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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1297–1312 of 9481 results
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Burning in This Midnight Dream
$20.00A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.
Many of the poems in Louise Halfe’s Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures.
Halfe’s poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture.
Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples’ Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe.
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Burning Mom
$18.95A retired suburban wife and mother tragically loses her partner after forty-five years together. So what does she do? The only thing that makes any sense at all. She embarks on her own hero’s journey. A road trip to the middle of the Nevada desert in a twenty-six-foot-long RV.
Based on the experiences of playwright Mieko Ouchi’s mother, Dorothy Ouchi, this irreverent one-woman play tosses us into the passenger seat and takes us on a voyage through the process of grief and the search for meaning and onto the madcap playa of the world’s largest free-form creative gathering as Dorothy discovers the power of art, community, Walmart, and MOOP and the courage to jump back into the deep end of life.
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Burning The Furniture
$20.00Paul Nelson’s new collection, Burning the Furniture, moves through a startling array of things seen while arranging the experience of them into a lucid privacy of mind that is the feature of first memory, what quiets the human heart – these are wonderful and beautiful poems. – Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano
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Burning Water
$19.00First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General’s Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver’s search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction, and humour. This gives you some idea of the scope of what has been called Bowering’s best novel. “I have sometimes said, kidding but not really kidding,” writes its author, “that I attended to the spirit of the west coast, and told the story about the rivals for our land as an instance in which the commanders decided to make love, not war.” As an accurate account of Vancouver’s exploration of our coastline, Burning Water conveys the exact length-99 feet-of the explorer’s ship, and contains citations from his journals. As a work of fanciful fiction, things usually thought to be impossible transpire, without compromising the realism of the text. Bowering recalls that his free hand with history particularly incensed the founder of the National Archives, who had written a biography of George Vancouver and complained in print that Burning Water differed too much from other, similar books in its field.
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Burnley “Rocky” Jones Revolutionary
$25.00“The life, work and activism of Rocky Jones are central to African-Canadian history and the civil rights movement in Canada. Canadians lost a great soul, with the recent death of Rocky Jones, but his autobiography – co-written by James Walker, a close friend of Rocky Jones and one of our foremost writers about Black history in Canada – is a wonderful gift to the entire country. Revolutionary will soon be required reading for any person who seeks to understand the civil rights movement in Canada.”
– Lawrence Hill“A must read, a manual for all freedom fighters, and a testament to Rocky Jones’ and Black power and resilience.”
— Afua Cooper“Any telling of human rights and social equity in Canada would be incomplete without reference to “revolutionary” Rocky Jones’ truth-telling about his life captured in this compelling exemplary autobiography. This insightful account is not only about life as an African Nova Scotian, but also about the community, law, politics.”
— Carl JamesBorn and raised in Truro, Nova Scotia, Burnley “Rocky” Jones is one of Canada’s most important figures of social justice. Often referred to as Canada’s Stokely Carmichael, Jones was tirelessly dedicated to student movements, peace activism, Black Power, anti-racism, women’s liberation and human rights reform. He was a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, brought the Black Panthers to Canada, taught at Dalhousie and founded his own law firm.
This autobiography tells the story of Jones’s inimitable life and his accomplishments.
But it also does more. It illuminates the Black experience in Nova Scotia, it explains the evolving nature of race relations and human rights in recent Canadian history, and it reveals the origins of the “remedial” approach to racial equality that is now practised by activists and governments.
Finally, the story of Rocky Jones is a reminder that human rights are not a gift, but a prize that must be fought for.
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Burqa of Skin
$18.00Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture’s vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death. Now beyond the ripples of scandal Arcan’s work has caused, here are the last echoes of her work, and it is as stunning as it is brief.
Burqa of Skin, with its gruesome title, catapults her work into contemporary debates on culture and gender. The book collects three previously unpublished works: “The Dress,” “The Child in the Mirror” and “Shame.” The first two are written in the first person, in that turbulent, suffocating language that was Arcan’s singular brand, that of a writer on the edge. In the third text, she analyses with inexhaustible ferocity her humiliating experience on the set of a TV talk show. Two lesser-known non-fiction pieces are also included in this collection: a reflection on speed dating and a column published in 2004 titled “Suicide Can Be Harmful to Your Health.”
Praise for Burqa of Skin:
“A masterpiece, a rare and poisonous plant whose posthumous publication makes [the work] all the more striking.” (Juliette Einhorn, Le Figaro)
“… When Arcan’s writing is at its sharpest – as it nearly always was, and as Melissa Bull’s translation convincingly conveys – practically every sentence can serve as a jumping-off point for sustained contemplation and/or heated debate. … ” (The Montreal Gazette)
“… the writing is genuine and lived, giving an almost real-time picture of the author’s philosophical wrestlings … stylishly translated by Melissa Bull … 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)
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Burr
$22.95A ’90s-era Southern Ontario Gothic about holding on to the dead, voiced with plaintive urgency and macabre sensuality.In the small town of Burr, Ontario, thirteen-year-old Jane yearns to reunite with her recently deceased father and fantasizes about tunnelling through the earth to his coffin. This leads her to bond with local eccentric Ernest, who is still reeling from the long-ago drowning of his little sister. Jane’s mother, Meredith, escapes into wildness, enacting the past on the abandoned bed that she finds in the middle of the forest, until her daughter’s disappearance spurs her into action.The voice of the town conveys the suspicions and subliminal fears of a rural community—a chorus of whispers that reaches a fever pitch when Jane and Ernest disappear from Burr together. Throughout, the novel is haunted by Henry, a former wrestler who once stood on his bed in the middle of the night, holding up the weight of the ceiling in his sleeping hands.Mixing realism and the fantastic, Brooke Lockyer’s debut novel investigates the nature of grief and longing that reach beyond the grave.
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Bush Camp
$15.95Both a politically engaged achievement and a highly personal one, Bush Camp is a fitting addition to the unmistakeable idiom of Marvin Francis.A dynamic poetry collection of dry wit and powerful commentary, Bush Camp features a roster of strikingly original characters–Johnny Muskeg, Newfie, Stretch, as well as the camp’s only women, Jenny–that plays with stereotypes as it challenges them. Francis describes the physical rigors of a railroad camp as well as the complex demands of the urban reserve.Poems splash out on the page in a wildly creative exploration of the clash of rural and urban, First Nation and majority cultures. Bush Camp is a new kind of howl.
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Bush Runner
$22.95WINNER OF THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE • “Readers might well wonder if Jonathan Swift at his edgiest has been at work.”—RBC Taylor Prize Jury Citation • “A remarkable biography of an even more remarkable 17th-century individual … Beautifully written and endlessly thought-provoking.”—Maclean’s
Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal. Co-founder of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions.
A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation.
Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.
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Business As Usual
$22.95Toronto’s David Sanders and Claire Dumont are the Nick and Nora Charles of academia: two amateur detectives pulled into a web of deceit and violence involving murder, the illegal cross-border dumping of toxic waste, organized crime, dubious, self-serving politicians, and a mysterious, ambitious businessman whose loyalties are unknown.In Business As Usual, author Michael Boughn weaves together multiple plots, deals within deals, and double crosses galore as David and Claire find themselves pulled deeper and deeper into a funny, captivating hard-boiled mystery that might have been written by of Dashiell Hammett–if he’d only had the chance to read Betty Friedan.
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But We Built Roads for Them
$27.95In the fiery political debates in and about Italy, silence reigns about the country?s colonial legacy. Reducing European colonial history to Britain and France has effectively concealed an enduring phenomenon in Italian history that lasted for 80 years (1882 to 1960). It also blots out the history of the countries it colonized in Northeastern Africa.
Francesco Filippi challenges the myth of Italians being “nice people” or “good” colonialists who simply built roads for Africans. Despite extensive historiography, the collective awareness of the nations conquered and the violence inflicted on them remains superficial, be it in Italy or internationally. He retraces Italy’s colonial history, focusing on how propaganda, literature and popular culture have warped our understanding of the past and thereby hampered our ability to deal with the present
Filippi’s unique approach in which he deftly pits historical facts against popular myths provides a model that could be adapted to countries everywhere.
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But When We Look Closer
$19.95Though But When We Look Closer is a collection of eighteen stories that approaches its subjects from a parade of landscapes, running through these tales is a singular motif–taking control. Characters find themselves in skins they wish to shed, with vices held close and with voices that must be heard. Whether it be seeking a life in a foreign land, lusting after a street junky, driving through the city with a gun or searching for buried treasure, But When We Look Closer offers a fascinating examination into the occupations and obsessions of those who walk beside us and live next door.
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Butch
$35.95Butch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities. Its first incarnation exhibited as a public art project in transit shelters around Vancouver in March-April 2013, with a simultaneous gallery show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (the Cultch). According to Cultch administrators, the opening night (which attracted over 500 attendees and spilled out into the street for half a block) was the largest visual art opening in their 35-year history. The project caused an internet sensation, generating thousands of posts and shares on social media, blog posts as far away as Germany and Denmark, and interest for further exhibitions across Canada and the United States.
This project delineates Butch as an inclusive site of resistance to limitations on the way women, gender, and sexuality are still defined. The images honour the beauty, power, and diversity of women who transgress the gender binary, interspersed with text written by the photographic subjects themselves. The transversal dialectic of female masculinity is celebrated here–unapologetic and undiluted.
The author positions Butch as intrinsically queer. They explore the complex and contradictory natures of butch, “glorying in our mercurial and perhaps sometimes confusing natures.” Butch not only forces a reassessment of the body and the queer subject, it dismantles socialized, role-defined, gender appropriate behaviour. The queer cultures in which Butch is situated are constantly changing, and the author captures a diverse range of portrayals that celebrate and reflect butch identities. In the context of transgender movements, intersex activism, and genderqueer dialogues, a project like Butch on picturing and mirroring butch finds an important place.
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Butcher
$17.95An old man in a military uniform and a Santa hat is dumped at the police station. He doesn’t speak English, and a lawyer’s business card is baited on the meat hook that hangs on his neck. As a lawyer, a police officer and a translator struggle to unravel the truth, they uncover a past that won’t stay buried, and a decades-old quest for justice that must be served.
This edition includes a foreword by Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court of Canada justice and former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and notes on the Lavinian language created for the play.
Butcher premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in October 2014.
Praise for Nicolas Billon’s Iceland:
‘Billon is a masterful storyteller, drawing us into his characters’ lives via richly detailed monologues, full of haunting imagery that echoes throughout the play.’
—NOW Magazine
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Butter Cream
$18.95What happens when a 56-year-old fiction writer decides to ditch it all and attend professional pastry chef school for a year? In writing that brings to mind the work of journalist/chef Michael Ruhlman, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School tells the story of eleven months of whipping, spreading and creaming in the pursuit of perfection. A chronicle of an intense year of learning and tasting, dramas at the stove and in the locker room, Butter Cream is about fights, friendship and competition, fallen cakes and rising doughs. And sometimes, unexpectedly, the sheer joy of baking. It’s a memoir that also includes trips back to her mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens and to her own complicated relationship with all things sweet.
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Butterflies in Bucaramanga
$18.95Tanna Patterson-Z’s meticulously researched novel, a fictionalized account of the 1998 kidnapping of mining executive Edward Leonard by Colombian renegades, guides readers deep into the physical and political terrain of a beautiful but dangerous country that remains off-limits to the casual traveller. At once a suspense thriller and an engrossing work of journalism, The Butterfly Connection is a story of a man who gets caught in the collision between Western corporate imperatives and revolutionary politics — and whose unlikely obsession with the beautiful blue Morpho butterfly proves the key to his survival.