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All Books in this Collection
Showing 1489–1504 of 9481 results
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Certifiable
$16.95Toronto writer Pamela Mordecai is a well-known voice in poetry of the Caribbean diaspora. She has long been a popular anthologist, a mentor to other writers, a frequent contributor to literary journals, and a vital link between the literary worlds of Canada and Jamaica; Certifiable presents a maturing vision of women’s lives in both of her homes. Certifiable celebrates experience shot through with affection, family attachment, and madness.
The poems in the first section, “Just a Likl Loving,” explore the truths hidden beneath the ideal of love: love as comfort, love as currency, love as deathtrap. “Sister Sequence” embraces the fullness of sisterhood, from the conceptual “sister muse” as a power in the world to the ambivalent love among flesh-and-blood sisters. “Certifiable,” the final section, springs from intimacy with little and big madnesses.
The rhythms and rhymes of the creole soundscape crackle through Certifiable. Mordecai’s deft hand wordplay flows through and beyond standard English and the Creole continuum to reveal the characters in Certifiable and record their experiences.
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Ch’askin
$9.95Ch’askin is the great thunderbird whose appearance heralds rumbling thunder, a darkening sky and flashes of lightning — as well as good luck for the people of the Sechelt Nation. This compelling book recounts how this enormous and awe-inspiring bird — who looks like a golden eagle except much, much larger — aided and protected the members of the Sechelt villages for many years in many ways. From helping Chief Spelmu’lh, the father of the Sechelt Nation, build both the first longhouse and the many villages of his people, to delivering goats and grizzly bears for the hungry people to eat and creating islands from pebbles for the tired Sechelt hunters to rest, the story of Ch’askin is a story of protection, friendship and respect for fellow living beings.
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Chai Tea Sunday
$14.95Explore the true resilience of the heart and our raw determination to find goodness in a world fraught with adversity
One woman’s courage in the face of personal tragedy is at the heart of Heather A. Clark’s debut novel. Thirty-three-year-old Nicky Fowler thought her whole life was mapped out — a rewarding career as a third grade teacher, an adoring husband, and the perfect house in the suburbs — but complicated fertility issues lead to a devastating tragedy. Nicky’s marriage crumbles and she’s left unable to cope with her now-changed life.
When Nicky accepts a volunteer teaching position at an orphanage in Kenya, she finds that life there is unlike the world she’s known. Drought has brought famine, violence is everywhere, and the jaded orphanage director takes out her hatred on the parentless children.
But Nicky finds strength in Mama Bu, her host mother, who provides wisdom and perspective over cups of chai, Kenya’s signature drink. Nicky comes to realize that she must do much more than teach the orphans — she must save them.
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Chainsaw Earle
$14.95“Chainsaw Earle” is an original and highly amusing song written by Wayne Chaulk and Kevin Blackmore of the band Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers. A popular request wherever the group performs, the tune is featured in at least four videos on youtube.com. Wayne claims the song is based on a guy in his home town who was “absolutely fixated on the chainsaw” and loved the smell of oil fumes and the damage it could do to a tree. “Chainsaw Earle” was finished in 1990 while the two musicians were driving along the South Shore of Nova Scotia and can be found on the band’s album entitled “The Miracle Cure.”
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Chalk
$18.00Winner of the 38th Annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest
“You” and L, a mysterious third gender runaway, hit the road on a mission to find the meaning of life. Traveling by plane, bus and car, You run into trouble with the cops, mourn a family tragedy, smoke hundreds of cigarettes, attend a retirement party, come to terms with a broken heart, and discover that all roads lead back to where You started – in the flowers drawn by two little girls in coloured chalk on the sidewalk.
Selected Praise:
The book’s central conceit, that modern society is injurious to human relationships and honest communication, is well expressed. The use of chalk drawing as a motif for the difficulties of emotional honesty is effective, especially at the very end of the work, where rain threatens to blur and erase any attempt at expression through the drawings. Pulling the reader in, the immediacy of Diaczuk’s narrative is compelling and stands out alongside some of his stylistic inventions as the best thing about this book, gritty realism running against the desire for connection, the failure to understand and communicate at odds with the need for self-expression.” (Vancouver Sun)
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Challenging the Mississippi Fire Bombers
$24.95In June 1964, courageous young civil rights workers risked their lives in the face of violence, intimidation, illegal arrests, and racism to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi, which had historically excluded most blacks from voting. With a firsthand account of the details and thoughtful descriptions of key people on the front lines, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Charles McLaurin, John Harris, Irene McGruder, and many more, author Jim Dann brings that historic period back to life. He places those 15 months in Mississippi?known as Freedom Summer?in the overall history of the struggle of African Americans for freedom, equality, and democratic rights in the South, the country, and throughout the world. Fraught with lessons drawn from those experiences, Challenging the Mississippi Firebombers is a valuable contribution to understanding and advancing civil rights struggles in addition to being a fascinating and engrossing story of a pivotal moment in the mid-20th-century United States.
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Chameleon (Days)
$19.95What happens when the narrator is removed from a story? When the author’s real life is fictionalized instead, so that creator and creation relate on the same existential ground with no middleman? Chameleon (Days) is such an experiment in storytelling, a literary novel that explores an author’s psychotic break as he prepares to write an idea he has apparently stolen, one prompted by the discovery of a secondary character in his walk-in closet. A fictional day-to-day narrative structured around the search for Kashif, a feared and hunted terrorist labeled the Chameleon for the many facial surgeries he has incurred to disguise his identity, Chameleon (Days) bridges its author’s life to the evolution of Kashif’s story creating a fiction “while life happens,” which often manifests itself in interference, inspiration, and the perils of letting your character know who his creator is.
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Chameleon and Other Stories
$17.95“The leopard may not be able to change its spots, but the chameleon sure can.” In Chameleon & Other Stories, Bill Schermbrucker takes as his central metaphor a creature who changes its colour to reflect and blend in with the environment, just as human beings are sometimes asked to change their colour to reflect and blend in, to protect themselves and to adapt—and cannot; a creature who sits there, very still, eyes looking in separate directions, bearing witness to movement and change. Chameleon & Other Stories is a book about constants; and a book about change. Bill Schermbrucker writes: “You can’t forget your roots. The events and people of my childhood and young adult years are constantly present to me. I hear their voices and, at the most unexpected times, I’m suddenly thrown back to the land itself.” Set in Kenya, the book is a collection of eight short stories which are told from the point of view of Alistair, a young man who is growing up during the time of Mau Mau and subsequent independence. With his strong, clear memory of the past and the country in which he himself grew up, Schermbrucker presents a multi-layered portrait of character, place and time in Chameleon & Other Stories. He writes: “Accent, like clothing style, may change; but memory does not vanish. It doesn’t even fade. It gets more intense and brighter. Partly this comes from isolation… With nobody around to confirm, deny or enlarge on what I say, the sound of my own stories becomes terribly authentic in my head. People sometimes ask me if the stories are autobiographical. The answer is: ‘No, no— much clearer!’” Chameleon & Other Stories is Bill Schermbrucker’s first, very intriguing, very assured book of short stories.
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Champ
$6.95Part chronicle, part meditation, this witty and unusual collection of poems deals with the life and professional career of Tommy Burns, the Canadian who became Heavyweight Champion of the world.
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Chance
$24.95Dragan was a Yugoslav peasant who flirted with the ideals of Communism and aspired to become a teacher. Instead, he became a slave in a German labour camp. Galina was an only child growing up in the harsh reality of Stalinist Russia. She survived the siege of Leningrad only to be exiled and enslaved in her turn. Chance is the true story of two ordinary people who lived in extraordinary times. Displaced by war and the vagaries of politics, Dragan and Galina met and married in the chaos that followed the conflict. For them, survival was not a question of heroes and victims but simply a matter of chance.
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Chandelier
$22.95Award-winning poet David O’Meara captures one family’s precarious balance between misery and hope in his debut novel.
Twenty-year-old Georgia is reeling from severe depression after the death of her best friend when she arrives in South Korea. Everyone teaching English is there for one of two reasons—adventure or escape—and she quickly falls in with a group of other foreigners. She eases into a life of late-night bars, riotous student protests and surfing until some unexpected news forces her to face the problems she has left behind.
Hugo Walser is bound for Barcelona to publicly confront the man he’s convinced is presenting a keynote speech about Hugo’s controversial failure as an architect. Determined to drink away his pain until the big event, Hugo rambles through the city, distracted by thoughts of how he’s failed his family. When the police call to investigate the disappearance of his ex-wife, Sarah Trimble, Hugo turns his attention to all he stands to lose.
Meanwhile, Sarah, a high-end real estate agent, has been duped out of her life savings by a con man. En route to sell her last asset, the neglected family cottage in Gatineau, she’s derailed when her car is caught in a flash flood. Alone and desperate, she seizes one last chance to right a wrong.
Following a modern family’s dysfunction, Chandelier is a three-part portrait of a young adult and her divorced parents as they navigate profound loss and disappointment and the crux between despair and optimism.
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Change for Good
$36.95“I wish we had this book forty years ago!” — Ben Cohen, co-founder, Ben & Jerry’s
An action-oriented approach for businesses to solve the world’s most urgent social problems — and benefit from doing so.
More than a year into a global pandemic, profit and shareholder value are no longer the primary metric of business success. Customers, shareholders, and communities are demanding that companies do good, do more, and do better. In Change for Good, Paul Klein shows how companies must move beyond what he calls “corporate social responsibility light” and demonstrate how they can help solve social problems that have been defined as UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Change for Good is a new system for making social change through business that reflects Paul’s experience over the last 35 years. One of the core principles of Change for Good is including people with lived experience of social problems in identifying promising solutions and collaborating to bring these solutions to life. This methodology can create impactful and sustainable social change in society in ways that aren’t possible when executives make decisions in their boardrooms that are intended to impact the lives of vulnerable people.
Through personal experiences, case studies, and practical tools, Change for Good will inspire readers and their organizations to make the shift from a passive social responsibility to taking action to help solve the world’s most pressing social problems.
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Change in a Razor-backed Season
$18.95Change in a Razor-backed Season is Michael deBeyer’s second collection of poetry. Throughout this collection, deBeyer charts an extended exposure to seasons and weather, focusing on the pervasive quality of the outdoors, its uncanny disregard for walls or roofs or notions of inside.
“I write outdoors, en plein air,” says deBeyer. “I walk around, writing into my notebook or directly into memory in cooler weather. Why write outdoors: walking helps establish rhythm, extra oxygen enhances creativity, and I think the lack of boundaries frees up imagination. While subconsciously these may be my reasons, I consciously write outside for those chance encounters with strange subject matter.”
“In Change in a Razor-backed Season, I’m engaged with perception and trust. It’s the difference between the first moment when one trusts one’s senses completely and the second moment when one questions the grounds of that trust that I’m most involved with. Between these two moments, there’s no interlocutor, no angel or devil on one’s shoulder undermining sensory perception; it’s self-imposed, but there’s of course no way to prove that. The book is open to doubt, and I felt that if I could write through doubt there would be poetic possibilities beyond. So this became a book of scepticism, but a positive scepticism: like a scientist who doubts for the sake of discovery.”
The collection begins on water, with whales, overcast skies and the politics of oceanfront property. deBeyer demonstrates a cinematic eye for the colour and thickness of light, and an ear for the precise dialect of hours and seasons. The second group of poems brings the outdoors inside, via cathedral doors, ghost towns and the last standing wall of a fallen house. Here the poet captures the simultaneous experience of alienation and continuation that characterizes such landscapes. These poems epitomize autumn, that season when civilization and its fall seem closer together than at any other time of year.
The final groups of poems deliver the collection’s climax and denouement. In the third, de Beyer wades deepest into sensory processes, pinpointing moments of understanding, rolling backwards and forwards in time, reinventing the arrival of information and offering instruction to readers who seek to conduct mental experiments of this type. From there we are invited to downshift into a bemused and occasionally whimsical sequence. Maintaining a close eye on his subjects, deBeyer makes room for wild pronouncements, declarations of love and dreamlike capers, before a final return to seasonal considerations that brings the collection full circle.
Change in a Razor-backed Season combines poetic engagement with scientific investigation and an inspiring sense of adventure. deBeyer’s verses delve beneath the skin, travelling optic nerve and cochlea, before resurfacing to venture up river and into the woods. His range and curiosity introduce binoculars and magnifying glass to the poetic tradition.
This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset in Requiem by Andrew Steeves and printed offset on laid paper.
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Change Room
$17.95The multifaceted pun in the title of Mark Cochrane’s latest book of poems (a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place) is a barbed hook of seduction for the reader in love with the body of language. And it is ever so clearly the body as a willful and skillful construct of the contrary obsessions of an anorexic bodybuilder persona that’s the subject of this book. The constructed self, each part bulked, ripped and cut from the pages of an anatomy text, preened in the mirror of Narcissus, everywhere stands in for the shape of a perfected language. The homoeroticism of the gymnasium, with its complex rituals of the averted gaze, permit the author a level of textual objectification no longer accessible in the presence of the other, the feminine, where the schoolmates of princess Diana make a subtextual, exegetic mockery of correct sexual politics, complete with time-shared automobiles and offspring.
In Change Room, Cochrane brings back to the lyric and the ode the vast range of subject and object so carefully excised from the conventional language of poetics over the past two hundred years. The body, its parts, functions and secretions are here fetishized by the creative power of desire to the point where the love of its perfection crosses the boundaries of gender and polity. In its explicit bisexuality, Change Room exposes one of the great codes of the lyric convention-the elaborately constructed ambiguity of ““other”“ sexualities, and dissects and examines them with the dispassionate skill and curiosity of a medical professional.
Nothing in Cochrane’s text is left to chance, least of all the metaphor of the body of language. This is a poet who has taped his eyes wide open, who finds a language to address
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Changes
$21.95A Canadian underground classic, an unredeemedly raw tale of sex, drugs and booze in the life of a Vancouver jazz musician in the early 1960s.
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Changing Places
$29.95The title of this collection balances Changing Places with Relocation and Empathy because, in each chapter, the authors bring closer the promise of change by reaching out to people who have been dispossessed. In doing so, they reject abstraction, preferring to hear out and come to terms with abuses and imbalances of power as they affect embodied experience and people who struggle. They avoid suppressing somatic and emotional ways of knowing the world, because that suppression makes whole groups of the “less skilled” or “less intelligent” into the less worthy, the less remunerated, and the less recognized members of society. Among the forms of identification and relocation involved in the work of empathy, the authors show awareness of multiple subjectivities, and of how selves and understandings might evolve if they were accorded a place and a voice in the processes by which researchers conceive of, and report on, the subjects of their enquiries. Where the authors of Changing Places convey, either by statement or implication, how they position themselves, they offer the possibility of new forms of knowledge and insight.