Enter for a Chance to Win Free Books!
49th Shelf members can enter to win a copy of any of the books listed here (please sign up here if you haven’t already). At the end of the giveaway period, we do a random draw, and the publishers ship copies directly to the winners. Good luck!
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes
Essays on Motherhood
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.
Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.
Ultimately, these deeply moving, graceful essays force us to consider how close we are to death, even in the most average of moments, and how beauty is a necessary celebration amidst the chaos of being alive.
- Giveaway period ends
- May 31, 2024
- Copies available
- 3
- Members entered
- 31
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Beneath the Surface of Things
New and Selected Essays
The essays in this collection came about during the unhurried months when one who had traveled incessantly was obliged to stay still, even as events flared on all sides in a world that never stops moving. Wade Davis brings his unique cultural perspective to such varied topics as the demonization of coca, the sacred plant of the Inca; the Great War and the birth of modernity; the British conquest of Everest; the endless conflict in the Middle East; reaching beyond climate fear and trepidation; on the meaning of the sacred. His essay, “The Unraveling of America,” first published in Rolling Stone, attracted five million readers and generated 362 million social media impressions. Media interest in the story was sustained over many weeks, with interview requests coming in from 23 countries.
The anthropological lens, as Davis demonstrates, reveals what lies beneath the surface of things, allowing us to see, and to seek, the wisdom of the middle way, a perspective of promise and hope that all of the essays in this collection aspire to convey.
- Giveaway period ends
- May 31, 2024
- Copies available
- 3
- Members entered
- 36
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Realia
In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Shambolic and precise, these poems are unskinned. Including a mini-essay on the author’s OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement.
- Giveaway period ends
- May 31, 2024
- Copies available
- 3
- Members entered
- 21
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Anatomical Venus
Anatomical Venus is a visceral collection of poems that invoke anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th century morgues and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love.
- Giveaway period ends
- May 31, 2024
- Copies available
- 3
- Members entered
- 26
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
The Road to Appledore
Or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place
The recent pandemic accelerated an existing trend among urban Canadians to move to the country. Yet to quote from a 2022 Globe and Mail article, “People from cities don’t always realize what they’re getting into.”
For anyone setting out in that direction, or dreaming of doing so, Tom Wayman’s The Road to Appledore: Or How How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place is rewarding reading. The book follows Wayman from Vancouver to southeastern BC’s Slocan Valley, deep in the Selkirk Mountains, and presents with his characteristic humour and philosophical insight his ensuing major shifts of perspective and knowledge. Mishaps, misadventures and moments of delight and wonder abound in Wayman’s prose reflections on his decades of living immersed in nature and the contemporary rural—from having to deal with a bear cub in his kitchen, to engaging in a vigilante action to protect a community water system, to the quiet satisfaction of growing his own food and flowers.
Wayman depicts the rural southwest of Canada in intimate detail, transporting readers alongside him.
- Giveaway period ends
- May 31, 2024
- Copies available
- 3
- Members entered
- 34
You need to be logged in to enter to win. Have an account already? Sign In. Need an account? Sign Up. It's easy and just takes a minute.
Page 2 of 2
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2