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Showing 1313–1328 of 9481 results
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Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams
$18.95Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams is a story of B, a young non-binary woman coming of age in the Montreal music scene. As she witnesses her friends struggling with mental illness and drug addiction, she also must deal with her own craft, the nepotism of the industry, and maintaining her transient lifestyle. Lucid, subconscious, introverted, and taking B from Montreal to Los Angeles, Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams is an intimate perspective on the life of making music.
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Butterfly
$19.95Lucien and Nataa might have slipped toward love, if her past in Sarajevo hadn’t caught up with her. Nataa finds work modeling for a painter in Toronto, but he is murdered. Nataa disappears that night, running for her life. Her vanishing is connected to the discovery of a video, secretly filmed in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Butterfly is a novel that charts a controlled descent through the dark legacy of war and the underbelly of the global art scene … into a world ruled by a desperate hope for impossible redemption.
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Butterfly in Amber
$21.95Delia, an independent-minded Montreal woman of sixty and sexually experienced, leaves her married lover to go on a cruise along the Volga and enters into a forbidden but lustful and satisfying liaison with Kostya, a young member of the ship’s crew. Kostya, looking out for the best opportunity to leave his country, is in it for more than erotic pleasures, something Delia understands and acts accordingly. Inappropriate dalliance, however, on board and ports of call in a Russia at war with Chechnya is not the sole narrative engine of this acutely written novel. Memory and identity, the inexorable passing of time, and the desire to be more in imagination than in actuality, are driving motivators in the lives of such characters as the brilliantly conceived, and possibly lunatic Frank, an elderly gentleman who believes himself to be the son of the murdered tsarevitch Alexis and has designs on Delia. Kostya’s colourful mother and the mysterious, threatening man who seems to follow Delia also have their own plans. Butterfly in Amber is a novel about choices, sex, living life on unfamiliar terrain, and the courage to act according to one’s desires, the consequences be damned, although discretion is always advisable, if not always followed.
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Butterfly Tears
$22.95Butterfly Tears is a collection of seventeen pieces of short fiction that depict the experiences of Chinese immigrant women facing the challenges of life in a new country. The stories are set in different parts of China, Canada, and to a lesser extent in the United States and examine Chinese women’s cross-cultural experiences in North America as well as women’s issues and political discrimination in China. The stories, or parts of stories, set in China give the reader interesting glimpses into events such as the cultural revolution and Mao’s death.The immigrant experience, the predominant theme, encompasses a number of aspects ranging from issues such as language and food to education. Feminism and changing male/female relationships form another important theme that also runs through many of the stories.
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Buying Cigarettes for the Dog
$19.95A man steps out for a pack of smokes and winds up walking around the planet; a woman sun-tanning by a pool finds herself covered in chicken feet; a guerrilla army of cows infiltrates a big city; a man hires a bodyguard to protect him from his poodle.
The first book of fiction since 1997 from the consummately underground Stuart Ross blends an unflagging penchant for experiment with the measured skill of a seasoned, highly disciplined craftsman.
Buying Cigarettes for the Dog is anything but a collection of linked stories in a homogenous voice: instead, Ross offers us fables, letters, political tracts, gems of minimalist surrealism, and even a post-gothic novella. Throughout, he draws from the same deep, dark sense of humour that has earned him acclaim as Canada’s foremost surrealist poet. Ross’s strange, strangely compassionate stories engage the emotions as well as the intellect, giving the reader no choice but to participate. Buying Cigarettes for the Dog holds a mirror to the absurdities of 21st-century Earth; here is an absurdism so true that it becomes real.
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Buying on Time Again
$22.95“A moving and entertaining collection of short stories… that has the unified feel and trajectory of a novel.” (Quill & Quire)
Narrated by the middle child of an East European family who fled to a Toronto suburb after the war, Antanas Sileika’s esteemed collection could be about any Canadian family in the ’50s and ’60s — if they had an outhouse on their suburban lot and lived underground while plotting revenge on their English-speaking neighbours. Together, these touching, hilarious stories make up a powerful chronicle of a place and a time, a close-knit community, and most of all, a family: three boys, a long-suffering mother, and a strangely lovable pipe-smoking, English-mangling father.
First published in 1997, when it was a finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto Book Award, Buying on Time has become a favourite of Canadian readers and a staple of this country’s immigrant fiction. Now updated and featuring a previously uncollected story, Buying on Time Again is sure to move and delight a whole new generation.
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By the Book
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Bystander
$23.00“I have never been faced with a moral crisis, let alone a matter of life or death.”
Peter Simons doesn’t spend much time at home in his apartment. Thanks to his job at a multinational company, he is often flying around the world, enjoying a life of luxurious solitude in five-star hotels. So when he returns after being away for nine months and notices a strange smell coming from his neighbour’s apartment, he initially tries not to get involved, but when a body is discovered, Peter’s carefully cultivated detachment begins to crumble. And when new people move into the vacant apartment, he gets caught up in a petty dispute that will bring him to the brink of moral ruin.
Bystander is a pitiless, bold work of intense psychological realism narrated by a professionally successful but socially bankrupt anti-hero who expects global connection and local anonymity. It excoriates the contingency of contemporary morality, and, at a time of growing isolation, forces the reader to examine what it means to be a good neighbour.
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Cabalcor
$24.00Sun Belt’s collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town. Drawing from an array of invented sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports, Cabalcor charts the rise and fall of a mythical boomtown that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.
The multi-layered narrative is woven together by an extraordinary blend of texts, both black and white and colour images, and a full downloadable album of Sun Belt’s quietly surreal, dusty music.
Praise for Cabalcor:
“… Cabalcor is not, as far as this reviewer can tell, intended as a thinly veiled commentary on a real-life town or even on the oil sands. Rather, it ruminates on the larger issues of extraction, migration, labour and ‘desertification’ in all its senses.” (The Globe and Mail)
“Sun Belt have done a remarkable job developing a fictional location that has a distinct atmosphere and local character; the album is part of a multi-media release in combination with a book, Cabalcor: An Extracted History, which features fictional sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports that chart the region’s descent into a wasteland. … ” (Exclaim)
“… the subject is incredibly timely, in terms of activism, as Sun Belt’s project examines the ramifications of tar sands just as Greenpeace recently published a statement demanding the Canadian government stop such acts and ‘end the industrialization of a vast area of Indigenous territories, forests and wetlands in northern Alberta’ and thousands of activists in Canada continue to protest the expansion of numerous pipelines.” (rabble.ca)
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Cadillac Cathedral
$18.95Jack Hodgins, one of Canada’s favourite storytellers, has returned with a new tale in Cadillac Cathedral. In this story, situated on Vancouver Island, the literary home of many of his earlier books, Hodgins lovingly recreates the rural community of Portuguese Creek. It is here we meet Arvo, a Finn, who has worked in logging camps all his life and now spends his retirement rescuing abandoned cars to restore in his garage, where his loyal group of friends congregate to keep him company. When the group hears that an old friend has died, they decide to drive south to the big city to pick up the body. A road trip ensues-but not just any road trip, for it takes place in a Cadillac Cathedral, a remarkable hearse built in the 1930s, which Arvo has refurbished. Along the way, the friends encounter adventures that create detours into country life. We learn about the unusual marriages that keep couples apart and together. There is a winsome widow with her eye on Arvo, and another mysterious widow in the big city for whom Arvo appears to retain strong feelings. Here is Hodgins at his humorous best, capturing a timeless world that is yet very much of our time.
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Cadillac Couches
$19.95Winner of a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal
Cadillac Couches is a picaresque road trip novel that journeys from prairie to big city and back again. A quixotic tale set in the late nineties and framed by the popular Edmonton Folk Music Festival, it follows two music-smitten twentysomething women as they search for love and purpose. Annie Jones is trying to put her big love, Sullivan, behind her and squash her demons of anxiety and compulsion. In a post-fest funk, she and her more worldly sidekick Isobel jump in Annie’s 1972 Volkswagen Beetle and race across the country to Montreal where her real-life fantasy man, Hawksley Workman, is doing a gig. A year later Annie and Isobel end up back at the folk festival, this time in a much different position.
A witty first novel, Cadillac Couches is a story about finding one’s holy grail in life. The book comes with its own playlist.
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Cadillac Road
$25.00Starting in the 1950s, Cadillac Road is the story of Sharon Desjardins: from her earliest childhood memories leaving Northern Quebec and a violent father to adventures in Buffalo and Crystal Beach with her mother and younger sister, Gloria, to dreams of escaping claustrophobic poverty in shabby Grenville by going to Toronto and marrying a wealthy lawyer whom she doesn’t love, having turned down local boy Clinton McClary because she doesn’t think he’ll amount to much. In the end, depressed and on pills, Sharon realizes she needs to be true to her heart, abandons her marriage and takes to the road, a road that could very well lead back to her original hometown of Cadillac.
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Café Alibi
$14.95Swift’s Budavox: poems 1990-1999 explored sex, violence, art, and memory, to critical acclaim. His new collection, Cafè Alibi, written while the author lived abroad in Budapest and Paris, extends these concerns with popular culture, history, desire, nostalgia, and the often competing claims of travel and home. Swift’s crisp, elegant, deceptively calm language questions images of “the child, the adult and the outside world” in ways both witty and disturbing. Cafè Alibi maps a stylish itinerary through exotic terrain, offering at once hostility and ultimate peace, poetry that puts love to the test and disarms our darkest fears.
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Cafe Daughter
$15.95CafŽ Daughter is a one-woman drama inspired by a true story about a Chinese-Cree girl growing up in Saskatchewan in the 1950s and 60s.
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Cage of Light
$20.00Cage of Light holds together many narrative strands. It traces an environment of familial violence into adulthood. It witnesses the filter of addiction in life and love; it considers what sustains and protects, what constricts and harms, and the fluidity of these things. It addresses the practice of Zen and time spent in a Rinzai Monastery in Japan. It uses a language of struggle and seeks through the ‘food chains’ of human animal life, including episodes from literature and dream, for ways to see clearly what we foment as we go, and for what is there regardless.
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Cake
$17.95A man earns. However little, however nefariously, he earns.
Oba, a middle-aged businessman, is torn between his pride and dignity. He’s obsessed with making deals in unidentified substances to stay afloat. A powerful client named Araf arrives, interested in Oba’s business, but also his fierce, inherited servant Femi. Oba’s young progeny Mabo is hungry and desperate, but still driven by his skills and sympathetic to the needs of others.
In this stark and poetic musing on the nature and poisons of survival, Cake humanizes the dynamic between Niger and Iran and their clandestine trade in uranium, presenting a dark and critical look at oppression, consumerism, and what happens when all of our resources are dried up.