Steeple Green Books

12/07/2024

From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller, the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft.

Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.

Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin’s own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. She also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online.

Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf.

$10

12/07/2024

"When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year."
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.

$10

12/06/2024

Thanks to everyone who came out to the reading of Our Town last night. What a sweet, sweet time. I didn't manage to take a single photo, but instead made a pile of the food bank items you all brought. Over 50 donations for the Fill Your Caboose community food drive! Thank you, y'all are the best. There are donation boxes all over town until December 10th. Spread the food! 💚

12/06/2024

In this delightful book, Laurie Lacey's reflections on the magical world of plant life and the gathering of remedies chronicles more than 70 plants used by the Mi'kmaq as medicines. Since the Mi'kmaq healing process begins with the gathering and preparation of medicines, Lacey takes us into swamps and bogs, the barrens and woods, to explore the habitats of plants with healing properties. He then illustrates each medicinal plant and describes its traditional use or uses. Whether one is hiking through a field listening for the sound of the "sacred plant," the yellow rattle, exploring bogs in the hope of finding the elusive blue flag, or simply interested in the Mi'kmaq approach to health and healing, Mi'kmaq Medicines will prove a helpful and enjoyable companion.

This new edition includes a fully revised text and a new preface from the author on current perspectives in Mi'kmaq medicines.

12/06/2024

What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. The End of Solitude brings together more than forty of his finest essays, including four that are published here for the first time.

Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how can we sustain our individuality in an age of networks and groups?

$1

12/05/2024

From one of the world’s most renowned cave divers, a firsthand account of exploring the earth’s final frontier: the hidden depths of our oceans and the sunken caves inside our planet

More people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest, and we know more about deep space than we do about the depths of our oceans. From one of the top cave divers working today—and one of the very few women in her field—Into the Planet blends science, adventure, and memoir to bring readers face-to-face with the terror and beauty of earth’s remaining unknowns and the extremes of human capability.

Jill Heinerth—the first person in history to dive deep into an Antarctic iceberg and leader of a team that discovered the ancient watery remains of Mayan civilizations—has descended farther into the inner depths of our planet than any other woman. She takes us into the harrowing split-second decisions that determine whether a diver makes it back to safety, the prejudices that prevent women from pursuing careers underwater, and her endeavour to recover a fallen friend’s body from the confines of a cave. But there’s beauty beyond the danger of diving, and while Heinerth swims beneath our feet in the lifeblood of our planet, she works with biologists discovering new species, physicists tracking climate change, and hydrogeologists examining our finite freshwater reserves.

Written with hair-raising intensity, Into the Planet is the first book to deliver an intimate account of cave diving, transporting readers deep into inner space, where fear must be reconciled and a mission’s success balances between knowing one’s limits and pushing the envelope of human endurance.

$10

12/05/2024

👋📚

Holidays are here
a book for you to unwind
or a book for them

Otis & Clementine's Books & Coffee
King's Co-op Bookstore
Bookmark II
Friction Books
Steeple Green Books

12/05/2024

An entertaining and inspiring early reader celebrating the dynamic woman behind Hope for Wildlife, featuring full colour illustrations.

A charitable organization based in Seaforth, Nova Scotia, Hope for Wildlife has been rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing wildlife since 1997, and to date has helped over 80,000 injured and orphaned wild animals representing more than 250 species. The popular reality television show Hope for Wildlife TV, currently filming its eleventh season, has given the wildlife rescue and its heroic founder an international platform.

The woman who started it all, Hope Swinimer, continues to run the organization, with the help of many volunteers, interns, wildlife rescuers, veterinarians, and donors. While Hope has never been one for the personal spotlight, her achievements are finally celebrated in this inspiring book for young readers.

She is Hope for Wildlife tells the incredible real-life story of a young girl growing up in rural Argyle, Nova Scotia, who dreamed of one day helping animals. With charming full-colour illustrations from Cape Breton artist Leah Boudreau, this early reader follows Hope's journey as she builds Hope for Wildlife from the ground up, overcoming many obstacles?and saving many animals?along the way, From Zorro the skunk to Bobbi the robin to Gretel the pine marten, and so many more!

An entertaining and educational story that celebrates wildlife rehabilitation, female entrepreneurship, and community-building, She is Hope for Wildlife is the perfect read for the young animal lovers in your life.

Features a timeline and short educational note about Hope for Wildlife.

A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will support Hope for Wildlife.

$19.95

12/04/2024

Do you know what your brain is made of? How does memory function? What is a neuron and how does it work? For that matter what's a comic? And in the words of Lewis Carroll's famous caterpillar: "Who are you?"

Neurocomic is a journey through the human brain: a place of neuron forests, memory caves, and castles of deception. Along the way, you'll encounter Boschean beasts, giant squid, guitar-playing sea slugs, and the great pioneers of neuroscience. Neuroscientists Dr. Matteo Farinella and Dr. Hana Ros unravel the mysteries of the human brain in this groundbreaking graphic novel that provides a unique insight into the most complex thing in the universe.

$10

12/04/2024

This local favourite is back in stock. Breads! Pies! Chowders! Cakes!

12/04/2024

Four middle-class suburban men decide to embark on a three-day canoe trip down a particularly wild section of a river in Georgia. For Ed Gentry, Bobby Trippe, Drew Ballinger, and Lewis Medlock, the trip represents a break from their daily routines, a chance for adventure with few real risks, and the last occasion to see a beautiful valley before the river is dammed up. Lewis, an enthusiastic outdoorsman and champion archer, is obsessed by the desire to pit himself against nature.

When two of the friends are viciously attacked by mountain men, their mild adventure becomes a fight for their very lives. Men prey upon one another, the treacherous river becomes a graveyard for those without the strength or the luck to survive, and Ed, forced to lead his friends to safety, calls upon primal instincts buried within him to achieve deliverance.

One of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century
One of Time Magazine's 100 Best English Language Novels

$10

12/01/2024

Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy - the story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God.

In the mid-twentieth century these four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them - in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them - the School of the Holy Ghost - and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

$10

12/01/2024

The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.

Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems “Bearded Irises” and “Peonies.” Ian Frazier pulls weeds in “Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener,” and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in “Consider the Castor Bean”; Ken Druse stalks the s*xy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favourites also make appearances.

Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has assembled this diverse crew and provides a spirited introduction. A wonderful gift for green thumbs, My Favorite Plant is a happy collection of fresh takes on old friends.

$10

11/30/2024

From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes the Nebula award-winning masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.

The "Jubilee Tides" will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. A man from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies has been sent to investigate. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and charismatic bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting dying world in his own evil image-and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying, astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.

This novel of surreal hard SF was widely compared to the fiction of Gene Wolfe when it was first published, and Swanwick has gone on in the two decades since its first publication to become recognized as one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers.

$10

11/30/2024

What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of s*xual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and s*x and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created?

In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and s*x. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve?

In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heteros*xual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for s*x and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

$10

11/30/2024

In this remarkable blend of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue, poet and author Kathleen Jamie touches points on a timeline spanning millennia, and considers what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressiely preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

$10