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Showing 1233–1248 of 9481 results
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Bread and Salt
$16.95In this her first book of “prosaics,” Renee Rodin discovers a home in the wilderness surrounding her. Pieced together from childhood memories of Montreal, dreams of her mother’s towering absence, long distance calls with her father, street politics and the joy of children, Bread and Salt, what you bring for luck to a new house, is a joyous affirmation of vision and courage in hard times.
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Bread, Wine & Angels
$17.95Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Runner-Up.The story of a girl in a remote village of southern Italy, considered a “barrel of wine” to be sold off quickly, lest she turn to vinegar.”. . . a novel that describes the real lives of a vanished world with brilliant and down-to-earth sincerity.”–Quill & Quire
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Break Away
$16.95Winter, teenagers, and dreams of glory come together in this novel about the reaction of a small working-class town when the local hero decides not to join a professional hockey team. Talented Alexandre McKenzie lives on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River, where in summer he rides the logging trails on his quad, and in winter?after school and hockey practice?he likes to head off alone to a bush camp outside town. When he meets and falls in love with an unusual girl, Jessie, who has been plagued by tragedy, his friends and neighbors criticize him for stepping outside the popular crowd. Fighting to hold his head high, Alex takes comfort in his love of nature and his sightings of a magnificent bull moose?and he knows that he does not want a future in sports.
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Break Point
$19.95Groomed since the age of eight by his obsessive father Vince Spadea, by most accounts—except Andre Agassi’s, who called Vince “a journeyman” at age 25—has been a success. At the start of the 2005 season, 19th seed Spadea was the only over-30-year-old player besides Agassi to be ranked in the top-20 on the world professional tennis circuit.
Now in his 13th professional season, Spadea gives a riveting account of the ultra-competitive and often hilarious world of a pro tennis player. He battles injuries, coaching and agent changes, and a slight from American Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe as he continues his improbable climb back up the rankings. Along the way, he considers taking two months off to appear on The Bachelor, practices with a still combative John McEnroe in a New York City tennis club, and prowls LA parties with his buddy, comedian Jon Lovitz, trying to pick up actresses like Natalie Portman and jump start his fledgling acting career.
Agassi, Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Martina Navratilova, Maria Sharapova, Jennifer Capriati, Tim Henman, and Marat Safin are all analyzed in more colourful and personal terms than the tennis media has ever provided. In these pages, Spadea breaks the taboo of the “whatever you see, hear and do here, stays here” locker room mentality.
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Breaker
$18.00The essence, the quintessence, of lyric poetry.
Sue Sinclair is the director inheritor of the great early 20th Century German poet, Rilke: she possesses intense lyrical vision, steeped in wonder at the existence of the world, and a kind of grief at our inability to lose ourselves in it completely. Her perception is acutely focused and rigorous; and she is acutely self-aware. She is not afraid of words like “beauty” or “being,” yet, because of the intensity of her vision, she never uses them as clichŽs. Her gift for metaphor is astonishing and may remind some readers of the young Roo Borson.
You cross the heat-ridden ground, the sweet, brittle scent
of sage rising underfoot. So easy to pretend a single word
will occur to you, and that it will do all the good
anyone could hope. The earth is parched and lonely,
relies on dignity to protect it. Each thing hanging
by the thread of itself. Bleating crickets. Rustle of dry stalks.
The silence pushes you toward yourself:
It’s time to walk deep into the heart of what troubles you.
&3150; from “Drought”“In these poems, ‘the world lifts its head/and clarity pours from its back.’ The world-reading in Sue Sinclair’s Breaker, the ontology of the book, is magical and feels deeply true. All objects here exercise the power of a profound affective gravity; cities, islands, gardens and the savouring mind itself pull and accommodate the one who looks hard. Sinclair’s poems shape us to be just this sort of fierce viewer. They have a moving, extraordinary facility to discern, taste, the sweet depths of things.” — Tim Lilburn
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Breaking and Entering
$24.95Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • An Oprah Daily Best Book of 2023 • One of the Globe and Mail’s Most Anticipated Titles of 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A 49th Shelf Fall Book To Put On Your List • One of the Globe 100’s Best Books of 2023
During the hottest summer on record, Bea’s dangerous new hobby puts everyone’s sense of security to the test.
Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former self, and the same could be said of her life. She dreams of the past, her days as a newlywed, a new mom, a new homeowner gutting the kitchen—now the only novel experience that looms is the threat of divorce.
Everything changes when she googles “escape” and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she’s subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people’s lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.
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Breakneck
$20.00Rose Dubois and Julie O’Brien find themselves on the roof of a Montreal apartment building on a scorching summer’s day, and from that moment on their fates are intertwined. Worldwide climate change and dramatic shifts in weather patterns foreshadow their predestined suffering.
As is soon revealed, the two women share a submissive love for the same man, Charles. Their mutual desire creates an arms race of artificial beauty and debasement; they have a common obsession for plastic surgery and strive to be avatars of the perfect female.As they compete for the love and attention of Charles, both women come to realize that to accept being nothing more than an object, to kneel and grovel before your persecutor, you ultimately become his executioner. In the end, Charles’ own obsessions and desires – which he loathes – are ultimately his undoing and downfall.
Praise for Breakneck:
“… With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan’s novels in translation. … Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion – and honesty – her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve’s Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan’s work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work – Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit – so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer.” (The Times Literary Supplement)
“Breakneck is above all else an anxious novel, swimming in an excess of intoxicants and physical extremes, bouncing back and forth between personal improvement and destruction. It is ‘troubling and filled with pleasure’ – a phrase one of the women uses to describe her developing romance with Charles. Arcan’s frenetic, even disturbing prose – here in translation by Jacob Homel – mimics the book’s title, strong-arming its reader into an intense philosophical examination of vanity and excess. What risks coming across as a shallow narrative benefits from the incredibly thoughtful introspection that has come to define Arcan’s unique world. The late Quebec writer readily understood the all-consuming depths of what we often wrongly deem as superficial.” (Quill & Quire)
“Breakneck, Nelly Arcan’s newly translated third novel (originally published in 2007 in French as À ciel ouvert), secures the late author’s singular place in Canadian letters as a writer who punctures the platitudes of sex. Composed in Arcan’s trademark fiery style, Breakneck sets up a struggle between Rose and Julie, two successful, artistic women who want the same man. Breakneck is an unflinching, often outlandish look at female extremity in the matters of the heart, exposing how female rivals often share the same flaws. This is sisterhood, in Arcan’s formation, ‘at the bottom of the barrel.’ ” (The National Post)
One of 49th Shelf’s Most Anticipated Fiction titles, 2015
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Breath Taking
$22.95An unflinching and tender recollection of illness, death, and grief, sensitively exploring the dynamic between the burden of care and the burden of dying.
Carolyn Smart’s latest poetry collection offers a striking meditation on the death of her partner of nearly forty years. Structured in five distinct parts, this deeply moving book unfolds like a tragedy—each section like an act in a play, the individual poems key scenes in a shared life coming to an end.
The language in Breath Taking is direct and exacting, with colloquial phrases that animate and complicate the emotional pressure of the work itself. Familiar references are scattered throughout—Gould Lake, Road 38—not as a device, but as indications of the everyday world that love, pain, and death inhabit.
Intimate and exhaustive, this generous document doesn’t lean on a belief in God or the afterlife, nor does nature’s continuity offer an uncomplicated source of comfort. Instead, what is revealed is the unvarnished reality of love and loss—the arduous responsibilities, the fragile attempts at recovery, the wishful thinking that what is gone will one day return. Breath Taking is a profound, vital reflection on the end of a life, and on those who go on living.
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Breath, Like Water
$18.00“Look, I come from a line of angry women. / I am not in love with mountains, or rivers, or poetry. / I am in love with Mountain.”
In Breath, Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance the narrator, a settler-colonial hiker, grapples with her attachment to the Okanagan Mountain alongside her desire to honour the Land Back movement of Indigenous peoples and the harmful history of white colonizers. She is critical of her own role in this system, yet cognizant of the lack of power she possesses to return the land to its rightful owners. Instead she walks–hiking the Okanagan Mountain regularly, learning the rhythms of snow, heat, bears, pine trees, mule deer, and ticks–sharing its joys with lovers.
In styles both experimental and familiar, a tangential narrative takes off. Sparked by a mysterious plane crash in 1950, the narrator contemplates a fire-hungry tree-people inhabiting Okanagan Mountain. Blending poetic prose with free verse, Norah Bowman weaves a narrative of magical speculation and natural history to decolonize human-nature relationships and celebrate the spirit of the mountain.
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Breathing Fire 2
$24.00Breathing Fire II is Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s new selection of Canada’s finest young poets.Nine years ago the first volume of Breathing Fire was published to rave reviews, introducing 31 of Canada’s finest new poets to a wide and appreciative audience of readers. The anthology has since gone into several printings and become a basic text in schools and universities across the country. And the poets within, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Tim Bowling, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Crummey, Evelyn Lau, Sue Goyette and Carmine Starnino, have gone on to develop and captivate wide readerships of their own.Today a new and exciting generation of poets has come of age. Some, including Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, Alison Pick, Shane Rhodes, matt robinson, Laisha Rosnau and Nathalie Stephens, have already put out books, and have even won or been shortlisted for major awards. Others with work just as compelling will be introduced for the first time. Breathing Fire 2 collects the best from all 33 of these writers, proudly presenting the next generation of Canada’s poets to the world.
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Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive
$22.95Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers… the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived.
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Breathing Soccer
$10.95Breathing Soccer is the realistic account of Lisa who is forbidden to play soccer because of her asthma. At its core the novel reveals the plight of asthmatics who desire the challenge and thrill of sports, but who must weigh that desire against some very real health issues. Dr. Emerson, her family doctor, has warned Lisa that her asthma must be taken seriously, and that the aggressive demands that soccer places on her breathing could be lethal. Her parents believe the doctor and as a result become overly protective. Right down the line people stand in her way, even her soccer coach, Wilcox, who decides not to play her in the games because he does not want to take a chance on her getting sick and weakening the team’s chance to win. But just when it seems that the world has conspired against her, while watching the Olympic Games, Lisa discovers a new source of strength in the example of Olympic Rower Silken Laumann. Lisa is inspired by Silken who, after a terrible accident, was told by doctors that her career was over, but who rose above their verdict to overcome her own barriers in order to win the Bronze medal for Canada.
With the encouragement of camp counsellor, Giant, and her new asthma doctor, Lisa finds the inner strength necessary to rise above her own obstacles and become the soccer player she always knew she could be.
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Breathing the Page
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breth
$29.95breth presents both new and selected poems from legendary Canadian sound, visual, and performance poet bill bissett. bissett’s innovations have shaped poetry, music, painting, and publishing and have stimulated, provoked, influenced, shocked, and delighted audiences for half a century. This new collection, bissett writes,
“shows sew manee threds thru poetree n langwage btween n thru lyrik sound song vizual narrativ non narrativ his her storikal naytur humour sexual romantik politikul metaphysikal spiritual fuseyun th pickshur image in th lettr th shape uv th lettr in th drawing line orchestrating th needs 4 caring n heering n being with each othr all th drama uv all uv us lerning why n how creating thru art n th bizness uv life a much mor free n equitabul societee b r e t h contains manee storeez uv being ther n getting ther n uv th love uv art n each othr th sharing times n th losses in our journeez 2 b helping each othr n th planet erth nobody owns n thru art manee ways uv lifting ourselvs with kleen watr erth fire n air n love ths b r e t h is abt thees adventurs uv sharing physical being n love spiritual n touching th manee ways art poetree can take us byond th gift n prison uv self in2 th manee worlds in n uv ths beautiful galaxee n ourselvs uttring th sounds in th images n lettrs n lettrs 2 manee passing comets n ourselvs spin th reel dreem xchanging love 4 love our manee selvs on fire our gifts 2 each othr n ourselvs that evreewun has enuff ths time uv th sun n th lite in th dark touch th sun in time with joy n sorrow lerning n unlerning langwage n poetree can show we join with ourselvs n each other.”
This volume, the largest in bill bissett’s publication history, includes more than a hundred illustrations and visual poems, many of them appearing in print for the first time, as well as a foreword by fellow poet Tim Atkins (author of Folklore and On Fathers < On Daughtyrs), a bibliographical “a r c h i v e,” and an index of poem titles.
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Brevity of Red, The
$14.95The Brevity of Red is the product of long reflection on loss: of a daughter, a sister, parents; and of familial stories. These intelligent, vivid, carefully crafted poems honour the dead, yet they avoid easy answers. Although they affirm the power of love and are centred in the personal, their tendency is centrifugal.
Dramatic monologues in the voices of Hannah, Isaac, Job or a Mohenjo-daro carver of seals are reinforced by meditations on ancient artefacts that connect us to a vanishing past whose human pain, savagery, whimsy and redemption illuminate our present day ironies and “joys / with the soil still on them.”
With fresh metaphors and emotionally resonant images, MacLean questions those places where we seek solace: our artistic imaginations, our religious traditions and myths, as well as the entrancing, but arbitrarily cruel natural world from which we spring. Always she calls us to attention within this moment. Her language is focused, her descriptions clear and precise. Though the mood is largely elegiac, it is also wry and surprisingly edgy, as it reaches for the grace notes of celebration.
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Brian Jungen
$54.00Born in the remote northern community of Fort St. John, British Columbia, to a Dane-zaa mother and a Swiss-Canadian father, Brian Jungen’s dual heritage often provides the themes and subject matter for his work. Brian Jungen: Friendship Centre examines over 80 pieces from Jungen’s imaginative body of work, including sculptures, drawings, and film stills — from whale skeletons composed of white plastic chairs and gas cans decorated with floral beadwork designs to totem pole-like forms constructed out of golf bags and Northwest Coast masks made out of repurposed sneakers. This generously illustrated volume details Jungen’s material explorations of a long history of inequality, the environment, and Indigenous ways of knowing and making.