon? That’s the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. This disease affecting one in ten cis women and uncounted numbers of others is chronically overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood — and improperly treated across the medical system. Discrimination and medical gaslighting are rife in endo care, often leaving patients worse off than when they arrived.
Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of BLEED — part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, BLEED tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalizing women. Using an intersectional lens, BLEED dives into how the system perpetuates misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other prejudices to this day.
BLEED isn’t a self-help book. It’s an evidence file and an eye-opening, enraging read. It will validate those who have been gaslit, mistreated, or ignored by medicine and spur readers to fight for nothing short of revolution.
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Bleeding Light
$23.95A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.
A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer’s son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.
For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmation—through religious, cosmic, chemical and other means—of a world beyond their own. It’s a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age.
“A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mystical—as if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho’s flock.”—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers
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Bleeding Light: Poems
$20.95Bleeding Light is a collection of poems in ghazal form that traces the steps of a woman’s journey through night. She knows that in order to witness dawn, she has to travel through dusk first. Throughout her journey, she is caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness and the knowledge of light. Each couplet is an independent thought and reflection, a pearl strung into a necklace. Bleeding Light is fraught with opposing, stark and often violent imagery heavily influenced by Sufi philosophy.