Search results for ""Rare Machines""

An intimate yet wide-sweeping story of a marine biologist working to save ocean ecosystems from climate change.With the world’s oceans ravaged by climate change, Émeraude, a young marine biologist, works to preserve aquatic ecosystems by recreating them for zoos. When her work earns her a spot aboard a research vessel with an extended mission in the Arctic, it is the inescapable draw of the ocean that will save her when the world she leaves behind is irrevocably changed.Stories of Émeraude’s ancestors — a young sailor abandoned at birth, a conjuror who mixes potions for her neighbours, a violent young man who hides in the woods to escape an even more violent war, and a talented young singer born to a mother who cannot speak — weave their way through her intimate reflections on a modest life, unknowingly shaped by those who came before.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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A dark, satiric novel about a woman whose attempt to escape crises in her health and marriage ends up causing more chaos.Cat's career has stalled, her marriage has gone flat, and being a stay-at-home mom for two young kids has become a grind. When she finds out, all within a few days, that she is pregnant, that a lump in her breast is the worst thing it could be, and that her husband has done something unforgivably repulsive, she responds by running away from her marriage and her life — a life that, on the outside, looks like middle-class success. Her actions send waves of chaos through the lives of multiple characters, including a struggling house cleaner, a rich and charismatic yoga guru, and even an ailing dog. What follows is a dark comedy about marriage, motherhood, privilege, and power.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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A father reflects on the rich life of his son, who died suddenly at twenty-six after living with schizophrenia. On the morning of Boxing Day 2009, the poet Fraser Sutherland and his wife found their son, Malcolm, dead in his bedroom in their house. He was twenty-six and had died from a seizure of unknown cause. Malcolm had been living with schizophrenia since the age of seventeen.Fraser’s respectful narration of Malcolm’s life — his happiness as well as his sufferings, his heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind, his readings, his writings, his experiments with religious thought — is a master writer’s attempt to give shape and dignity to his son’s life, to memorialize it as more than an illness. And in writing about his son’s life, Fraser creates his own self-effacing memoir — the memoir of a parent’s resilience through years of stressful care.Fraser Sutherland, one of Canada’s finest poetry critics and essayists, died shortly after completing this book.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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A mid-level drug trafficker and self-proclaimed low-life with a big vocabulary comes to terms with his actions and his mental health. Andrew Brobyn’s relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents’ home in Toronto while he figured out what to do with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer.Equal parts hilarious and terrifying, Babble On is a psycho-philosophical memoir that tracks Brobyn as he navigates the consequences of his eccentric choices and struggles with profound ambivalence toward his own health and well-being.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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For readers of Queenie and Honey Girl, a coming-of-age story about queer Black identity, love, passion, chosen family, and rediscovering life’s pleasures after loss.Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister.Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life’s most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present. On the journey to turning twenty-five, she finally sees that she belongs to herself, and goes about the business of reclaiming that self. Through a series of whirlwind love affairs, parties, and trips abroad, Jade stumbles toward relinquishing the weight of her trauma as she fully comes into her own as a young Black woman and writer. A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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“Equal parts Harlequin romance, Gothic horror story and Camusian moral tale.” — GLOBE AND MAILFrom the bestselling author of Drunk Mom, comes a story of romantic obsession, mental illness, and self-discovery as one woman travels to a haunted quarantine island.Josephine is obsessed. Or possessed — by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn’t promise anything, but who gives her a taste of intimacy that puts her on the brink of losing her mind. Oscillating between her elusive lover and her older former partner, stuck in the hell that is working in a cubicle, and obliged to tend to her destructive, senile mother, Josephine is trapped. After a work assignment promises to deliver distraction, Josephine makes a decision to visit a former quarantine island in the Adriatic Sea, where she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Intimate and erotic, Possessed is a dark and funny story exploring sexual obsession, mental illness, and the supernatural.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Finalist for 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction • Co-Winner of 2022 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First BookAfter years of secrecy and silence, Rowan McCandless leaves an abusive relationship and rediscovers her voice and identity through writing.She was never to lie to him. She was never to leave him; and she was never supposed to tell.Persephone’s Children chronicles Rowan McCandless’s odyssey as a Black, biracial woman escaping the stranglehold of a long-term abusive relationship. Through a series of thematically linked and structurally inventive essays, McCandless explores the fraught and fragmented relationship between memory and trauma. Multiple mythologies emerge to bind legacy and loss, motherhood and daughterhood, racism and intergenerational trauma, mental illness and resiliency.It is only in the aftermath that she can begin to see the patterns in her history, hear the echoes of oppression passed down from unknown, unnamed ancestors, and discover her worth and right to exist in the world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt — the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library).Finalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First Novel Seven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them. The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness. Both sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands.Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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A brisk, humorous collection of essays that redefines the mythos of fatherhood depicted in film, television, and video games.What do dads tell us about the world? Not your real dad, but dads in general. Dads are everywhere. Lurking in our movies, television shows, and video games. Spouting homespun wisdom and atrocious jokes, wallowing in might-have-beens and back-in-my-days, or rigidly defending the status quo. These fictional dads fuel a myth of fatherhood. What is that myth trying to tell us? And what is it trying to sell us? Dad Bod is a clever, riveting collection of essays about father figures in popular culture. From Gandalf to Homer Simpson, Die Hard to The Mandalorian, these essays unpack the tropes that inform our collective image of fatherhood. Follow Cian Cruise, newly minted dad, as he riffs on the stereotypes and lore of fatherhood, traces a contemporary art history of dads in popular culture, and journeys to the heart of dadness to become a better father.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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In a near future ravaged by illness, one woman and her AI companion enter a dangerous bubble of the superrich.It's 2035: a fledging synthetic consciousness “wakes up” in a lab. Jenny, the lead developer, determined to nurture this synthetic being like a child, trains it to work with people at the border of the American Protectorate of Canada. She names it Julian.Two years later, Slaton, a therapist at a university, is framed by a student for arranging an illegal abortion. She follows the student to America and is detained at the border, where she meets Julian in virtual space. After a week of interviewing, he decides to stay with her, learning about the world, the human condition, and what it means to fall in love. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague is spreading across the world. Only the far-seeing and well-connected Julian can protect Slaton from the impending societal collapse.Autonomy is an ambitious philosophical novel about the possibilities for love in a world in which human bodies are either threatened or irrelevant.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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The true story of how one Muslim woman shaped her own fate and escaped her forced wedding.Sumaiya Matin was never sure if the story of the Shaytan Bride was truth or myth. When she moved at age six from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Thunder Bay, Ontario, recollections of this devilish bride followed her. At first, the Shaytan Bride seemed to be the monster of fairy tales, a woman possessed or seduced by a jinni. But everything changes during a family trip to Bangladesh, and in the weeks leading to Sumaiya’s own forced wedding, she discovers that the story — and the bride herself — are much closer than they seem.The Shaytan Bride is the true coming-of-age story of a girl navigating desire and faith. Through her journey into adulthood, she battles herself and her circumstances to differentiate between destiny and free will. Sumaiya Matin’s life in love and violence is a testament to one woman’s strength as she faces the complicated fallout of her decisions.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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In the year following her mother’s death, Sophie navigates a complicated love triangle between a new flame and a past partner.It's the west end of Toronto, the apartments are small, and everybody is twenty-seven and making some kind of art. In the wake of her mother’s death, Sophie pays rent by making stained glass mosaics for rich people and plays house with her childhood friend and sometimes-lover, the beautiful boy Alex. Both are from Newfoundland but move easily in this world of crowded patios and DIY movie shoots. When Sophie meets the glamorous poet Maggie, who is the downtown product of a hundred cool queer bars, she falls into a bewildered infatuation, but secrets emerge that threaten to crumble the foundation of her relationship with Alex and Maggie both.Moving from bohemian Toronto to an arts colony in a castle in France and then back to Newfoundland, Mudflowers examines the impact of family that one is born into and family one chooses, exploring new and unconventional intimacies.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction 2022 — ShortlistedA neurotic party girl's coming-of-age memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die. Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can’t stay sober. She’s terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.Then, in the autumn following her twenty-seventh birthday, an abnormal lump discovered in her left breast serves as the catalyst for a journey of rigorous self-questioning. Waiting on a diagnosis, she begins an intellectual assessment of her life, desperate to justify a short existence full of dumb choices. Armed with her philosophy degree and angry determination, she attacks each issue in her life as the days creep by and winds up writing a searingly honest memoir about learning to live before getting ready to die.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Too much sex in the city: a young woman goes into a self-destructive spiral after becoming obsessed with a downtown Montreal hipster.Reality, that speedy bitch, is catching up to me.In downtown Montreal, everyone is in a band or making a movie. Philomena Flynn and her best friend, Tania, are living fast and hard. There is sex when and where they want it, as well as drugs of all kinds. Not enough work, but lots of parties. Cute boys or nice boys, but rarely both at once. Philomena has no idea how to protect herself from her roaring feelings and goes into a spiral of self-destruction when her heart is broken. Too bad for Tania. Too bad for Philomena’s dad. Too bad for boys who are too nice to her, and too bad, above all, for Philomena.Like Animals is a glimpse into the raucous, sex-filled lives — infused with self-doubt and euphoria — of young, creative people who are far more sensitive than their cool facades will admit.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEA failed musician obsessed with avant-garde art enters a shadowy world where bohemian excess meets the avaricious interests of a real estate cabal.Alexander Otkazov is finished with Montreal. Having wasted his youth on the love of art, he’s ready for a life of anonymous condo towers and profitable boredom. But when he moves to Toronto, he is forced into a monkish existence by the unforgiving pressures of the city — until he stumbles across a story about an ambitious experimental music collective that could be his ticket to a better job and a better life.Desperate to prove himself as a journalist, Alexander chases answers that take him from Forest Hill mansions to the bottom of Halifax Harbour, moving ever deeper into a shadowy world of amorphous real estate deals, creative megalomania, and finance capitalism, where avant-garde art is simply another mask for big money. In order to unravel the threads tying everything he loves to everything he hates, he will have to confront his own most sordid desires and the lengths he is willing to go to achieve his dreams of an easy life.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit AwardA professor of English literature writes the autobiography of his fantasy alter-ego, wanton movie star Gloria Grahame, while his own sexual desires go frustrated.Denton Moulton — a shy, effeminate male professor — lives inside his head, where he is really a long-dead movie star: the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. Professor Moulton is desperate to reveal Gloria’s shocking secret before he dies. Does he have the right to tell this woman’s story? Who, in fact, has the right to tell anyone’s story at all?A scandalous, humorous novel of taboo desires and repression, I, Gloria Grahame alternates between Gloria’s imagined life with her film-director husband, Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, and Denton’s increasingly frustrated real-life attempts to produce his own work of art: an all-male drag production of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The novel takes us from high-strung film sets to dark bars and the puritanical offices of government arts granting agencies, where Denton runs up against the sternest warnings that he may not, in fact, imagine himself as someone else, even in art.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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A meditation on the meaning of life in an increasingly global world, from acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Xue Yiwei. Set in modern-day Montreal, Celia, Misoka, I is the story of a middle-aged Chinese man who has been living in the city for fifteen years. After the death of his wife, he begins to reflect on his past and how he has ended up alone in Canada, a solitary member of the Chinese diaspora. It is in this period of angst and uncertainty, during the most unusual of winters, that he meets two women by Beaver Lake, on Montreal’s Mount Royal. They, too, have their own stories: stories of their own personal plights, which connect present to past, and West to East.The distinct paths taken by these three characters — Celia, Misoka, and “I” — span continents and decades, but, whether by chance or design, converge in Montreal, like mysterious figures in an ancient Chinese Zen painting. After coming together, the three begin to examine who they are, where they might belong, and how to navigate otherness and identity in a globalized world.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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Discover some of the rarest and most desirable Porsche sports cars ever produced! Throughout the history of the sports car, no marque has epitomized the excitement and passion of driving like Porsche. The Saratoga Automobile Museum, in collaboration with architect Steven Harris, presents 22 of the marque’s rarest air and water-cooled cars. This remarkable collection highlights the manufacturer’s past seven decades of production -- from 356 Carreras and Speedsters to high-performance RS 911s -- all captured in sensational detail by renowned photographer James Lipman. Showcases 22 of the rarest and most desirable Porsche sports cars, from the 1956 Carrera GT to the 2019 991.2 GT2RS, as well as several custom builds More than 240 stunning images including exterior, interior, and engine-bay details by Car and Driver, Motor Trend, and Top Gear photographer James Lipman. Includes driving impressions from automotive journalists Jethro Bovingdon of Top Gear, Dickie Meaden of evo magazine, and Intercooler cofounder Andrew Frankel The stunning imagery is accompanied by specifications and history as well as driving impressions from leading automotive writers Richard Meaden, John Simister and others. Air & Water combines breathtaking imagery and words to transport the reader on a thrilling journey of being behind the wheel of these ultra-rare machines.

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Two young men bringing up a small child in the middle of nowhere. Everything could be fine, but strangers start to meddle.For near a century the reclusive Bliss clan farmed the same land. Now it’s 1963 and everyone’s gone except teenage Cam, his older cousin Wes, and little Dorie. They buried Gran over a year ago. But Gramp is still with them, wrapped tight as a mummy in an old tarp in the cold room off the kitchen. Life’s better now without the old man’s rants and terrors.There are problems with the land lease and the meddlesome, moralizing neighbours, and rumours are spreading in town that there’s something not quite right about Cam and Wes, but they’re taking care of it all as best they can. Then the local Children’s Aid drops by to say Dorie needs schooling and proper parents, and it’s clear they can’t hide their secrets any longer. They’re on the road, heading north, with a body in the trunk. Wes knows a place, a cabin deep in the woods …No matter what they do, gruesome casualties seem to follow them. It could be funny if it wasn’t so nightmarish. And through it all, a tender secret love thrives, as they try to hold on to the family they’ve built together.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

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