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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1185–1200 of 9481 results
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Book of Changes, The
$18.95In her second volume of poetry, Madeline Sonik creates poetry through the contemplation and inspiration of the abstruse symbols encountered in the ancient oracular Chinese text, the I Ching (The Book of Changes). The interplay of concept and image that the I Ching offers, as well as the non-causal worldview it implicates, presents a unique place of poetic inquiry. Carl Jung used the I Ching as a method of exploring the unconscious, and pointed out how it worked by allowing chance details to “enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it.” This is what Sonik has attempted to do in each of the 64 poems that correspond to the I Ching’s hexagrams. She also uses the I Ching as a feminist writer, for although it gives credence to intuitive and synchronistic ways of knowing which, in Western cultures, are associated with the feminine–the work is predominantly masculinist in that it foregrounds issues of male power, as well as occupations and concerns that have traditionally excluded women. Sonik compensates for the lack of feminine presence in the I Ching by projecting into the hexagrams a personal experience of womanhood, where autobiographical elements are at liberty to dialogue with proverbial wisdom. Through this conversation, readers will discover a deeper understanding of what it means to be both human and female.
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Book of Faith, The
$19.95Mordecai Richler meets Jane Austen in The Book of Faith. Faith, Rhoda, and Erica, affectionately known the Three Graces, are members of a liberal Jewish congregation in contemporary Montreal. Rabbi Nate wants a grand new synagogue; Marty, the congregation’s treasurer, harbours a raunchy secret; and Melly is a hard-nosed Holocaust survivor with an agenda. Award-winning author Elaine Kalman Naves’s debut novel is a delicious send-up of synagogue politics. It is also a paean to friendship.
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Book of Places
$19.95In Book of Places, Yvonne Blomer draws us along for a cycling journey spanning decades and countries. From a solitary traffic controller on a lonely Nevada highway, to the quizzical regulars of a dodgy pub in the UK, we follow Blomers meandering path through snapshots of the figures and sights that populate the world she moves through. This updated edition also features an expanded collection of poems, integrating a ghazal suite of meditations on childhood, place, and the concept of home, poems set on bicycles in Southeast Asia, and more recent poems reflecting on the ever-developing journey of life. The Book of Places invites us on a grand adventure, but ultimately leads us home.
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Book of Short Sentences
$17.00In her fourth poetry collection, Alice Burdick delves deeper into the life of a Toronto/Vancouver urbanite who has relocated to small-town Nova Scotia to live, work and raise a family. Her quirky, playful, often surreal poems are deeply imbued with the landscape of Nova Scotia’s south shore, as well as her own inner landscape, and the landscape of family. Her poems explore, too, the human vessel in which we carry pain, memory, joy, and existential bewilderment.
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book of variations
$23.95The range of bpNichol’s output is unparalleled, the reach of his curiosity, wit and inventiveness, immeasurable. Concrete poetry, novels, comics, sound poetry and even a television show, Fraggle Rock – it’s his eclecticism and love of ‘borderblur’ that make bp so unique.
The perfect counterpoint to his acclaimed nine-volume long poem, The Martyrology, the three long-lost classics contained in a book of variations showcase Nichol’s diverse, sprawling imagination. Placing love: a book of remembrances, zygal: a book of mysteries and translations and art facts: a book of contexts side by side, as they were meant to be, this fun and ephemeral collection may prove to be Nichol’s most lasting and important contribution to poetry.
‘bpNichol was, and still is, the essential poet for so many of us.’
— Michael Ondaatje
‘This is bpNichol at his young, whimsical, charming, sweet, magical, formally inventive, childlike, zany, fecund, h-h-h-heavenly best. A total delight from beginning to beginning again.’
— Charles Bernstein
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Bookshops
$19.95Jorge Carrión collects bookshops: from Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore in New York City to City Lights Bookshop and Green Apple Books in San Francisco and all the bright spots in between (Prairie Lights, Tattered Cover, and countless others). In this thought-provoking, vivid, and entertaining essay, Carrión meditates on the importance of the bookshop as a cultural and intellectual space. Filled with anecdotes from the histories of some of the famous (and not-so-famous) shops he visits on his travels, thoughtful considerations of challenges faced by bookstores, and fascinating digressions on their political and social impact, Bookshops is both a manifesto and a love letter to these spaces that transform readers’ lives.
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Bookshops
$32.95Jorge Carrión collects bookshops: from Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore in New York City to City Lights Bookshop and Green Apple Books in San Francisco and all the bright spots in between (Prairie Lights, Tattered Cover, and countless others). In this thought-provoking, vivid, and entertaining essay, Carrión meditates on the importance of the bookshop as a cultural and intellectual space. Filled with anecdotes from the histories of some of the famous (and not-so-famous) shops he visits on his travels, thoughtful considerations of challenges faced by bookstores, and fascinating digressions on their political and social impact, Bookshops is both a manifesto and a love letter to these spaces that transform readers’ lives.
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Bootlegger’s Confession, The
$16.95It’s 1922 and business is booming for Saul and Lou Sugarman– thanks to prohibition. But business gets personal when the Sugarmans’ brother-in-law ends up dead. Looking for answers, private detective Sam Klein is called in to investigate.
What appears to be nothing more than a deal-gone-bad quickly spirals out of control to threaten Sam’s own family. How can Sam prevent his loved ones from becoming enmeshed in a bootlegger turf war that’s bigger than even he can imagine?
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Border Cities Powerhouse
$32.95Border Cities Powerhouse chronicles one of the most dramatic urban transformations in Canadian history, documenting the shift from modest industry to manufacturing dynamo. The coming of the automobile in 1904 put the Border Cities on the map, sparking a period of explosive growth.
From the bright lights of hydro-electric power and the construction of the Ambassador Bridge to the Battle of Ford City, communist agitation, and the Border Cities’ forced amalgamation during the Great Depression, this was a period of unprecedented progress and open conflict.
Tracing the region’s development through Prohibition, the Dirty Thirties, and the military expansion of the First and Second World Wars, the era reaches its climax during the infamous 1945 Ford Factory Strike, when autoworkers faced off against corporate management in a struggle that would change the face of Canadian labour.
Following the success of The River & the Land: A History of Windsor to 1900, this second book in Patrick Brode’s comprehensive, three-volume history of Windsor captures an age of dramatic change and political struggle.
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Border Markers
$15.95Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!After the accidental death of a teenaged friend, the Lansing family has split along fault lines previously hidden under a patina of suburban banality. Every family has secrets, but for the Lansings those secrets end up propelling them in different directions away from their border town to foreign shores and to prison.Told in thirty-three flash fiction narratives, Border Markers is fractured like the psyches of its characters, all keen edges and tough language. It’s a slice of prairie noir that straddles the line between magical and gritty realism. Jenny Ferguson’s debut is a compelling collection of commonplace tragedies and surprising insights.
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Bordertown Café
$17.95In Bordertown Café, seventeen-year-old Jimmy faces the archetypal Canadian dilemma: stay home in Canada, with all its obvious flaws, or go south (young man) to the Land of Opportunity. Jimmy’s dad is the powerfully encoded Western hero of American popular myth – the cowboy as trucker, living his freedom and riding the roads of Wyoming. He offers Jimmy the prosperity of his new American home, a large modern house fully equipped with everything, including a capable new wife. In contrast, Jimmy’s mom, Marlene, is a failed wife and a weak, tentative mother. The home she has made for herself and her son “on the Canadian side of nowhere” is provisional and shabby: half finished, ill equipped, badly decorated.
Jimmy’s conflict is writ large as the play dramatizes Canada’s struggle to negotiate a unique identity in the shadow of its brash, superpower neighbour. Although global realities have shifted in the decades since the play’s inception, its themes of personal and cultural identity endure.
Cast of 2 women and 2 men.
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Born
$24.95What happens when an English teacher goes into labor during a high school lockdown?
High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant and trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha’s suicide attempt. Maria, the school’s counsellor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in.
As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she’s going into labour. And she’ll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can.
This isn’t your typical lockdown story. With clear-eyed empathy, Born explores the many pitfalls and utopian possibilities of the school system, motherhood, and caregiving, and the sometimes fraught, sometimes transcendent nature of the student-teacher relationship.
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Born Out of This
$21.95Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. Lowther looks back on her mother’s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty surrounding that life-changing moment.
Tumbling through the years that follow, Lowther searches for her own identity–foster homes, punk rock concerts, activism and wanderings in Europe fill her hours but leave her searching. Ultimately she is drawn back to the forests and coast of her home.
With remarkable poetic vision, Lowther weaves her words and her mother’s poetry into the landscape, until language and land are inseparable. She describes the waning days of spawning salmon: “barely submerged, the dark grey still-living move slowly among the dead, except for sudden splashes, bursts of energy, pinnacles of desperation.” Nothing is simple in this dense, temperate jungle, and even this routine tragedy renews: “This landscape of gore nourishes and fertilizes the trees and berry bushes.”
With over twenty years of poetic devotion to Clayoquot Sound, Christine Lowther entrances readers through the stunning vividness of her writing, profound reflections on our place in the natural world and its ultimate indifference to us: “We … humans stand between forest and ocean like acupuncture needles, feeling the world pulsing with its endless cycles.” Steeped in the immense beauty of the coastal rainforest, this indifference is strangely reassuring.
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Born Sacred
$27.00In October 2023, upon witnessing the escalation of Palestinian genocide, Ktunaxa poet Smokii Sumac began writing poems reflecting on the stories of Palestinians in Gaza who were risking their lives to share news of the genocide of Palestinian culture, literature, and life. These 100 poems offer a witnessing of the escalation of colonial violence, both current and historical, across oceans, lands, cultures, and people, and the reckoning one has in the face of a genocide.
Vulnerable, eloquent, compassionate, and enduring, Born Sacred is an in-time reflection honouring the shared histories of Indigenous Peoples of North America and of the people in Palestine. Sumac offers this collection as a small piece of life dedicated to Palestinians and resounds the collective call for solidarity in our shared liberation.
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Born to Walk
$27.95The case for getting back on our feet
The humble act of putting one foot in front of the other transcends age, geography, culture, and class, and is one of the most economical and environmentally responsible modes of transit. Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.
At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein travelled throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada to walk with people who saw the act not only as a form of transportation and recreation, but also as a path to a better world. There are no magic-bullet solutions to modern epidemics like obesity, anxiety, alienation, and climate change. But what if there is a simple way to take a step in the right direction? Combining fascinating reportage, eye-opening research, and Rubinstein’s own discoveries, Born to Walk explores how far this ancient habit can take us, how much repair is within range, and guarantees that you’ll never again take walking for granted.
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Born to Walk
$19.95The case for getting back on our feet — now in paperback
The humble act of putting one foot in front of the other transcends age, geography, culture, and class and is one of the most economical and environmentally responsible modes of transit. Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.
At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein traveled throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada to walk with people who saw the act not only as a form of transportation and recreation, but also as a path to a better world. There are no magic-bullet solutions to modern epidemics like obesity, anxiety, alienation, and climate change. But what if there is a simple way to take a step in the right direction? Combining fascinating reportage, eye-opening research, and Rubinstein’s own discoveries, Born to Walk explores how far this ancient habit can take us and how much repair is within range, and guarantees that you’ll never again take walking for granted.