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Showing 113–128 of 8928 results
A Cemetery for Holes
$20.00In A Cemetery for Holes, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under the stress of family trauma. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. It is this history of violence which is ultimately confronted, fought against, and overcome. While engaged in this struggle, the poems also strive to rebuild, to console and to rediscover the world, its beauty, tenderness, humour, and joy.
A Century of Grant MacEwan
$9.95August 12, 2002 would have marked the 100th birthday of one of Western Canada’s most beloved, exemplary, idiosyncratic and admired citizens, the Hon. J.W. Grant MacEwan. A Century of Grant MacEwan: Selected Writings is published to mark the centenary of the author’s birth, and showcases the writing achievements of this remarkable man. From his first foray into historical writing, The Sodbusters (1948), to Watershed: Reflections on Water (2000), this collection offers a fascinating selection drawn from the nearly fifty books that won him a place in hearts and on bookshelves across the Canadian West.
From perilous Chilcotin–Klondike cattle drives to the creation of a short-lived republic within the boundaries of Manitoba, A Century of Grant MacEwan is MacEwan at his finest, preserving little-known or neglected nuggets of the past for future generations to read and remember. Through his writing, MacEwan shows us our history.
A Chance For Life
$17.95How one woman overcame adversity; took control of her life… and beat the odds. “My name is Suzanne Giroux. My father traded his life for mine… and I chose to live. This is my story.” So begins the story of Suzanne Giroux. Born on the border between Quebec and Ontario, she lives her life walking a fine line between life and death. At the age of 24, Suzanne discovers a lump in her breast that turns out to be breast cancer, and she begins a struggle to maintain her sanity and her health. She tells of two miscarriages; her fiancé, the man of her dreams, falling in a construction accident and being reduced to a vegetative state; the man she finally does marry becoming abusive, indifferent, an alcoholic and an adulterer; and the return of her cancer after an operation to remove it fails. Rushing to her side, her distraught father tells her that he would give anything to trade places with her, to take her cancer into his body so she could be healthy. And then he is diagnosed with cancer as well. But not all is dark. On vacation, she meets a doctor who suggests she try to qualify for the drug Herceptin, which stops the growth of tumours in breast cancer and sometimes even shrinks them. Giroux begins the treatments, but as she gets better, her father becomes worse, and she loses him at the same time her marriage falls apart.
A Christmas Story
$29.95“The definitive book about Bob Clark’s 1983 classic holiday film.” — Parade
A delightful gift book with rare and previously unreleased photographs, behind-the-scenes insight, and interviews with the stars of the beloved film
Learn about the special effects required to stick Flick’s tongue to the frozen pole, the film’s unlikely rise to fame after a mediocre theater debut, and which famous actor Darren McGavin beat out for the role of the Old Man
From Jean Shepherd’s original radio broadcasts to Bob Clark’s 1983 sleeper hit film and beyond, A Christmas Story has become a beloved yuletide tradition over the last three decades. This engaging book reveals — and celebrates — the inside scoop behind the film’s production, release, and unlikely ascent to the top of popular culture.
This is the untold story of the making of the film — and what happened afterwards. Ralphie Parker’s quest for a Red Ryder Air Rifle didn’t conclude with the movie’s release; the tale inspired massive VHS sales, a Broadway production, and a mountain of merchandise. Complete with rare and previously unreleased photographs, this book provides fans of the movie and film buffs alike with all they didn’t know about the timeless classic.
A Clap for Cadence
$14.95Whether it’s a middle-aged man travelling to Mexico in search of a troubled sister or a thirty-something restaurant manager trying desperately to hold her life together, this stunning debut collection of interconnected stories unerringly charts the emotional journeys of a wonderful cast of characters, none more charming, interesting or endearing than the woman who lends her name to its title. Filled with compassion, humour and eloquence, A Clap for Cadence signals the arrival of a talented young writer of uncommon dexterity and maturity of voice, whose wholly original creations are as real and as recognizable as ourselves.
A Clearing
$14.95A Clearing is a meditation of the everyday — both the joys and the losses observed in the natural world as they so closely mirror day-to-day human experience. There is a mystical edge to these poems that opens to deeper understanding of simple desire juxtaposed with the hard realities of homelessness, failed relationships, and loss in childbirth. A Clearing, Carson’s first full collection of poetry, alternates between tender, poignant portraits and a sharper, darker voice evoked by difficult life experiences. Seasons are metaphors for loss and hunger, leading readers to larger revelations about aging, violence and global conflict. These poems are short, gritty and provocative, asking the reader to look harder at their own lives and the world around them. With the poems in A Clearing, Carson explores how having the courage to let go of the things that bog us down can lead to a place where sun shines through the shadows.
A Clutter of Cats
$16.95It’s late spring and young artist Gerry Coneybear and her twenty cats are thrilled to finally be able to spend time in the garden surrounding her 200-year-old house on the Ottawa River. But Gerry is having difficulty keeping her curious cats safe from her new neighbours’ large dog. The couple’s? marriage appears a bit fraught, and when the philandering husband is murdered, the wife is the obvious suspect. Or ought to be. As events unfold next door, Gerry watches from her garden, where she picks rhubarb, weeds, and plants her flowers, catnip and herbs, all supervised by her cats and her friend and part-time housekeeper Prudence. A terrible car crash, an eccentric train engineer (and his equally eccentric wife), and a midnight visit to the house next door all contribute to this cozy mystery coming out all right in the end. And there’s jam-making. And ghosts.
A Company of Rogues
$22.95Award recognition for book one of the Cupids trilogy, A Roll of the Bones
***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER***
***SILVER, THE MIRAMICHI READER‘S THE VERY BEST! COVER ART/DESIGN AWARD***
This dramatic conclusion to a trilogy foregrounds the experiences of women settlers in North America as they grapple with notions of homeland, colonization, and sense of belonging.
A Company of Rogues completes the Cupids trilogy, moving the action back to the New Found Land seven years after John Guy’s colonists first settled Cupids Cove. After their wanderings across the ocean, Ned and Nancy are united—but will the shores of New Found Land provide a permanent home? Kathryn and Nicholas Guy join the effort to found a second colony at Bristol’s Hope, but their work is threatened by a shadowy enemy who holds a dangerous power over Kathryn. And a newcomer to the colony, the Wampanoag traveller Tisquantum, settles among the English colonists, challenging their beliefs about the New World they have come to settle and the people who call it home.
A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People
$17.95People who rely on stereotypes are often vilified. But really, is there a better way to classify people? There are some taxonimical difficulties, though. Exactly how many types of people are there? What behaviours are characteristic of each particular group? How do you know if you’ve spotted an armchair psychologist or a kleptomaniac?
Gabe Foreman’s A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People is not your average reference book. It turns a series of sociological case studies into a functional encyclopedia that doubles as a unique, achingly funny, always engaging collection of poems. ‘Bridesmaids,’ ‘Day Traders,’ ‘Entomologists’ and ‘Number Crunchers’ are all dutifully catalogued in a series of luminously strange, compellingly original lyric and prose poems
The resulting field guide to our disparate humanity is often absurd, sometimes sad and frequently a mixture of both, as each entry unravels according to its own spidery logic.
A Convergence of Solitudes
$23.00A story of identity, connection and forgiveness, A Convergence of Solitudes shares the lives of two families across Partition of India, Operation Babylift in Vietnam, and two referendums in Quebec.
Sunil and Hima, teenage lovers, bravely defy taboos in pre-Partition India to come together as their country divides in two. They move across the world to Montreal and raise a family, but Sunil shows symptoms of schizophrenia, shattering their newfound peace. As a teenager, their daughter Rani becomes obsessed with Quebecois supergroup Sensibilité—and, in particular, the band’s charismatic, nationalistic frontman, Serge Giglio—whose music connects Rani to the province’s struggle for cultural freedom. A chance encounter leads Rani to babysit Mélanie, Serge’s adopted daughter from Vietnam, bringing her fleetingly within his inner circle.
Years later, Rani, now a college guidance counselor, discovers that Mélanie has booked an appointment to discuss her future at the school. Unmoved by her father’s staunch patriotism and her British mother’s bourgeois ways, Mélanie is struggling with deep uncertainty about her identity and belonging. As the two women’s lives become more and more intertwined, Rani’s fascination with Mélanie’s father’s music becomes a strange shadow amidst their friendship.
A Covenant of Salt
$17.95Since the death of her parents in 1791, Lily McEvoy has lived as a recluse in her isolated Armagh County manor with her two maidservants and Titus, the farmhand who has become her whipping boy. But tonight, the heiress is expecting company. Her guest is Master Anselm, the legendary stone cutter who has transformed the estate’s abandoned salt mine into an immense funerary monument to the memory of the McEvoy family, sculpting bas-reliefs in the chapels, crypts and tombs he has carved out of the rock salt of its cavernous walls.
Lily is sniffing powdered salt in the attic as she summons the shadow of her father, the cruel Irish Rear Admiral Magnus McEvoy, hero of the capture of Quebec and absolute master of his estate, and of her mother, the mysterious Laurence, she of the webbed feet who emerged from the river of a stormy night.
But the same salt that has preserved Lily’s memories is desiccating her. Her obsession with the past now risks transforming her, like Lot’s wife, into a pillar of salt—crystallized by the family’s abominable secrets. These secrets, and the instrument of her revenge, she will today finally reveal to Anselm over their precipitous evening meal.
Drawing from the history of the conquest of Quebec and Irish legend, this is an exotic new way to tell a very old story.
A Credit to Your Race
$18.00A longtime resident of Surrey, Truman Green wrote ‘A Credit to Your Race’ (1973), in which a fifteen-year-old black porter’s son falls in love with, and impregnates, the white girl next door. Set in Surrey, circa 1960, ‘A Credit to Your Race’ is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of Canadian racism could come to bear on a youthful, interracial couple. “If Isolation is a key theme of black B.C. writing,” says social historian Wayde Compton, “Green’s protagonist Billy Robinson is the most fully-drawn expression.” Compton says Green was diplomatic in the way he described racism, but his novel was passed over nonetheless. After rejection from several literary presses in Canada, Truman self-published his novel in a limited edition of three hundred copies.
“If isolation is a key theme of black B.C. writing, Green’s protagonist Billy Robinson is the most fully-drawn expression.” author and social historian Wayde Compton
A Criminal to Remember
$16.00Michael Van Rooy’s writing is fast-paced, highly entertaining, and exciting with a mix of quirky humour and dark, dry wit. Spine-tingling moments alternate with edge-of-your-seat action in Van Rooy’s Monty Haaviko crime thriller novels.This third instalment in the Monty Haaviko series takes a darker tone from the previous two episodes, An Ordinary Decent Criminal (ODC), and Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal(YFNC). A sophisticated, multi-layered plot keeps pages turning and readers hooked. This time, Monty is tangled in political intrigue, blackmail, corruption, and a long-standing feud in which he becomes a pawn. At the same time, a serial killer threatens the love of Monty’s life–his wife Claire, and soon, escape seems impossible. Monty is approached by a wealthy businessman to run for an elected position on the city’s new Police Commission. As an ex-con, this is something Monty finds intensely amusing. However, he soon discovers his backer has a long-standing rivalry with another businessman who is backing his own patsy for the Commission, and who stands to gain a fortune if his man wins. When Claire starts getting mysterious gifts and flowers, Monty learns about a serial killer the police have been tracking unsuccessfully for many years. He is torn between leaving town and giving up the Police Commission, or staying and risking Claire’s life. But the killer is one who, once he sets his sights on his victims, will stop at nothing to make them his.
A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden
$18.95A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden
A Dark Boat
$16.00‘A Dark Boat’, a new collection of poetry by Patrick Friesen, is heavily influenced by ‘cante jondo’ (Spanish “deep song”, or flamenco) and ‘fado’ (Portuguese songs of longing). Friesen approaches music as a method of weaving his poems with both Spanish and Portuguese aspects of longing, imagistic leaps, and darkness.
The poems in ‘A Dark Boat’ try to shake hands with darkness; the kind of darkness that is rich and necessary for a full human life, the darkness of soil into which seeds drop and grow, the darkness of the grave into which the body is lowered. They explore the kind of loneliness and yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word ‘saudad:’ a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was.
Although musically aware and inspired, Friesen’s poems do not delve too deeply into the metaphorical; rather, they thrive on an allusive and suggestive level that makes room for jarring non sequiturs andvibrant images. These elusive and emotional poems say much, while telling as little as possible.
“…His (Friesen’s) sensitivity as an artist affects all his work in a profound and beautiful way. …Friesen writes about a world that is “quiet” but teeming with emotion; this world is alive and “writhing” with lust, obsession, inspiration, suffering, and yearning. …There is a musicality to Friesen’s writing, a lyricism indicative of what the Spanish term “Deep Song”, a more somber stream of flamenco music. There are constant references to fado music, pianos, horns and Tom Waits, as Friesen probes the universality of music. …The poems are not frivolous but neither are they suppressive or overwrought by the darkness. Instead, the themes are the undiluted musings of an adult, contemplative, full of yearning and with an awareness of death. Friesen is preoccupied with dancing, the motion of feet and legs. In his poems everything from walking and drunken stumbles, as well as the movementof dance, is associated with lust, struggle and resistance. This becomes the perfect backdrop for historically rich poems about Lorca. …” – Vancouver Weekly
“…If you’ve never heard fado music, you should. It is an intense, raw, emotional music which Patrick compared to the Delta blues, another passion of his. Or you could just read this book, which is imbued with his reminiscences of his trip and the music of fado. …lines that punch you in the gut, leaving you breathless. …” – PrairieFire
A Day Does Not Go By
$16.95Johnston skillfully follows the twentieth-century realist tradition of stripping stories down to details and everyday conversations that represent accurate snippets of life, and he explores perception – our ability to discern between conclusions and reality, between misplaced trust and mirror-pane truth. In his unique stories, Jeff and Beth clumsily discuss how they should be reacting to finding a “dead man,” who is not actually dead; a married couple doubt the existence of their eight-year-old son enough to add their names to a school petition asking “teachers and students to no longer refer to the boy… except as a myth.”Johnston masterfully mixes such stories and perspectives with short vignettes told directly from ground zero of a surreal, apparitional landscape. Without philosophical discourse or interrogation, these stories playfully prompt us to question our own realities. The debut of one of western Canada’s most thoughtful and original new authors, A Day Does Not Go By realistically depicts the confusion brought about by crumbling or extinguished relationships, roles and identities.