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All Books in this Collection
Showing 97–112 of 8929 results
A Book of Great Worth
$18.95Set largely among the Jewish community of inter-war New York City, this is a beautifully-told collection of scenes from Morgenstern’s life. The tricky ground of writing the advice column for a provincial Yiddish daily; successes during, and hard times after, the Depression; a position at the top of his craft as a labour specialist in the New York City Yiddish press – these and many more form a portrait of “a fundamentally decent man in morally perplexing situations”.
“I’ve been working on a series of stories about the character I call “my father” – loosely based on my own father – for about 30 years…I wondered if I could use the character in other situations. [One] story had begun with a spark of truth – a story my father had told many times about a foolish man he’d once known – and the spirit of my father.
“All the stories in the series walk that precarious tightrope between memoir and fiction…”I worked hard, with the stories’ structure and a sort of old-fashioned expository style, to make them feel like memoir – like truth.”
A Book of Riddlu
$20.00These “riddlu” are a lighthearted but heartfelt attempt to combine two poetic forms that demand extreme concision and that value the suggestive power of metaphor: the riddle and the haiku. … Both have different strengths – the quick thinking of the riddle (a lifesaver for Bilbo Baggins), the serious looking of the haiku. My “riddlu” tries to lighten the haiku’s seriousness while lending some of its intuitive weight to the riddle, producing little triads of lines that glance across metaphorical waters like skipped stones.
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space
$18.00In a secularized society, what kind of faith in our collective powers and imaginations can be patch-worked together, and what might be the role of angels? Through multiple locales, languages and spiritualities, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space both subverts and sublimates traditions of religious poetry, love poetry, and song. Playful in form and formed full of play, this fourth book of poetry by Kevin Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. Spenst meditates on mental health, poetic friendships and influences, and the possibility of there being an angel assigned to the Mennonites at the beginning of their global journey. These poems sing, cry, and soothe.
A Boy’s Life of Napoleon
$2.99Alden Nowlan’s “A Boy’s Life of Napoleon” is a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan’s first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960 but published posthumously in 1988. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions’s 60th anniversary, it is also available as part of the six@sixty collection.
A Brief and Endless Sea
$20.00Born out of waiting out the lockdown during the early days of the pandemic, Barbara Pelman’s A Brief and Endless Sea explores a life in retrospect, beginning with a high school typing class and ending with the Angel Purah, cutting the ties that bind a soul to a body. Many of the poems in this collection are rooted in Jewish tradition: the prophet Isaiah’s words of comfort; the rabbinical story of the Lost Princess, that angel and her counterpart, the Angel Duma. Pelman takes us to difficult places—the dissolution of a marriage, caring for a parent with dementia. But she doesn’t leave us there, waiting. Using the power of words to map a route out, A Brief and Endless Sea pulls us toward life in all of its vibrant details—the simple beauty of a small garden of tomatoes and roses, the pleasures of teaching poetry, long walks with a grandson, and encounters with spirituality. For Pelman, there is comfort in the making of a poem and in the “smallest life you can love.” Like the glosa form she turns to often, something small transforms into something larger, expansive. In A Brief and Endless Sea, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and waiting in itself presents fertile ground for hope and possibility.
A Brief History of Oversharing
$19.95Musings from a “one-man flash mob” (Toronto Star)
Comedian Shawn Hitchins explores his irreverent nature in this debut collection of essays. Hitchins doesn’t shy away from his failures or celebrate his mild successes — he sacrifices them for an audience’s amusement. He roasts his younger self, the effeminate ginger-haired kid with a competitive streak. The ups and downs of being a sperm donor to a lesbian couple. Then the fiery redhead professes his love for actress Shelley Long, declares his hatred of musical theatre, and recounts a summer spent in Provincetown working as a drag queen.
Nothing is sacred. His first major break-up, how his mother plotted the murder of the family cat, his difficult relationship with his father, becoming an unintentional spokesperson for all redheads, and many more.
Blunt, awkward, emotional, ribald, this anthology of humiliation culminates in a greater understanding of love, work, and family. Like the final scene in a Murder She Wrote episode, A Brief History of Oversharing promises everyone the A-ha! moment Oprah tells us to experience. Paired with bourbon, Scottish wool, and Humpty Dumpty Party Mix, this journey is best read through a lens of schadenfreude.
A Brief History of the Short-Lived
$18.95In his third poetry collection, A Brief History of the Short-Lived, Chris Hutchinson brings the full force of his linguistic dexterity to bear on the elusive subject of literature itself.
With his restless intellectual curiosity tempered by a dash of witty self-deprecation, Hutchinson deftly manoeuvres through hallowed halls of academia with humour and grace.
Three stylistically distinct sections,”Imago,””A Brief History of the Short-Lived,” and “Serialist” are interwoven throughout the collection, showcasing the range of Hutchinson’s poetic ability. The “Brief History” poems explode from the page in densely allusive bursts of energy, clusters of images fired off at a rapid pace: “He is wearing a green felt / Fedora with an ostrich plume which bursts into flame the moment I drop / A three-sided coin into his outstretched flipper.” By contrast, the “Imago” and “Serialist” sections are quieter and more meditative, though no less inventive or rich in imagery: “Rhetoric is big business / as byzantine networks / replace its circle of friends.”
By turns gleefully irreverent, thoughtful and too clever for its own good, A Brief History of the Short-Lived defies description–it must be read to be believed.
A Brief Relief from Hunger
$20.00A brief relief from hunger is a poetry collection about the yearnings of a young man – cocaine, human connection, fast food – and the ravenous world in which he lives. In Vancouver, the speaker binges Big Macs post-rehab while others consume fentanyl-tainted drugs. Growling bodies are everywhere, including on Facebook where people post cruel comments about drug users in the face of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis. At the heart of the collection are poems that respond to these comments from the perspective of the speaker, now sober but still hungry, whose friends are dying from the contaminated drug supply. The speaker knows at least one reliable source of contentment: Grandma’s kitchen, where, at his lowest points, he finds cabbage rolls, acceptance, and a tenderness he wishes to absorb into his masculinity.
A Brief View from the Coastal Suite
$21.95Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!
The reunited Lund siblings, separated as children by Social Services, find that family, whether held together by blood or by choice, can be both a curse and a blessing, an obstacle and a point of connection.
Set in Vancouver during the economically turbulent year of 2008, A Brief View from the Coastal Suite explores the Lunds’ differing values in respect to relationships, money, and environment – all markers for a materialistic society that is becoming increasingly inhospitable. Cleo struggles to find time for her challenging job as an architectural designer and for the demands of her family; Mandalay, an artist and single parent, tries to raise her twin sons uncontaminated by the materialistic values of their lawyer father; and Cliff attempts to run a landscape company with his spoiled younger brother, Ben, and to accommodate the ever-increasing demands of his Estonian mail-order bride.
Karen Hofmann’s brilliant sequel to her novel What is Going to Happen Next skillfully explores societal attitudes and the instability of personal and public lives in a world that values money above all else.
A Bright and Steady Flame
$22.95In 1974, after escaping an abusive marriage, Luanne Armstrong struggled with poverty and caring for four small children. During this time, the author and Sam Moore began their friendship; they were both young single parents in crisis, and needed to change their lives. They supported each other through the child-rearing years, careers and environmental, peace and feminist work. Their friendship endured and strengthened during the colourful, sometimes strange, but also community-altering movements that rocked the seventies and eighties throughout BC: back-to-the-landers, draft dodgers, hippies, drugs and political movements for peace, feminism and equality.
Now in their later years, they are again both facing an identity crisis, and, again, they do so together, their long friendship a source of immense strength and comfort. This book delves into the hardships of aging, grief and pain, and how friendships can sustain all of us.
A Bright and Steady Flame gives insight into how deep and powerful a friendship can be. Armstrong’s new book speaks to our compelling human need and ability to build long-lasting community. This is a love story that celebrates, for all people, the solace that true friendship can provide.
A Brimful of Asha
$16.95In 2007 Ravi Jain completed school and was itching to get his feet wet in the theatre scene. With plans to begin his own company, Ravi put off marriage for a few years, much to the disappointment of his mother, Asha, who was getting impatient with Ravi’s non-traditional approach to life. In this autobiographical story of the Jain family, Ravi recalls a trip to India with his parents in tow, where they ambushed him with a series of prospective wives at every turn. Conveyed through storytelling, A Brimful of Asha is a comedic and heartwarming tale of a family caught between two cultures.
A Broken Bowl
$12.95Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow.
“Picture-building poetry doesn’t get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader’s self – each piece a new gesture to try on.” — Per Brask.
“These are the end days – someone’s got a kitchen knife and is ‘looking for the government’ the river is a ‘filthy transfusion.’ Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We’re long past apology, reconstruction: there’s only Friesen’s voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust.” — Tim Lilburn.
NOMINATED for the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
A Burning We Will Die
$20.00Nurses traditionally care for bodies; they don’t find murdered ones. Erin Rine, a gutsy, thirty-year-old nurse, inadvertently steps into murder when she trips over her patient’s body. With her headstrong Aries personality, a black belt in taekwondo, and only fearing the unpredictable bear population in her Northern Ontario woodland districts, Erin gets caught up in the investigation with the help of her best friend, an elderly neighbour who provides astrological influences, eerily apt psychic warnings.
Burned in prior relationships, Erin is disconcerted by her attraction to the handsome investigating detective, and strives to avoid a romantic entanglement despite the investigation bringing them closer.
A Calendar of Reckoning
$17.95With careful attention to detail, and evocative turns of phrase, Dave Margoshes introspectively looks back on youth. Intriguing metaphors, reminiscent of pastoral imagery, create a sharp contrast between the heavy subject matter of one’s own mortality, and the beautiful, evocative comparisons between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, particularly birds and trees. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, is juxtaposed with the desire to give in to temptation, and become one with the world, as Margoshes makes most evident in his final poem, “Wisdom”, a fitting end to a collection that would have the reader struggling between reconciling their past and present.
A Canadian’s Guide to Money-Smart Living
$19.95A Canadian’s Guide to Money-Smart Living will help the reader to understand how to live money-smart, providing step-by-step instructions on how to take control of his or her financial future. Many of us feel that managing our money and financial future is hard work and out of our control, which often leads to us ignoring the issue or putting it off for another day, week or year. Simple everyday solutions are available. These start with learning the basics, being comfortable with the topic of money in the household and finally, asking a financial expert the right questions.
A Casual Brutality
$19.95A Casual Brutality is a powerful, dark novel about the failure of a decent man to come to terms with the moral disintegration of the Caribbean island of his birth.
Casaquemada is a fragile West Indian republic divided by racial antagonism, lured into a spurious nationalism by impotent rulers, awash in a mindless consumerism fostered by easy money and a lust for an imported version of the good life. Raj Ramsingh is a Toronto doctor who returns to his native island only to leave it again, having paid a tragic price for his unwillingness to recognize the cruel imperatives of the men who will determine Casaquemada’s fate.
A Casual Brutality takes the reader into a world of terrifying dualities: illusion has become destruction; decency had become helplessness; nationhood has become tribalism; and a violent future looks only towards a brutal past. A novel as timely now as when it was first published in 1988.