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Showing 129–144 of 9005 results
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.
A Daytripper’s Guide To Manitoba
$31.95Sandwiched between North Dakota and Nunavut, Manitoba has never been the busiest chunk of tourism real estate in North America. To independent travellers, this is a good thing: Canada’s undiscovered province offers uncrowded beaches, innumerable lakes and unlikely cultural attractions, especially in the gritty/cool capital, Winnipeg.
A Daytripper’s Guide to Manitoba is the only comprehensive travel handbook to the -province and an indispensable tool for visitors from abroad, Canadians passing through and Manitobans who want to get to know their own backyard.
This fourth edition is packed with new attractions such as Winnipeg’s Inuit Art Gallery and cool new accommodations from Wasagaming to Winnipeg Beach. And since you’ve been cooped up a little more than usual as of late, this new edition has even more information about hiking, paddling and camping.
Get the straight goods on cities, towns and natural attractions in every corner of the province and northwestern Ontario, compiled by one of Manitoba’s most tenacious independent travellers, journalist Bartley Kives.
Stuff your face with a fat boy, Winnipeg’s famous burger.
Eyeball turn-of-the-last-century architecture.
Commune with nature in wild areas that still feel wild.
And forget what you think you know about the Canadian prairies – the only thing flat about Manitoba is the Trans-Canada Highway.
A Death Feast in Dimlahamid
$18.00On December 11, 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision in the historical aboriginal title action known a Delgamuukw versus The Queen. The decision vindicated the fifty-two Gitkan and We’suwe’en chiefs named as the plaintiffs in the court case, and completely rewrites the rules for resolving Native title in Canada. Epic battles with bear spirits in the streets of an ancient mythical city, logging-road showdowns deep in the Skeena Mountains, and forays into courtrooms and boardrooms in Vancouver punctuate Glavin’s eminently readable account of this land claims case.This new edition reprints the complete text of the original 1990 edition, and adds a new chapter that takes up the narrative from the point when the case was still before the BC Supreme Court, follows the tumultuous events from Oka to the establishment of the BC Treaty Commission, examines the landscape that lies behind the incoherence and hysteria surrounding aboriginal rights in British Columbia, and looks ahead to a post-Delgamuukw Canada.
A Description of the Blazing World
$21.95After Morgan Wells’s wife leaves him, a postcard from France arrives. It is addressed to a Morgan Wells—but not the Morgan Wells who receives it. Desperate to be led out of his despair, Morgan decides to read the postcard as a sign and embark upon a surreal journey to find, observe, and meet the other Morgan Wellses in the city of Toronto.
On the day that a 2003 citywide power outage submerges Toronto in darkness, a teenage boy finds a missive of his own: a copy of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, one of the first science fiction novels ever written. The boy, obsessed with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, interprets the coincidence of finding the book during the blackout as a premonition, and begins looking for proof that the end of the world is near.
A Description of the Blazing World interlaces two narratives in a novel about the city in the new millennium: a crowded space that incubates signs of an apocalypse that never quite materializes. But it is this very threat of imminent danger—that everything could go up in blazes—that drives a reclusive man and a lonely boy to search for their respective revelations.
A Desolate Splendor
$18.95A chilling portrait of a family fighting to preserve their humanity in a cruel and merciless world
The collapse of civilization has left the survivors scattered amongst a few settlements along the wilderness fringe of a land ravaged by war. Preyed upon by roving bands of sadistic ex-soldiers and ever at the mercy of a natural world that has turned against them, a family is facing their final days. Hope appears in the guise of their young son. Raised in isolation and taught by his father to survive at any cost, he is thrust headlong into a battle for the future of humankind after rescuing a girl fleeing from a savage and relentless cult bent on burning the world back to Eden.
Raw and unflinching, A Desolate Splendor weaves a stark, and eerily familiar, portrayal of life on the brink of extinction and heralds the rise of an exciting new voice in apocalyptic fiction.
A Devil Every Day
$19.95Through a kaleidoscope of philosophy, critical theory, and folk theology, A Devil Every Day, surveys the terrain where white Western culture blends into pure evil. Twisting into aphorisms, inner dialogues, and incantations, John Nymans poems are caught between complacency and a disquieting agnosticism, contemplating the problematic pleasures and unremarkable monstrosities of the contemporary West. Ultimately, A Devil Every Day asks: what hope is there for personal integrity in a radically moralizing future?
A Diary in the Age of Water
$22.95Winner (Bronze) of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards (Science Fiction); Winnner (Silver), 2020 Literary Titan Book Awards
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past–to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred–events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust–and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins–Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity during a time when China owns the USA and the USA owns Canada. The diary spans a twenty-year period in the mid-twenty-first century of 33-year-old Lynna, a single mother who works in Toronto for CanadaCorp, an international utility that controls everything about water, and who witnesses disturbing events that she doesn’t realize will soon lead to humanity’s demise. A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”–as a nation and an individual–in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
A Dream Given Form
$22.95The only comprehensive critical guide to the beloved sci-fi phenomenon
A Dream Given Form provides an accessible, comprehensive, and critical look at Babylon 5, one of the most groundbreaking series of all time. Nearly 20 years after the show ended, this indispensable companion not only covers all five seasons of Babylon 5, but also the feature-length TV movies, the spinoff series Crusade (including three non-produced episodes), The Legend of the Rangers, The Lost Tales, the canonical novels, the DC comic book series, and the short stories set in the Babylon 5 universe. Each season and text is explored thoroughly with an in-depth look at how the individual episodes, books, stories, and comics fit into larger ongoing storylines.
Carefully constructed to be enjoyed by both those who have watched the series multiple times and viewers watching for the first time, A Dream Given Form elucidates without spoiling and illuminates without nitpicking.
A Dream in the Eye
$39.95First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb *
A Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting. Webb’s visual work – a surprising “late style” (the work of an independent artist in her sixties, seventies, and eighties) – is in many ways a response to and extension of concerns explored in her poetry: the natural world of the West Coast, global political strife, the artist’s struggle to express themself. All of this is explored in her more formalist collages and expressive, abstract paintings.
In addition to Webb’s seventy-four paintings and eighty collages, A Dream in the Eye includes introductory material by the book’s editor Stephen Collis and art historian and curator Laurie White, as well as supplementary material including some of Webb’s own reflections on her visual work, an essay by Betsy Warland, and a selection of poems written in response to Webb’s paintings by her long-time friend Diana Hayes.
A Dream of a Woman
$21.95Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Award-winning novelist Casey Plett (Little Fish) returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.
Casey Plett’s 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.
In “Hazel and Christopher,” two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In “Perfect Places,” a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In “Couldn’t Hear You Talk Anymore,” the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.
An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.
A Dream Wants Waking
$22.00In 2219 CE Luoyang, a city patched together after the Great Catastrophe, the half-human, half-fox spirit Yinhe moves through her most recent incarnation. The city is watched over by No. 1, an artificial intelligence housed in a giant brain created by the scientists of Central Government, which entertains and monitors all the inhabitants of the city, both human and chimerical. But No. 1 is starting to behave erratically and the power of the Spirit Supreme Assembly, with its demand for pure bloodlines, is growing. Yinhe is summoned to the Dream Zone, where the chimerical creatures formed by the scientists are contained to do the most dangerous jobs of the city. There Yinhe is given information that will give her the chance to create great change in the city, to stave off an ancient enemy and, perhaps, to reunite with her soulmate, lost many lives before.
Weaving a silken web of Chinese myth, speculative fiction and storytelling Lydia Kwa has brilliantly realized a future where questions of sentience, of personhood and of the truth of dreams wrap around a timeless quest for freedom and for love.