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ebooks for Everyone Lists

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Showing 81–100 of 803 results

Black and Blue

By: Stanley Péan

$21.95

Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic “Strange Fruit” made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?” And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.Jazz is liberation music, from Fats Waller to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane who walked side by side with Martin Luther King with his piece “Alabama.” Péan shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip-hop to widen jazz’s audience. The intricate crisscross between Black musical forms, from Marvin Gaye to the Last Poets is explored, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process (with the exception of Spike Lee).
Black Dog

By: Matthew Heiti

$17.95

The Breakfast Club meets Shirley Jackson in a fusion of live theatre and technology that tells a darkly comic but hopeful story of four teenage outsiders struggling with death, depression and the shadow of a black dog.

Two is fraught. While dealing with the impossible expectations of her parents, she is trying to understand why her brother, a bright and talented teenager, has taken his own life. It’s not until a fateful school detention that she meets three other students who all seem as lost as she is. There’s Three, a quiet, misunderstood guy who doesn’t quite know how to care for himself; Four, the fashionable, popular kid and class clown; and Five, a rebel ready to fight against everyone and everything. Despite their differences, they each grapple with depression and anxiety and become an unlikely source of comfort to one another. As the four unite to battle teachers, parents, therapists and their own demons, their promising futures begin to reveal themselves.
Black Girl in The Ring

By: Delores V. Mullings

$19.95

Juxtaposing experiences of discrimination with love and resilience, this debut poetry collection is a critique of intimate and institutional violence and hostility, entwined with a celebration of beauty and fierceness.

What is the difference between institutional violence enacted by trusted individuals and intimate violence enacted by loved ones? This collection of free verse, haiku, and narrative poetry takes the reader by the hand and walks them through these parallel experiences from a personal perspective. In a study of relationships of power, these poems delve into the complex structures of feminism, nature, and discrimination. A balanced mixture of reflection, celebration, energy, and sadness unfolds within the pages; drawing on a contemporary style, the author creates the space to feel grief, loss, sorrow, and disappointment in equal measure with joy, contemplation, excitement, and elation.
Blessed Curse, The

By: Sarmad Sehbai

$22.95

Fearing loss of their sexual potency, a closed circle of men in power embarks on a fabulous journey involving erotica, magical herbs, spiritual pimps, a virgin prostitute and a divine bird–to find the ultimate aphrodisiac for their masculinity. Their search carries symbolic overtones of Pakistan’s bizarre predicament and its nuclear ambitions in the global political arena. The Blessed Curse is a savage satire, blending the real and unreal; a topsy-turvy exposé of the country’s rulers in their corruption of religion, politics, and economy. The novel’s style carries the tradition of Punjabi humour, which is often dark, irreverent, and brutally frank.
Blind Spot

By: Laurence Miall

$19.95

“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”When his parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains detached, striking up a relationship with a woman in a neighbouring house … and stumbling across evidence that his mother may have engaged in a longstanding extramarital affair herself.In Luke, Laurence Miall has crafted an unforgettable literary antihero, a man disconnected from the pain of those around him, yet blind to his own faults. With his clean, forceful language and a familiarity with the darker corners of the male psyche, Blind Spot is a gripping literary debut.
Blue Bear Woman

By: Virginia Bordeleau

$22.95

Blue Bear Woman is the first novel written by an Indigenous woman that was published in Quebec in the French language. The story of a young Cree woman’s search for her roots and identity, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s debut novel, Ourse bleue, was originally published in 2007, and is her second novel to be translated into English. The novel explores contemporary Indigenous life and the impact on the Cree of the building of the Eastmain dam in northern Quebec, posited as “virgin” territory, yet which has actually been part of the Cree traditional territory since time immemorial. In search of her roots, Victoria takes a trip to the country of her Cree ancestors with her companion, Daniel. It is a long journey to the north along the shores of James Bay. Colours, smells, and majestic landscapes arouse memories that soon devolve into strange and hauntings dreams at night. In bits and pieces, uncles, aunties, and cousins arrive to tell the story of Victoria’s family and bring with them images of her childhood that are tinged both with joy and sadness. Guided by her totem, the Blue Bear, she returns home to make peace with her soul, as well as release the soul of her Great-Uncle George, a hunter who has been missing in the forest for over twenty years.
Blue Hours

By: Alison Acheson

$24.95

A novel about fatherhood, grief, unanswerable questions, and the small, magical moments that make up life.

Keith has always striven to break rules as he navigates full-time parenting and supports the career of his successful photographer wife. Her unexpected illness and death leaves both him and his son Charlie in bits. When they take a road trip, a journey begins that does not end when they return home.

Keith must deal with revelations that complicate his grief, even as Charlie’s response is unsettling. Together, father and son connect with loved ones, strangers, and each other. Life’s magical and mystical moments emerge. Is it enough to heal, though?
Blue Notes

By: Anne Cathrine Bomann

$23.00

How much grief is too much? How far should we go to avoid pain? From the author of the international bestselling novel Agatha comes a literary medical thriller about loss, empathy, science, Big Pharma, and societal norms.

A Danish university research group is finishing its study of a new medicine, Callocain: the world’s first pill for grief. But psychology professor Thorsten Gjeldsted suspects that someone has manipulated the test results to hide a disturbing side effect. When no one believes him, he teams up with two students to investigate: Anna, who has recently experienced traumatic grief herself, and Shadi, whose statistical skills might prevent her from living a quiet life in the shadows. Together, these sleuthing academics try to discover what’s really happening before the drug becomes widely available.

Blue Notes is brimming with ethical and existential ideas about the search for identity and one’s place in the world, while offering a highly original literary adventure that ultimately underscores the healing power of love.
Blue Sonoma

By: Jane Munro

$20.00

A wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak

In Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called “the gifts reserved for age.” A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his “battered blue Sonoma” is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro’s wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches.

Grey wood twisted tight
within the framework of the tree Ð
impossible to snap off,
forged as it dries.

And in me, parts I can’t imagine
myself without Ð silvering.
~from “The live arbutus carries dead branches … ”
Blue Sunflower Startle

By: Yasmin Ladha

$21.95

A home harbours secrets. Father has cancer. He is dying. Not a word.

Mother tells me to take care of my little brother.

In the early 1960s, a young girl and her brother move to their grandparents’ flourmill in Dodoma in newly-independent Tanzania. Her grandfather bellows his love for East Africa, where he and other Indian merchants have thrived. But the ground is shifting. President Nyerere is calling for the widespread nationalization of property. The hum of the mill has quieted. The young girl prays at the jamatkhana (Give me back my father) and spends evenings at the cinema watching cowboy films—grief and grievances, if only momentarily, disappear.

Hush, not a word.

Years later, the girl and her family immigrate to Calgary, Alberta and she begins a love affair with the prairies. Wary that her grandfather’s passion for his country consumed him, she is unwilling to settle for geographical monogamy. She travels to Chonju, South Korea to work as a language teacher, and Delhi, India for trysts with her Kashmiri lover. Frequently, she is startled by the appearance of things that remind her of the prairies, but show up in other countries. She aches for a home that beckons her return: the Canadian West, the hero that pulls a U-turn for its beloved.

Would you come for her, all ribby hair, or slicing the air like a boomerang, hollering at God? Would you strike a wild deal with Him, do anything to get her back?

Yasmin Ladha offers readers an exquisite exploration of the ways in which one can love a country. Written in unusual, intoxicating, and poetic prose, Blue Sunflower Startle is a modern day Romance for frequent travellers and nomadic spirits.
Blue to the Sky

By: Sylvia McNicoll

$14.95

“Blue to the Sky is a fabulous book that fills a niche of families and children living with severe allergies. … Highly Recommended.” — Canadian Review of Materials

The journey to conquering your fears starts with 1,776 steps.

Starting sixth grade after years of homeschooling, Ella is tired of being known as Allergic-to-Everything Girl. She just wants to eat pizza without breaking into hives, convince her mom to adopt a Whoodle dog, and get over her stage fright so she can perform her poem to her class.

When her best friend signs up for a CN Tower climb for charity, Ella knows she has to join. If she can climb to the top and summon the courage to recite her poem over the city, she’s convinced she’ll finally be cured of her fears.
Blueberries and Apricots

By: Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

$20.95

Translated from French by Howard Scott

In this, her third volume of poetry, this Aboriginal writer from Quebec again confronts the loss of her landscape and language.

On my left hip
a face

I walk
I walk upright
like a shadow

a people on my hip
a boatload of fruit
and the dream inside
women and children first

“A cry rises in me and transfigures me. The world waits for woman to come back as she was born: woman standing, woman powerful, woman resurgent. A call rises in me and I’ve decided to say yes to my birth.”
Bodymap

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

$20.95

Finalist for the Triangle Awards, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, 2015
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Poetry, 2016

In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
Bon: The Last Highway

By: Jesse Fink

$22.95

The death of Bon Scott is the Da Vinci Code of rockIn death, AC/DC’s trailblazing frontman has become a rock icon, and the legend of the man known around the world simply as “Bon” grows with each passing year. But how much of it is myth?At the heart of Bon: The Last Highway is a special — and unlikely — friendship between an Australian rock star and an alcoholic Texan troublemaker. Jesse Fink, author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC, reveals its importance for the first time.Leaving no stone unturned in a three-year journey that begins in Austin and ends in London, Fink takes the reader back to a legendary era for music that saw the relentless AC/DC machine achieve its commercial breakthrough but also threaten to come apart. With unprecedented access to Bon’s lovers, newly unearthed documents, and a trove of never-before-seen photos, Fink divulges startling new information about Bon’s last hours to solve the mystery of how he died.Music fans around the world have been waiting for the original, forensic, unflinching, and masterful biography Bon Scott so richly deserves — and now, finally, it’s here.
Bone Cage

By: Catherine Banks

$16.95

Jamie is twenty-two years old and works twelve-hour shifts operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp. At the end of each shift, he walks through the destruction he has created looking for injured birds and animals and rescues those he can. Jamie’s desire to escape this world is thwarted by his fear of leaving the place where he has some status.

Bone Cage examines how young people in rural communities, employed in the destruction of the environment they love, treat the people they love at the end of their shift. Bone Cage is about the difficulty in growing and hanging on to dreams in a world where dreams are seen as impractical or weak. It is funny. It is tragic. It is about different kinds of escaping. It is about a soul trapped in its own rib cage, a cage of bone, a Bone Cage.
Border Markers

By: Jenny Ferguson

$15.95

Shortlisted for the Cover Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!After the accidental death of a teenaged friend, the Lansing family has split along fault lines previously hidden under a patina of suburban banality. Every family has secrets, but for the Lansings those secrets end up propelling them in different directions away from their border town to foreign shores and to prison.Told in thirty-three flash fiction narratives, Border Markers is fractured like the psyches of its characters, all keen edges and tough language. It’s a slice of prairie noir that straddles the line between magical and gritty realism. Jenny Ferguson’s debut is a compelling collection of commonplace tragedies and surprising insights.
Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience

By: Alpha Nkuranga

$26.00

“My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those three years will not fade in one hundred lifetimes.”

At the age of eight, Alpha Nkuranga made a fateful decision. With war raging around her, she grabbed the hand of her younger brother, Elijah, and ran from her grandparents’ home. When they came to a swamp, they hid until it was safe to escape. Weeks later, they joined a group of refugees, who were fleeing to Tanzania. “If I kept walking,” Alpha remembers thinking, “I could tell my story.”

Nkuranga emigrated to Canada more than a decade later. She now works with women and children who face abuse and homelessness. In Born to Walk, she tells a remarkable story of resistance and survival.
Bottle Rocket Hearts

By: Zoe Whittall

$19.95

Welcome to ’90s Montreal. It’s been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. Revolution seems possible to eighteen-year-old Eve, who is pining to get out of her parent’s house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della: ten years older, mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, and an avid separatist. Their explosive beginning and volatile relationship paves a path for the personal and political to collide on the night of the referendum.
Bottoms Up

By: Sheilah Roberts Lukins

$21.95

In 1617, Lord Falkland’s colonists in Newfoundland were instructed to bring, among other things, 20 barrels of caske (ale), 90 bushels of malt, a malt mill, 4500 pounds of hops, 1 firkin of Aqua vitae, 1 firkin of canarie wine, and 1 firkin of methaglyne (mead). And so began the time-honoured tradition of countering the rugged Newfoundland environment with a nip of something stronger. Now, four hundred years later, from our famous kitchen parties to the bars and pubs of George Street, the history of our cultural traditions is intertwined with the history of liquor and beer.

Bottoms Up is the story of alcohol in Newfoundland and Labrador, and reveals how the drink helped shape so much of the province’s culture. What did Newfoundlanders drink 400 years ago? Where were the most popular drinking establishments of the past? Why does one of our streets have the most pubs per square foot in North America? Distilling four centuries of fact and anecdote, Sheilah Roberts Lukins serves up a revealing and often amusing survey of our fascination with good spirits.
Boundary Problems

By: Greg Bechtel

$19.95

In his confident debut, Greg Bechtel offers ten charged stories about the impossible-turned-possible—secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic—our world distilled and transmuted.

Boundary Problems vibrates on the edge of meaning, as carjackers, accidental gunrunners, small-town cabbies, and confused physics students struggle to wring meaning from the strange events that overtake them. Bechtel’s worlds of mystery, physics, and magic constantly challenge his characters’ pursuit of logical explanations. These compelling tales blur lines and push boundaries—into the surreal, into the playful, into the irresistibility of uncertainty.