You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Welcome to the world of the Vinyl Cafe. Meet Dave, the proud owner of the world's smallest record store. Meet his pal, Kenny Wong, who runs Wong's Scottish Meat Pies. Meet Dave's wife and their children. Watch while they all bump and stumble through a hilarious year of mistakes, miscues, misunderstandings, and muddle. The adventures begin in December with Dave's disastrous yet inspired attempts to cook the family turkey. And they move through the seasons to the following Christmas's fiasco, when Dave accidentally spikes the kids' punch bowl at his neighbor's Christmas soiree. Home from the Vinyl Cafe also explores the tender awkwardness of first love, the challenges presented by a dying guin...
Bestselling author and radio storytelling sensation Stuart McLean revisits the heartwarming and hilarious friends from his iconic Vinyl Cafe. Dave and his wife Morley would no doubt tell you that life is what you make it. Unfortunately for them, that means a compilation tape of mistakes, miscues, misunderstandings, and muddle. That's not to say that there is anything particularly unusual about the family and friends at the Vinyl Cafe. After all, who wouldn't try to toilet-train a cat? Who hasn't started a small home fix-it job only to set fire to the walls? Created mass hysteria at a school concert? Lost an aging relative while visiting our nation's capital? Vinyl Cafe Unplugged is a warm and delightful collection of stories following the common foibles and everyday absurdities of family life.
Like an old friend who's turned up in town, Stuart McLean returns with Stories from the Vinyl Cafe, his bestselling collection of tales based on his enormously popular Vinyl Cafe radio program. The collection features Canada's much-loved fictional family: Dave, Morley, Stephanie and Sam. Stories from the Vinyl Cafe also introduces a host of other wonderfully imagined characters, such as Margaret Dwyer, a suburban housewife who startles herself by shoplifting a pepperoni sausage, and Flora Perriton, who is consumed with thoughts of lost opportunities when an old friend passes away. Then there's Ed, who-overcome by the death of his favourite rock star-embarks on a pilgrimage to New York City to meet the singer's widow. As always, the stories in this rewarding and irreverent collection prove that Stuart McLean is indeed a national treasure.
Selected from fifteen years of radio-show archives and re-edited by the author, this eclectic collection gives a glimpse into the thoughful mind at work behind The Vinyl Cafe.
What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope ...
Including five new, never before published Christmas stories and the classic "Dave Cooks the Turkey," this special collection from the Vinyl Cafe is Stuart McLean at his finest. Christmas has always been a special time at the Vinyl Cafe. For two decades, Stuart McLean travelled across the country every December with The Vinyl Cafe Christmas tour, bringing the gift of laughter and light during the darkest days of the year. The hilarious world of Dave and Morley was even more real--more vibrant--during the holidays. For many, the Vinyl Cafe Christmas stories became beloved family traditions. From mishaps with the Turlingtons and the tale of a young Dave's first holiday disaster to the surprising "Christmas Ferret" and the touching sign-off in "The Christmas Card," these wonderful new stories will delight for years to come. Brimming with charm and humour (often at Dave's expense), these twelve stories entertain on every page, reminding us what the holidays are all about.
The Event and its Terrors undertakes a critical reimagining of one of the major events of Irish historythe Great Famine of the 1840sand of its subsequent legacies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, past and present, it considers the emergence of the Famine as an object of historical knowledge and controversy with reference both to the experience of modernity and to the production of academic and nationalist histories in colonial and post-independence Ireland. In doing so, it explores the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with the past via contemporary eyewitness accounts, oral histories, literature, folklore, and present-day commemorative events.
In Vinyl Cafe Diaries, master storyteller and humorist Stuart McLean takes us into the deepest recesses of The Vinyl Cafe. Learn all about the secret lives and hidden passions of the seemingly ordinary folk from the radio show. What is Dave doing by himself in a Halifax hotel room with a duck? What purloined item has Sam surreptitiously stuffed under his mattress and why? What is it about the book club that Mary Turlington doesn't dare tell Morley? Why is Morley skulking around with a man named Frank on the eve of her fortieth birthday? What grisly secret is Stephanie hiding in her father's picnic cooler? Why in the name of decency is Morley parading around in Stephanie's clothes? What are in the mysterious brown-paper packages that Sam is receiving in the mail? And why is Dave wearing that awful Grateful Dead T-shirt? Vinyl Cafe Diaries exposes the answers to these urgent questions in twenty never-before-told (well, okay, told on the radio) stories of strange secrets, odd dreams, high hopes and, of course, hilarious adventures.
If you ask them, Dave and Morley's friends will tell you that no matter how long you've known people, they can still surprise you. After all, no one expects to see a grown man dive into the trunk of his car to chase a rat. And despite what they may claim, few people are actually prepared to have their backyard, never mind their 12-year-old son, shoot to stardom on YouTube's most watched videos. And yes, the sight of a 87-year-old bungeejumping off a cruise ship is... unusual. But well-wishers at the Vinyl Cafe will advise you to be philosophical about such things. No matter who sends a volley of nails through your truck window, which mannequin is disrobed, or how green your skin turns when your mom leaves town, life marches on. In "Extreme Vinyl Cafe" bestselling author Stuart McLean regales us with the wild impulses and extreme behaviours of Canada's favourite characters at the Vinyl Cafe.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER From Canada's much-missed, nationally bestselling storyteller, a must-have collection featuring ten never-before-published stories and ten classic favourites, perfect for old fans and Vinyl Cafe newcomers alike. From the unforgettable Christmas classic “Dave Cooks the Turkey” to the tender tribute to ice-cream-loving, potato-sitting Arthur the dog in “Morte d’Arthur”; from the joys and challenges of marriage in “The Canoe Trip” to the celebration of childhood adventure in “The Waterslide.” From the beginning of life (the hilarious “Labour Pains”) to the end (the touching “Love Never Ends”) and all the moments—big and small—in between, these s...