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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

William Holt

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

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Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

Review content may be used by Loan Stars, the publisher of the title, BookNet Canada or selected third-parties at the program's discretion loanstsrs

You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

Review content may be used by Loan Stars, the publisher of the title, BookNet Canada or selected third-parties at the program's discretion loanstsrs

You recommended this title on September 12 2019

Amber Teething Necklaces for the Gullible

Peddling Snakeoil for the Modern Age

By William Holt

as a Loan Stars Smarchvember 2019 Adult top pick

This is a really great book that really opens your eyes to the use of hokey-pokey snakeoil based teething pain treatments that aren't Tylenol or Motrin based. Or then something else entirely that has nothing to do

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361.
Series: The Berlin Blues Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889225817 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 2008

A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of ?Ojibway World,” a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community.The Berlin Blues concludes Drew Hayden Taylor’s Blues quartet, showcasing contemporary stereotypes of First Nations people, including a fair number that originate from Indigenous communities themselves, to the often outraged delight of... + Read More
362.
Series: The Bicycle Eater Paperback Larry Tremblay 9780889225282 $19.95 FICTION Sep 15, 2005

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, an ?Anna-lexique,” in which the darkness and the light of her idealized being have shaded his language, even as her ubiquitous image has crowded out his own identity.Desperate to escape his unrequited ... + Read More
363.
Series: The Notebook Series The Black Notebook Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889225435 $19.95 FICTION Sep 01, 2006

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main—Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging out with a theatre company in her off hours, Céline sees opening before her a world where it is not only possible, but even desirable to pretend. When the director offers her a role in The Trojan Women,... + Read More
364.
Series: The Notebook Series The Blue Notebook Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889226197 $24.95 FICTION Dec 01, 2009

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Céline is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at Le Sélect, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Céline, a midget who has always thought she was unworthy, never having imagined the possibility of a mature loving and sexual relationship in her life, throws herself into a passionate affair with Gilbert, discoverin... + Read More
365.
Series: The Book of Esther Paperback Leanna Brodie 9780889226821 $16.95 DRAMA Apr 15, 2012

It is June 1981: the farm debt crisis. Pride Toronto’s first parade. Everything is changing, including fifteen-year-old Esther, who runs away to the city to escape the family farm. With the help of a brash young hustler and a gay activist who shelters street kids, she confronts her conservative Christian parents—farmers on the brink of financial ruin—and begins to find her way home. Acclaimed playwright Leanna Brodie excels with this heart-warming coming-of-age—and coming-out—drama. Cast of two women and three men.
366.
Series: The Box Closet Paperback Mary Meigs 9780889222533 $19.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Jan 01, 1987

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s early diaries, she no longer saw her parents as Mother and Father but as Margaret and Edward, young and vulnerable: Margaret who flirted, Edward who waited ten years to propose marriage. Meigs saw aspects o... + Read More
367.
Series: The Boy in the Treehouse / The Girl Who Loved Her Horses Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889224414 $17.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2000

In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America.In ?The Boy in the Treehouse,” Simon, the son of an Ojibway mother and a British father, climbs into his half-finished tree house on the vision-quest his books say is necessary for him to reclaim his mother’s culture. ?It’s a Native thing,” he informs his incredulous father (who ... + Read More
368.
Series: The Breakdown So Far Paperback M.A.C. Farrant 9780889225565 $17.95 FICTION Feb 23, 2007

The Jonathan Swift of the bingo hall and elder-care, the Alexander Pope of pet-care and the dinner parties of the liberal intelligentsia, Marion Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with The Breakdown So Far, her eighth volume of extremely short stories for those of us who seem to have lost both our way and our attention span. Unsparing in her critique of the New Age syncretism the mall culture has substituted for authentic emotion and belief, our adoption of Buddhism appears in h... + Read More
369.
Series: The Burden of Office Agamemnon and Other Losers Paperback Joseph Tussman 9780889222656 $18.95 PHILOSOPHY Jan 01, 1989

Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media ?sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of ?privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Can we make sense of any of this?To do so, Tussman turns to some of the oldest and greatest stories in our tradition. He re-reads and re-tells the tales of Moses, Oedipus, Orestes, Antigone and King Lear. The re-... + Read More
370.
Series: The Buz'Gem Blues Paperback Drew Hayden Taylor 9780889224629 $16.95 DRAMA Mar 15, 2002

The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his ?Blues Quartet.”Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn’t believe she has anything to offer anyone. Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on ?the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary ... + Read More
371.
Series: A Carpenter's Trilogy, A Chronicle in Three Plays The Carpenter Paperback Vittorio Rossi 9780889226098 $17.95 DRAMA May 21, 2009

In 1956, Silvio Rosato, a decorated World War II veteran, shows up at the house of his bigamist father, Eduardo Rosato, who had abandoned him and his mother in Italy in 1920, starting a second life and family for himself in Chicago. Handsome, assured and accomplished, there is something sinister about the young Silvio, with his air of familiarity and the distant, impenetrable look in his eyes. This mystery begins Hellfire Pass, part one of Rossi’s autobiographical A Carpenter’s Trilogy: A Chronicle in Three Plays.At first glance a classic tale ... + Read More
372.
Series: The Centre Poems 1970-2000 Paperback Barry McKinnon 9780889224971 $18.95 POETRY Mar 15, 2004

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment and a shoebox of photos his prairie grandfather had taken of the family homestead, he began to piece together his first long poem: ?I Wanted to Say Something.” Though this story had nothing to do with Prince George, the form it generated was large enoug... + Read More
373.
Series: The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors Paperback Oliver N. Wells 9780889222557 $24.95 SOCIAL SCIENCE Jan 01, 1987

Oliver Wells, naturalist, writer, ethnographer, farmer, and stock breeder, was born in 1907 at the pioneer farm established by his family three generations before in the valley of the Chilliwack River. The name of this farm, Edenbank, echoes the rich heritage and idealist aspirations of the pioneer family who came to the valley to establish a new way of life in this new land. Their neighbors were the Chilliwacks, the native Canadians who live in the area. In the 1950s, sensing that the people with whom his family had shared the land for generat... + Read More
374.
Series: The Circus Performers' Bar Paperback David Arnason 9780889222182 $17.95 FICTION Jan 01, 1984

The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context through which a male neo-consciousness takes shape in a world dominated by the feminist vision. Various adorations of Snow White by her seven dwarves and the de-fanging of the wolf by Little Red Riding Hoo... + Read More
375.
Series: The Collected Books of Artie Gold Paperback Arite Gold 9780889226524 $29.95 POETRY Sep 15, 2010

Artie Gold wrote. And although he published only eight books, they were just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Artie was always writing? on his manual Underwood, on the back of cigarette packs, on napkins, on the wall, on postcards to himself and to the rest of the world. He also sketched, sketches of the moment, the moment of a moment, like his poems, whose phrases and unsentimental melancholia left a permanent impression on your mind and in your heart. He and his poems made you realize that poetry, contrary to popular opinion, did matter.Art... + Read More
376.
Series: The Commons 1st edition Paperback Stephen Collis 9780889225800 $17.95 POETRY May 15, 2008

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed?taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism’s ?primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call ?privatization”?but it spilt over into Romanticism’s own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in ?the literary” since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumul... + Read More
377.
Series: The Concise Kochel Paperback Normand Chaurette 9780889225183 $15.95 DRAMA Mar 15, 2005

The Concise Köchel cannot be substituted for the ?Complete” catalogue. Published in response to the many requests from musicologists and musicians received by the publishers Breitkopf and Hartel, this abridged, less costly and easier to handle edition is designed to meet the most frequent needs of those interested in the works of Mozart.?From the IntroductionIt’s All Hallows’ Eve, and the Motherwell sisters, Lili and Cecile, have invited their musicologist patrons, the Brunswick sisters, to attend them on this crucial day. All their lives, Lili... + Read More
378.
Series: The Coronation Voyage Paperback Michel Marc Bouchard 9780889224223 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

May 1953. The Empress of France sets sail from Montreal. On the pretext of attending the celebrations marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an important mafioso leaves for England where he secretly plans to live in exile with his two sons. Aboard this floating palace in the middle of the ocean, the petty lord of the Montreal underworld must face the most important decision of his dubious career: will he sacrifice his youngest son for a safe-conduct?Le Voyage du couronnement, co-produced by Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal and Théatr... + Read More
379.
Series: The Death of René Lévesque Paperback David Fennario 9780889224803 $15.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2003

In taking on ?The Matter of Québec,” David Fennario provides audiences and readers with an abiding critique of the notion that history is created around ?great causes” by ?great men.” Given the recent reversal of fortune delivered to the tempestuous sound and fury of the Québec separatist movement, The Death of René Lévesque is, in retrospect, more than an astonishingly profound and prophetic political document.Showcasing the surprising theatrical range and virtuosity of the author of Canada’s first bilingual?though definitely not bicultural?wo... + Read More
380.
Series: The Decline of the Hollywood Empire Paperback Hervé Fischer 9780889225459 $17.95 PERFORMING ARTS Sep 01, 2006

The Hollywood empire was built over the course of a century through hard-nosed business practices such as block booking, dumping and buying up the competition, turning the silver screen into a goldmine in the process. The business logic that has driven the industry since its beginnings has gone into hyperdrive in recent years, with astronomical sums invested in productions and promotion. Ironically that massive outlay has gone toward churning out a flat, made-in-Hollywood universalism that can be exported planet-wide, but which is simultaneousl... + Read More
381.
Series: The Dishwashers Paperback Morris Panych 9780889225244 $16.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the ?classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an up-scale restaurant, a place of seamless existential drudgery so utterly remote from the light of day that its wage-slaves have no contact with anyone outside. Spoutin... + Read More
382.
Series: The Driving Force Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889225305 $15.95 DRAMA Nov 01, 2005

In Act 1, Claude, 55, visits his father Alex, 77, in an Alzheimer’s ward, intimately tending to his bodily functions and needs while hopelessly trying to reach his silent, vacant father with a series of monologues?to settle old scores and misunderstandings between them.In an astonishing and eerie reversal of roles, in Act 2 it is Alex who visits his son Claude in the same Alzheimer’s ward and it is Alex’s turn to rant and rail at what he perceives to be his mute son’s contempt for his own working class life.With a cruel and disconsolate irony, ... + Read More
383.
Series: Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal The Duchess and the Commoner Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889224186 $19.95 FICTION Sep 15, 1999

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, ... + Read More
384.
Series: The Dunsmuirs A Promise Kept Paperback Rod Langley 9780889223042 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1992

The Dunsmuirs: A Promise Kept is the second of three plays chronicling the saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest, most ruthless and ill fated families.While Robbie and Joan’s two sons, Alex and Robert, heirs apparent to the family fortune, are groomed to hold the reins of power, Robbie Dunsmuir cuts a deal with Sir John A. Macdonald to build a railway from Victoria to Nanaimo, to distract B.C. voters from the fact that the promise of a trans-continental railway which brought them into confederation has been delayed. The last spike of the E & N is ... + Read More
385.
Series: The Dunsmuirs Alone at the Edge Paperback Rod Langley 9780889222977 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1991

The first of three plays in this saga of one of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families, The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge chronicles the disgrace and exile of Robbie Dunsmuir from Scotland, the settlement of his family as indentured labourers to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Nanaimo coalfields and his application of ?scab” labour tactics which win him an independent prospector’s licence from the company. His discovery of a vast coal deposit on Vancouver Island, and his scramble to first finance and then gain control over the Wellington... + Read More
386.
Series: The East End Plays: Part 1 Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224131 $24.95 DRAMA Dec 01, 1999

By the time he was writing Gossip in 1977, George Walker had already begun to shift his settings from, on the one hand, North America’s colonial roots in Europe, and on the other, its fascination with other, exotically foreign locales. Yet, even in The Power Plays, Walker is still exploring the ironic and dramatic possibilities of the stereotypes (albeit, by this time, home-grown ones) that continue to provide the fertile ground of contemporary North American sensibilities.With his creation of the Governor General’s Award winning Criminals in L... + Read More
387.
Series: The East End Plays: Part 2 Paperback George F. Walker 9780889224049 $19.95 DRAMA Mar 01, 1999

Where is the East End? It’s where the sun comes up and where you bury the dead. It’s where George Walker set six of his plays. It’s the East End of Toronto; the Lower East Side of New York; down by the East River; East L.A.; East Vancouver. It’s where you get down to the basics of beginnings and endings, and how you get from each of those ends to the other. It’s where Walker’s settings have ?come home.” From his offer of tenuous hope to the denizens of a city salvaged from the powerful and the greedy in Beautiful City (1987); to his championing... + Read More
388.
Series: The Ecstasy of Rita Joe Paperback George Ryga 9780889220003 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1970

Rita Joe is a Native girl who leaves the reservation for the city, only to die on skid row as a victim of white men’s violence and paternalistic attitudes towards First Nations peoples. As perhaps the best-known contemporary Canadian play and a poetic drama of enormous theatrical power, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe had a major influence in awakening consciousness to the ?Indian problem” both in whites and Natives themselves.Cast of five women and 15 men. With a preface by Chief Dan George.The Ecstasy of Rita Joe premiered November 23, 1967 at the Va... + Read More
389.
Series: The Edward Curtis Project A Modern Picture Story Paperback Marie Clements 9780889226425 $24.95 DRAMA Sep 30, 2010

Edward Curtis saw his job as that of creating a photographic record of ?the vanishing race of the North American Indian.” His work therefore became as much a projection of colonial attitudes upon aboriginal peoples as it was an authentic record of their lives.The Edward Curtis Project began when the Presentation House Theatre commissioned Marie Clements to write a play that would stage the issues raised by Curtis’ monumental but controversial achievement?to dramatize not only the creation of his twenty-volume photographic and ethnographic epic ... + Read More
390.
Series: The Empress Has No Closure Paperback Adeena Karasick 9780889223073 $16.95 POETRY Jan 01, 1992

The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.
391.
Series: The Ends of the Earth Paperback Morris Panych 9780889223349 $17.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1993

Frank, having dedicated his life to the unremarkable, and Walker, paranoid since being struck by lighting at age three, attempt to flee from each other and end up following each other instead. They find themselves in a run-down hotel operated by deaf and misdirected Willy and blind Alice, who has a murderous dislike for visitors. Morris Panych’s brilliant tale reminds us all that fear can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
392.
Series: The Execution Paperback Marie-Claire Blais 9780889221031 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1976

The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais’s only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it tells the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one of their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil and complicity, themes well-known to readers of Blais’s fiction.
393.
Series: The Fairies Are Thirsty Paperback Denise Boucher 9780889222007 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1982

According to the 19th-century historian Michelet, ?Les fées” were women who would rather sing than pray. For this crime, they were punished by being imprisoned in containers that would be opened only at the end of time. In Les fées ont soif (The Fairies Are Thirsty) Denise Bocher takes this image and focuses on it. The Fairies Are Thirsty is a daring, passionate and poetic exploration of the role of women through all time. In the play, three women?a housewife, a whore and the Virgin Mary?fight to break out of the stereotyped roles in which they... + Read More
394.
Series: The Faraway Nearby Paperback John Murrell 9780921368564 $10.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1995

The enigmatic American artist Georgia O’Keeffe flourished in the desert solitude where her creativity and vision thrived and was challenged by its dangerous energies, its desolate and hard beauty. In John Murrell’s The Faraway Nearby, Georgia O’Keeffe resigns herself to an old age spent in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains without the company of others until a stranger enters her life. Juan Hamilton, a young artist and handyman, befriends the elderly O’Keeffe, becoming the eyes for the almost-blind artist, and the cush... + Read More
395.
Series: Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889221901 $19.95 FICTION Jan 01, 1981

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant—only one of them, “the fat woman,” is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circ... + Read More
396.
Series: The Fighting Days Paperback Wendy Lill 9780889222267 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1985

The Fighting Days is set in Winnipeg during 1910-1917. The play focuses on the life and work of Francis Marion Beynon, a Manitoba journalist and political activist. When the play opens, Francis is on her way to Winnipeg, leaving behind a sheltered and religious rural childhood. Soon after she arrives she meets Nellie McClung and becomes involved in the Votes-for-Women movement. She also begins work as the women’s page editor for The Rural Review, airing her controversial political views on the editorial page. Suddenly, Canada is involved in Wor... + Read More
397.
Series: Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal The First Quarter of the Moon Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889223523 $19.95 FICTION Jan 01, 1994

It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay’s series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer’s arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman’s son (who is never named) and Marcel. These moving, profoundly different epiphanies of a transforming world, seen through the memories of the characters, set the stage for the action of the novel which takes place in the space of this single, evocative day. The fat woman’s son ... + Read More
398.
Series: The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky Paperback Karen X. Tulchinsky 9780889226463 $29.95 FICTION Sep 01, 2010

In 2003, a mild-mannered historian named Moses Lapinsky jots down notes for a biography. It is to tell the tale of his father Sonny, a famous Jewish- Canadian boxer. As Moses buries himself in his research, he is transported back in time to the pivotal events of his father’s life. So begins the first of the five sections of the novel, each narrated by a different third person. Crammed with humour, sorrow, folly, bravery and the richness of the everyday, Tulchinsky traces the remarkable fortunes of generations of the Lapinsky family, bringing li... + Read More
399.
Series: The Glace Bay Miners' Museum Paperback Wendy Lill 9780889223691 $16.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 1996

A story of the ill-fated romance between a wandering musician-social-idealist and a Cape Breton coal miner’s daughter, whose dreams are reawakened by their passion. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum is a play in which the all-consuming brightness of dreams and memory are overshadowed by absentee greed, callousness and exploitation. It is a tragedy that is hard as nails and completely unsentimental, yet nonetheless full of love and humour.Cast of two women and three men.
400.
Series: The Great Wave of Civilization Paperback Herschel Hardin 9780889221062 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1976

The Great Wave of Civilization is Herschel Hardin’s play about the destruction of the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy by the liquor trade in Montana and Alberta in the 19th century. Little Dog of the Northern Blackfoot tribe vs. Snookum Jim, free trader, I.G. Baker, merchant-prince of Fort Benton and the rest of the ?great wave of civilization.”Cast of five women and 13 men.
401.
Series: The Gull Paperback Daphne Marlatt 9780889226166 $17.95 DRAMA Dec 01, 2009

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Uchimura Naoya Prize, The Gull is the first Canadian play staged in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh. Produced by Vancouver’s Pangaea Arts, and written by award-winning poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt, the play is set in 1950: wartime restrictions on interned Japanese Canadians have finally been lifted, allowing them to return to the coast. It is a dramatization of the historical link between the fishing town of Steveston, home to many of these first, second and third generation Japanese Canadian... + Read More
402.
Series: The Happiest Man in the World and Other Stories Paperback David Arnason 9780889222694 $18.95 FICTION Jan 01, 1989

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be ? husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, psychiatrists and sailors, fishermen and fish, and the girl and the wolf all have their conventional roles drop away as their dreams enter their everyday lives. The Happiest Man in t... + Read More
403.
Series: The Heart Laid Bare Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889224254 $19.95 FICTION Mar 15, 2002

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay’s most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur découvert, Leméac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent’s Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print.This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay’s sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion... + Read More
404.
Series: The Heretic Paperback John Murphy 9780889225954 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 09, 2008

The Heretic began with a rhetorical question the author posed to himself for a comedy show: ?If there is a God, why would He create us? If He’s perfect, all knowing, there’s nothing he can gain from us. He must have been so incredibly bored and lonely, that He created us for his own entertainment.”Not exactly a new idea, it works well as the basis of a stand-up act, but it relies on the assumption that humanity was made not only in God’s physical image, but that we are all also cookie-cutter replicas of God’s psychological profile. That’s where... + Read More
405.
Series: The Hope Slide / Little Sister Paperback Joan MacLeod 9780889224117 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1999

Two plays by award-winning playwright Joan MacLeod. Little Sister was first performed at Theatre Direct in Toronto in 1994 and won the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Theatre for Young Audiences in 1995. The Hope Slide was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1992 and won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1993.
406.
Series: The House that Hijack Built Paperback Adeena Karasick 9780889225114 $19.95 POETRY Sep 15, 2004

The House That Hijack Built explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of “logical” or normative semantic patterns. If “to hijack” is “to steal in transit,” this text focuses on how language, with its idioms and ideologies, is appropriated—hijacked and transported—to unknown destinations in the act of its transmission. In her fifth collection of poems / collages, Karasick explores the intersection between das Wahre (the true) and die Wahrheit (the truth), as a language at war with itself re-presents a... + Read More
407.
Series: The Hunting Ground Paperback Lise Tremblay 9780889225343 $15.95 FICTION Mar 01, 2006

A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat for birdwatchers, nature tourists and collectors of antiques and local crafts; now primarily dependent on income flows from cottagers and retirees.Each of these remarkably engaging stories is recoun... + Read More
408.
Series: The Impromptu of Outremont Paperback Michel Tremblay 9780889221857 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1981

Each year, the Beaugrand sisters meet for their sister Yvette’s birthday party?and to have a little ?impromptu”?at which they lash out at each other’s personal failures and at the failure of society to support them in their opinions about the world. The four sisters represent the French-Canadian intelligentsia of the fifties, whose interest in art, music, dance and literature is an adopted pose, not their life’s blood. Only one of the Beaugrand siters, Lorraine, has escaped her fate, running off with the Italian gardener to start a family in St... + Read More
409.
Series: The Invisibility Exhibit Paperback Sachiko Murakami 9780889225794 $16.95 POETRY May 15, 2008

These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the ?Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori Culbert, Lindsay Kines and Kim Bolan’s 2001 ?Missing Women” series in the Vancouver Sun. This media coverage, combined with the efforts of activists in political and cultural sectors, finally resulted in increased offi... + Read More
410.
Series: The Lady Smith Paperback Andrew Moodie 9781553310020 $14.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 2000

What happens when the ?other woman” becomes your roommate? What happens when she starts to confide in you about her affair?From the playwright of ?A Common Man’s Guide to Loving Women,” comes a claustrophobic drama, set in the Black community of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood, which challenges the distance between deception and redemption.
411.
Series: The Leisure Society Paperback François Archambault 9780889225312 $15.95 DRAMA Sep 15, 2005

Peter and Mary are unhappy. But they don’t know it yet. They work long hours. They invest their money for a retirement they will probably never enjoy. They buy things that are supposed to make them happy but that they never use. They obsess about the nightmare engines of Western economic growth: make more, earn more, have more.Bringing a child into this frightening world fuelled by instant gratification; wanting to have some time and space for themselves so they can continue to grow and develop; or dedicating time to deepen the bonds between th... + Read More
412.
Series: The Lil'wat World of Charlie Mack Paperback Dorothy Kennedy 9780889226401 $24.95 SOCIAL SCIENCE Feb 10, 2010

Early in their ethnographic work, Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy were privileged to meet Charlie Mack. Born on the Mount Currie Reserve in 1899, he was a fascinating character and a font of wisdom, exemplifying by his way of life, his skills in trapping and canoe-making, and his knowledge of the history of his people, the living world of the Lil’wat, which the young ethnologists were able to record on tape and in their notes and photographs. Most important among what Charlie Mack gave them was a wide corpus of stories; he was a master story... + Read More
413.
Series: The Madonna Painter Paperback Michel Marc Bouchard 9780889226418 $16.95 DRAMA Mar 05, 2010

At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish ?u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four local women all named Mary, a model for his work. The presence of the foreign artist, his choice of a local virgin to serve as a model and the frighteningly strange nature of his work will upset the live... + Read More
414.
Series: The Magnificent Voyage of Emiy Carr Paperback Jovette Marchessault 9780889223141 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1992

Emily Carr lived in a magical place that she had christened The House of All Sorts. In this House which is open to all that is vital on Earth, Emily Carr, with all her greatness and her imperfections, receives visitors from her planet: Lizzie, her sister, is greeted with war whoops and rebuffs, for Lizzie is the adversary, as is all Victorian society; Sophie, her Amerindian friend, who brings messages, reminders and lessons from life; Lawren Harris, her young painter friend from the Group of Seven, who wants to free painting from dogma and revo... + Read More
415.
Series: The Medusa Head Paperback Mary Meigs 9780889222106 $17.95 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Jan 01, 1983

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful ?Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The Medusa Head comes from the third woman?the autobiographer, who works hard to uncover the truth about that year. The story begins when Marie-Claire meets Andrée at a literary event in Paris. They fall in love; and when Mary meets Andrée, she ... + Read More
416.
Series: The Monument Cycles Paperback Mariner Janes 9780889227514 $16.95 POETRY Apr 15, 2012

The Monument Cycles investigates our relation to monuments and works of public art, ranging from memorials to cenotaphs, expressing our desire to capture the fleeting and intangible. Speaking specifically to the city of Vancouver, these poems focus explicitly on the impoverished Downtown Eastside, exploring the narrator’s experiences working in the poorest postal code in Canada.
417.
Series: The Moustache Memories of Greg Curnoe Paperback George Bowering 9780889104570 $16.95 POETRY Jan 01, 1993

George Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends in London, Ontario, in 1966. Bowering was a 30-year-old poet and university student and Curnoe was a 29-year-old painter who had dropped out of art school in Toronto to return to his place of birth. Their art was in its youth, their eyes and ears were wide open and their stomachs could withstand pots and pots of strong, black coffee. For 26 years they grew up parallel, inside each other’s work. Greg Curnoe was killed on his bicycle late in 1992, struck down in the middle of his bright career.This m... + Read More
418.
Series: The New Long Poem Anthology (Second Edition) Second Edition Paperback Sharon Thesen 9780889224384 $39.95 POETRY Mar 15, 2001

The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: ?A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive and sustained ?singing talk” in postmodern Canadian writing. Edited by Sharon Thesen, this collection of long poems; longer works; sequential poems; extended poems; and serial, lengthy or longish poems extend the geography of postmodern Canadian poetry as it was laid out in ... + Read More
419.
Series: The Noam Chomsky Lectures Paperback Daniel Brooks 9780889224056 $15.95 DRAMA Jan 01, 1997

’Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal base. We collectively know little about what is done in our name by our elected governments and the business interests they serve. The Noam Chomsky Lectures assumes not only that we do want to know, that ou... + Read More
420.
Series: The Occupation of Heather Rose Paperback Wendy Lill 9780889225930 $16.95 DRAMA Jan 09, 2008

Two epigraphs that frame The Occupation of Heather Rose, one from Alice in Wonderland and the other from Heart of Darkness, prepare the audience for the nightmare of dislocation and alienation this one-woman show evokes.Young, naïve, and inadequately trained, urban health care/social worker Heather Rose flirts with the pilot as she wings her way north in a bush plane, to land in an isolated and remote northern/Native community, carrying her Canada Food Guides, plans for fitness classes and community social activities with her.She is met, when s... + Read More