Search results for ""Exile Editions""

In his first collection of stories, The Chronicles of Kitchike: Taking a Hard Fall, Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui takes us on a journey into the heart of a very colourful Indigenous community where traditions, dreams, deprivation and, yes, corruption exist side by side.With image-laden language, he plunges us into the daily life of ordinary men and women facing political, economic, and mythical forces beyond their control. With wry humour and a touch of the fantastic, the author depicts the sometimes tense relationships in Southern Quebec's communities, allowing a snapshot of our multicultural society to be seen between the lines The Chronicles of Kitchike transports us to a unique universe, to a world that is not only comical but also gentle and replete with legend, home to a panoply of characters we're not likely to soon forget!

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A young woman forms her own idea of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend's mother during a thunderstorm. A naive bride returns to her beloved Ontario farm country and, after an encounter with a young female beekeeper, suddenly sees her husband in a sobering new light. Under pretences, a rural doctor returns for her childhood friend, but finds the women in her new life have only a very specific use for her. A middle-aged woman facing the devastating end of a friendship as well as her last chance at childbirth, flees North only to be confronted with the complexities of life in the Yukon. The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigourously seeking equipoise.

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A poet who skillfully manages lines both long and short to create narratives and lyric diction as she composes universes of elegance, raw sorrows, and the joys of human existence. 'Zhao Si is a poet of the infinite. She perceives enormous questions - the structure of the universe, the way in which time expands and contracts, and the realms of quantum physics and Hawking cosmos - in the same breath as she watches a beggar outside a subway station, a woman riding a bicycle through rain, or a homeless man with skin maladies. A keen observer of what exists right before her eyes, Zhao Si is constantly reminding her reader that the macrocosm exists in the microcosm, that what is visible in the finite is also to be perceived in the infinite if we are willing to open our eyes.' - from Bruce Meyer's Introduction.

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Cracker Jacks for Misfits is the Millenial story of four people who find themselves caught in the crosshairs of modern-day chaos as they discover independence, strength, and the power to love.In a series of interconnected short stories, Christine Ottoni tells the tale of a highly sensitive caregiver, Naomi, and her relationship with her reclusive, artistic mother, Joanne.From a whirlwind romance with a manic bartender named Marce, to an intense friendship with an ineffectual alcoholic named Jake, Naomi's search for intimacy and home is marked by urban claustrophobia and loneliness. The characters of Cracker Jacks for Misfits are hungry for human connection. They look for it online, in the unfamiliar bedrooms of Toronto, and in hushed conversations with strangers. Their stories are real – so real that we can all identify with their struggle. A portrait of millennial discontent and overconnectedness, Cracker Jacks for Misfits is about the moment when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. These stories are about the strange, intimate worlds we share with others, in dive bars, on road trips, and on the curb outside house parties. Ottoni presents a distinctive look at the struggle of a generation, and asks if we can every truly realise ourselves through our ability or inability to break free.This work of contemporary insight illuminates what is at the core of today's society: how important it is to understand and respect the sensibilities, goodness, strengths and frailties of those who we call friends, family, and the other. Cracker Jacks for Misfits is a moving and engaging narrative of a young person who finds their independence, strength, and power to love.

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Contributors to this collection include: Leanne Milech (Emerging winner: $10,000), Edward Brown (Any Point split winner: $2,500), Priscila Uppal (Any Point split winner: $2,500), Andrea Bradley, William John Wither, Mark Paterson, Christine Miscione, Martha Batiz, Bruce Meyer, Cara Marks, and Lorna Crozier.

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Slavko Mihalic (1928-2007) is one of the giants in Croatian literature of the second half of the 20th century. He was an anthologist, publisher, editor, critic, writer for children, authored over twenty books of poetry, and established several literary journals and the literary review Most (Bridge), which brought Croatian literature to international readers. Bach and Mozart inspired him and the musicality of these masters he applied to the word. Translated into major world languages, Slavko Mihalic is a recipient of numerous literary awards, among them Tin Ujevic, City of Zagreb, Matica Hrvatska, Miroslav Krleža, Goranov Vjenac, Vladimir Nazor and others. The poems in this edition are taken from his last three publications: Sabrane pjesme (Collected Poems), 1998; Akordeon (Accordion), 2000; and Mocvara (Marsh), 2004.

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The annual $15,000 Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction competition is open to all Canadian writers, with two prizes awarded: $10,000 for the best story by an emerging writer, and $5,000 for the best story by a writer at any point of her/his career. The CVC Anthology series features each year’s finalists, and is dedicated to the memory of Carter V. Cooper.From writer, artist and philanthropist, Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication: "I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper's brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world. Though I, and those who loved Carter, still hear his voice in our heads and in our hearts, my son's voice was silenced long ago. I hope this prize helps other writers find their voice, and through inclusion in the annual anthology helps them touch others' lives with the mystery and magic of the written word.

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This unique look at learned and acquired cultures explores the power and weaknesses of society, especially as it applies to those of Italian heritage. A strong argument is made for ethnic, cultural, and political independence; the importance of failure in relation to culture is also stressed.

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The goal is not to stay alive, but to stay human. —George Orwell, 1984 These stories draw us into the intimacy of what makes us human. Some are marked by war, social instability, totalitarianism, while others are peaceful and reassuring, but each emphasizes that great social movements call out for improvements to the common good, for true democracy without violence and with justice, for all citizens, including those yet to be born. Aude felt the protection of our Earth was urgent and vital, and certainly as is true today, before any future can be radiant, there is an enormous amount of work to do. Fragments of Place asks all of us to be aware of the new pages of global history as they are written, as we explore our ongoing human dilemmas.

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This collection of poetry explores interrelatedness, the intellectual and the ubiquitous with lyrical vision. There are wonderful moments in every poem, expressions of morphogenesis, as explored through the visions of homeless people as visiting preachers, the person as uncomfortable traveller, the various voices that speak to us through history and myth, hallucinating street people singing to vegetables, a plane crash at an air show, and a recounting of the end of the medieval Cathar and Albigensian crusades. These are just a few of the topics the author encounters with remarkable wit and ingenuity.

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Snake City takes the reader into an imaginary kingdom in the waterways of Florida, inhabited by macho gator-killers and feral pigs with murderous tusks for goring two-legged predators. At the center of this hallucinatory fable are Cottonmouth, a viper with a penchant for salty language, and his long-suffering roommate Freddie, a retired Canadian Snowbird who has stupidly purchased swamp acreage from a disreputable land developer to build his dream cabin.When both Freddie and Cottonmouth fall in love with Hilda, a shape-shifting swamp woman, a nasty ménage à trois develops. Into the grittier picture enters a religious zealot, nicknamed "Yessie" by the locals, and his stalker Handsome Harry, a ruthless alpha-gator who wants to make a fast food snack of him. Welcome to Snake City, a devouring adventure in pure evil, blood-curdling terror, and exotic dining.

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From Toronto’s poet laureate (2012–15) comes a new book that is a tour de force in confessional verse. This autobiographical sequence in 980 lines contains 70 stanzas of “skeletal sonnets” composed, astonishingly, in one day and one evening. Traverse is a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses, a great burst of imaginative energy and aesthetic reflection that celebrates a 30-year period of Clarke’s writing poetry.

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Bringing together an ensemble of Canada's best-known, mid-career, and emerging writers, including Margaret Atwood, Austin Clarke, Leon Rooke, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, Katherine Govier, Robertson Davies, Steven Hayward, and Barbara Gowdy, this anthology stands as the perfect gateway to discovering the city of Toronto. With a diverse range of content, the book focuses on the stories that have taken the city, in just six decades, from a narrow wryly praised as a city of churches to a brassy, gauche, imposing metropolis that is the fourth largest in North America. With an introduction from award-winning author Matt Shaw, this blends a cacophony of voices to encapsulate the vibrant city of Toronto.

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It was the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America moved to La Rive Gauche—the Left Bank of the Seine River—in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was reading proofs of A Farewell to Arms, and a few blocks away F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling with Tender Is the Night. As his first published book rose to fame in New York, Morley Callaghan arrived in Paris to share the felicities of literary life, not just with his two friends, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but also with fellow writers James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert McAlmon. Amid these tangled relations, some friendships flourished while others failed.This tragic and unforgettable story comes to vivid life in Callaghan's lucid, compassionate prose. Also included in this new edition are essays by Callaghan on Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and McAlmon, as well as the author's look back to those days in Paris and when he revisited 60 years later. The texts are followed by questions for discussion and related readings.

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Ignored by critics and readers of the time, these poems were written by Canadians who witnessed the horror of World War I first-hand, forming an anthology in which the forgotten experiences of a decade are finally remembered.

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Situated on a toxic leaf composting facility and the Portland International Airport is Dignity Village, the first city-recognized shantytown and a place the dejected, jobless, and impoverished outcasts of society call home. A powerful study of homelessness and the human spirit, this photo-ethnographic account follows the villagers for six months as they fight to overcome lives beleaguered with abuse, incarceration, addiction, mental health issues, and the stigma of poverty. The result is a stunning portraiture of the people who live there, explored through high-quality reporting, remarkable photography, and an honest visual representation of the flame of dignity that burns deep inside those in exile.

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Yael Gold is in love with her boss, Rabbi Judah Loeb, but when the rabbi’s wife is found murdered, Yael goes from love-addled naïf to panicky murder suspect overnight. Set in a desert suburb in the Southwest, this brilliant, tense murder mystery keeps readers constantly guessing “whodunit.” Was it Yael’s husband, an insecure Klezmer musician with a savant’s gift for musical trivia or one of Judah Loeb’s many mistresses? Or is the culprit the ethically-challenged senior rabbi whose “open marriage” scandal rocks his desert community—or is it the mysterious former mafia hitman known only as “The Scumbag?” With humour and suspense it follows Yael through the shocking murder as her troubled past—a philandering rabbi father, her Cuban gangster relatives, and scarring childhood abuse—provides scope to her difficult but triumphant journey to becoming a spiritual leader.

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Illustrating the multifaceted art of screenwriting, this guide expertly navigates its vital aspects—dramatic structure, the creation of character, and story development. The nature of the writer’s role in the film and television industry—both in Hollywood and in Canada—is explored, and the art of collaboration and the practicalities of writing for commercial production are examined in detail. Chapters cover classic three-act structure and its multi-character variation, story arc, adapting material from other forms of media, and creating dramatic movement in character. From portraying morality and establishing good and evil to fashioning the element of suspense, this sophisticated handbook also explores film as a business, considering agents, producers, and the arduous task of breaking into the industry.

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Illustrating solitude, memory, and the consolations of art, this new volume of poetry explores a variety of concepts—such as the pull of the natural world, the loss of a beloved parent, an inherited family garden, and the claims of the imagination. From a Bartók piano concerto and characters in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to celebrities such as Dolly Parton, the collection delves into these subjects and more with passionate detachment and surreal wit. A wide range of verse forms is utilized, including the villanelle, the elegy, and the contemporary sonnet.

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Presenting the most comprehensive selection of the famed Canadian writer’s verse, this anthology brings together all of Raymond Knister’s known poems—many of them in print for the first time—along with numerous letters and prose pieces. From pastoral compositions and alternate poetic versions to selected stories and essays, this collection demonstrates why the author was a truly influential personality in the modernist canon. The compilation contains works specifically chosen for their relevance to questions surrounding modernism, shedding light on a significant literary movement. A chronology, a list of anthologies featuring Knister, and an index of cited works are also included.

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Spanning from the 1800s to 2005, and featuring exceptional short stories from 28 of Canada's most prominent fiction writers, this unique anthology explores the nature of the human-dog bond through writing from both the nation's earliest storytellers—such as Ernest Thompson Seton, L. M. Montgomery, and Stephen Leacock—and a younger generation that includes Lynn Coady and Matt Shaw. Not simply sentimental tales about noble dogs doing heroic deeds, these stories represent the rich, complex, and mysterious bond between dogs and humans. Adventure and drama, heartfelt encounters and nostalgia, sharp-edged satire, and even fantasy make up the genres in this memorable collection, chosen by a critically acclaimed fiction writer who has sought essential reading that will appeal to dog lovers of every persuasion. There are city pets, country dogs, childhood companions, as well as a strange stone-dog statue, all ready to entertain and haunt readers, reminding them of their own beloved dogs, past and present. By way of Newfoundland to British Columbia—with a few stops in Europe, too—dogs of all breeds, shapes, and sizes inhabit these pages, showing what Canadians have sometimes made of their dogs, and what they've made of their people in return.

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Through a combination of amiable anecdotes, sharp-eyed historical reporting, and intense tangled memories of family life, this autobiography captures the legendary personality of television host Larry Zolf. Zolf could not be cajoled or cozened, and as this account demonstrates, he had a healthy distrust of those who didn’t drink, laugh, or lust. He regretted little and only ever wanted to keep on talking, and the sound of his voice runs through this book, telling a simple tale of great depth and subtlety. Revealing the phenom often known as “the Schnozz” to be the most personal of journalists and wittiest of astute observers, this history explores the “dialectical dancer” who played backroom crony to Robert Kennedy and taught Pierre Elliott Trudeau to be a stand-up comedian. Additional yarns include how Zolf befriended a KKK sheriff in Mississippi, the time he was beaten about the head with a cane by a one-legged cabinet minister, and how the memorable character sometimes wore a false nose and glasses to press conferences, only so he could take them off and declare, “Here is the nose who knows!”

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Throughout the Great Depression, Callaghan provided for himself and his family by writing short stories, which Ernest Hemingway compared to James Joyce. Of the more than 100 short stories that Morley Callaghan published, 21 appeared in The New Yorker over a period of 10 years. Those tales find new life in this reprint of a classic short story collection.

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Bursting with comedy and peculiarity, this collection of short stories explores the world of those living their Generation-X lives on the fringes of society. From a loner who uses mosh pits as a confessional to a cross-dresser prowling the aisles of the local supermarket, this work follows these characters as they navigate the universe in refreshing and unexpected ways.

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In Facets of Eros, David Sobelman, an award-winning writer of documentaries, explores the early drawings of Canadian artist Claire Wilks, their presciently feminist visual vocabulary. He does so by looking at the drawings—so open in their sexuality, so puzzling in their vision of motherhood, so sensually affirming in their engagement with death in the Shoah camps—through the lens of that ancient figure Eros, as first discussed by Plato. This is a startling, original approach to a startling, original artist, the meta-portrait of a singular woman who expressed the world she saw around her with her hands.

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Paul-Émile Borduas had both successes and failures as he tried to express in artwork and words his vision of a generous, spontaneous, creative society. He was the catalyst for events that led to the writing of an important social and artistic manifesto, Refus global (Total Refusal, in translation with Exile Editions) published in 1948 by the movement known as Les automatistes. Jean-Philippe Warren shows us the reversals and contradictions that make up this cultural figure, renowned for both his art and his thought. How his early hopes and doubts fermented in the crucible that is the mind of a young man. And how his attempts to find a new voice reflect the changes of a society trying to come to terms with a troubling and elusive modernity. Ultimately, Warren looks to understand the path that led Borduas to adopt a pictorial approach that was a clean break with the academicism of his time. He studies a man who broke early with the Catholic religion of his childhood, and who tried to replace it with a radically different ethic. At the same time, he suggests that Borduas came from an ambiance of Catholic intellectuals and artists who shared many of his progressive views and were also critical of the church's attitude to society and art. This is a remarkable portrait of one of our greatest artists and intellectuals, and shines a new light on a crucial turning point in the history of Québec and Canada.

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Vladimir Azarov was a child of the Soviet Kazakhstan steppes. When his mother discovered that he had a slight curvature of the spine, with her own loving humor she nicknamed him Richie, after Richard III, the 14th century English king, himself crooked, made famous as a monster by Shakespeare.At the same time Azarov suffered a vision-altering wound to his eye that transformed the way he perceived the world, both real and imagined. The wound eventually healed and, as he grew up feeling a wry kinship to the king, his bent eye became that of a visionary, of an artist who was a convention-breaking architect, and finally as a poet, not writing in Russian, but in the King's English. When, not long ago, the actual bones of Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester town, Azarov - now in his 80s living in Toronto, and remembering his kinship by name - envisioned the archeological dig and re-interment of the bones, and he became one in his mind with the reputation-renovated and redeemed king. He became, at last, Richie-Richard III, being sung to on a rainy day, over a new grave, by medieval knights.

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Selected by translator Dasha C. Nisula, this unique volume traces the development of modern free verse that extends from Croatia on the Adriatic to Russia in the East. Included are early pieces from the West to East Slavic belt, with the majority of the works focusing on the Russian Whitmanist Vladimir Burich, and the contemporary master of free verse in Russia, Vyacheslav Kupriyanov. A volume that captures feeling, essence, rhythm, and depth through superb translations.

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Born to be an outsider because of a rare genetic disorder, Kallmann syndrome, Brian Brett lived an androgynous childhood of abuse and sexual harassment. In his teen years he slid into the waterfall of poetry, becoming an auto-didactic polymath, writing - as he says - 'sideways' to the academic poetry of his times.Though raised into manhood in the back of a bootlegger's truck, Brett, as the hometown outsider, took on the outside world, delving into ancient alchemical mysteries, the poètes maudit of Jean-Arthur Rimbaud's days, the rhythms of various tribal cultures, the talking blues, the rhapsodic illuminations of jazz, all the while gathering field notes from nights around camp fires.To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a collection of poems written over the past twenty years, a collection that speaks with a child's open directness, in fierce ironies, a sometimes bent logic, a justifiable fear of his body, of loves won and lost, and the hallelujahs of a man standing on the lip of the grave. Brett has a unique spirit, a unique musical voice.

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For some six decades Barry Callaghan has been a singular presence in Canada. His distinctive literary style, tone and temperament reveal him to be an inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman. Always attuned to history and in covert search of adventure, he is also a public scholar, unflinching before the harsh complexities of our time. Raise You on the River is the fourth volume of essays from Canada's Man of Letters.

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2018 marks the tenth anniversary of an International Congress that gathered in Ghent to celebrate and discuss the work of Etty Hillesum, a woman who died in Auschwitz, whose diaries and letters have been translated into 67 languages. She is unquestionably one of the most singular voices from the Holocaust. But most in our country have never heard of her. So, who was Etty Hillesum? She was a Dutch Jew who died at the age of 29, leaving behind deeply moving, intellectually profound diaries and letters written during the last two years of her life under Nazi occupation. We only have these works because she threw them from a train on her way to the death camp. This volume is their visionary responses to Etty Hillesum.

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From writer, artist and philanthropist, Gloria Vanderbilt, who sponsors one of the largest literary prizes in Canada, and who supports this unique Canadians-only short fiction publication. "I am proud and thrilled that all these wonderful writers are presented in the CVC Anthology. Carter, my son, Anderson Cooper's brother, was just 23 when he died in 1988. He was a promising editor, writer, and, from the time he was a small child, a voracious reader. Carter came from a family of storytellers, and stories were a guide which helped him discover the world.

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Hugh Graham captures the passage of years, the progression of accumulation and recurrence, the present as dammed up history. Without warning, a world on the road to epiphany. And that world, threatened with disaster. Figures emerge, often from twilight. Children who do not fear death, travelers doomed to inertia, concupiscent women, bloody-minded intellectuals, haunted drunks, decaying diplomats, and Death as the man in the attic room. In the end, the gaze of a child become a man. Eleven stories of clarity and dark empathy.

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Extra Illicit Sonnets chronicles a love affair between a man and a woman of different complexions, cultures, continents, and generations, Sonia Fuentes of Andorra and Luca Xifona of Canada. She is Spanish in heritage; and he is Maltese. She is a Boomer and he is of Generation Y-Not. The poetry consists mainly of unrhymed – or blank – sonnets. It is transcendent and dangerous verse because it addresses humanity's most complex and volatile passion.

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The best of today's Canadian short fiction is showcased in this fourth annual volume of the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology series, which features the 12 stories short-listed—among them winners Jason Timermanis and Hugh Graham—for the 2014 $15,000 Vanderbilt/Exile Short Fiction Competition.The book contains contemporary writing that reflects a diversity in emerging and established Canadian writers, including Gregory Betts, K'ari Fisher, Matthew R. Loney, Helen Marshall, George McWhirter, Susan P. Redmayne, Linda Rogers, Leon Rooke, Madelaine Sonik, Erin Soros. Following the stories are biographies of each contributor.

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The Witherspoon family, descendants of New England Puritans involved in the 17th-century witchcraft trials, have inherited an unspoken secret that binds them to each other and to their ancient hilltop house in Madawaska Valley where the lives of four generations of women named Sibyl have unfolded. The story centers on the youngest Sibyl who, vowing to change her fate, flees to the city. Three years later she is forced to return to look for her missing grandmother.Alone in her birthplace, history superimposes itself on reality as she is pulled into the darkness of her ancestral past. But with the resilience of her Puritan forefathers, Sibyl confronts her family secrets, emerging with a clarity that culminates in the novel’s startling climax. The Crying Out is a daring first novel that draws the reader into its haunted world through the power of language and imagery. The highly charged, voice-driven narrative weaves back and forth between the 17th and 20th centuries, integrating past and present, love and betrayal, madness and sanity. By exploring the history of one family, Diane Keating speaks to the eternal question of what makes us who we are.

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Forty years after Pablo Neruda’s death, this compilation of his sonnets, unlike previous translations, captures the true spirit and verbal dexterity of his lesser-known genre. Pablo Neruda is still one of the most widely read, influential and beloved 20th-century poets. He was a Nobel Laureate, famous for his politically engaged lyrics, who also wrote these bold and sensual sonnets.In this new edition, the poems are followed by three essays on reading Neruda and his poetic effect by the notable poets and translators A. F. Moritz, Beatriz Hausner, and Toronto’s Poet Laureate (2012–2015) George Elliott Clarke, as well as a new afterword by the translator, questions for discussion, and recommended readings.

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A wonderful look at Soviet-era life as witnessed from the edge of the empire, this book is comprised of letters, poems, and prose pieces that together create a narrative. Through an entirely original form, Vladimir Azarov, who trained to be an architect in Moscow during Stalin's Iron Curtain years, begins with a simple exploratory exchange of letters between him and a faceless bureaucrat during his days overseeing the design and construction of the Soviet Embassy in the isolated republic of Mongolia. What follows is an unfolding sequence that finds Azarov meeting a remarkable Mongolian woman and later discovering the memoirs of one of Russia's greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, eventually revealing an unlikely love story between the Mongolian woman and Akhmatova's son. This enthralling account serves as both a cultural study and an exploration of the human condition.

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In this collection, award-winning author Austin Clarke has caught, in his characters, a sweet longing for youth and an anxiety-stricken rage at old age; an immigrant’s longing for a placid, lost home and his lust for a new high-speed motorcar life; and an intellectual’s sense of empowerment by black history even as he watches what little he knows about such history engulf him. These are intense and private lives made public by the force of their individual voices, voices that may be rambunctious and fractious but that are, nonetheless, elegant in their intent and humor and their acceptance that is never acquiescence. The volume also includes a prose portrait of Austin Clarke by acclaimed author Barry Callaghan.

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A tribute to the architects and visionaries who have had a hand in shaping Vladamir Azarov's inner landscape, this book of poetry celebrates that which holds the world together. From Van Gogh and Gauguin's tempestuous relationship in Arles to the dichotomies of modern-day Tokyo where the bustle of a giant metropolis is set against the Zen calm of monks and cathedral builders, the worlds of architecture and poetry are united in this collection.

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Subversive, edgy, and wildly entertaining, this short story collection is a unique encounter with fiction in Leon Rooke’s characteristic style as he peels back the skin of social convention and embraces the chaos of life with characters and themes as unpredictable as an assassin who murders the words in your memory; Egi Balducchi who is either a recording angel or a mad old man with a wheelbarrow; Eli's daughter, Frannie, who may just be a gentle two-bit hooker, or the Virgin herself; and is that really God, shrugging off insults from Isaac Babel and Guy de Maupassant? Then there is Lap the Dog who escapes gunshot and poison, and heads cross-country to find the human survivors; a glimpse into the life of Joyce Carol Oates; the philosopher Heidegger in a fight with Hannah Arendt; the Indian Chief who is denied his professorship at Yale when he turns up for the ceremony with a black princess on his arm; and more... Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow is an evocative short story collection that is wild with laughter, confronting pathos, rage and humour in ways that only Rooke’s writing could approach.

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In exploring the topic of health, this collection of poetry tackles a crucial aspect of our lives—but one that is rarely a subject of contemporary art. Playful, satirical, surreal, yet unflinchingly humane, the poems introduce men with wands to patrol their neighborhoods, past selves smuggling themselves aboard airplanes, and unhappy people trying their luck on a psychological wheel of blame.

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Combining romance with the darker side of human nature, this novel opens with the hanging of an ex-World War I soldier for involuntary murder. The element of violence blends with a love story involving the late soldier's sister, who seeks to possess the life of her brother's closest friend, John Hughes. Hughes then finds himself drawn into the circle affected by the hanging, contemplating murdering the sister himself. Capturing the terror of a war abroad as it penetrates the tranquility of a small town, this tale illustrates how a man's death can haunt those who endure his execution.

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From movie buffs and film students to anyone who enjoys true-crime stories or is interested in U.S. politics, this companion to a critically acclaimed biopic offers a rare glimpse into the creative process of cinema. A mix of Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, and Oliver Stone’s W, George Hickenlooper's Casino Jack explores the complex figure at the center of the biggest scandal to hit Washington after Watergate—Jack Abramoff, a political operative who worked the back alleys of Republican administrations around the globe from Nicaragua to Angola. The screenplay begins with Abramoff’s arrest by the FBI in Los Angeles in 2005 and the Mafia-style murder of the Florida casino owner Gus Boulis, then goes back in time to George Bush’s inauguration in 2000, which Abramoff celebrates with the powerful House Leader, Tom DeLay. From there Abramoff proceeds to gain a multimillion-dollar fortune lobbying on behalf of dodgy Asian sweatshop owners and gullible Indian casino proprietors—all the while wining and dining the big players in Washington. This illustrated companion to the film features the complete screenplay in script form, a foreword by the film’s writer Norman Snider, an introduction and photo diary by the film’s director George Hickenlooper, 10 storyboards, an afterword by film critic F. X. Feeney, and more than 50 film stills interspersed throughout the text.

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From the streets of modern Israel to the barrooms of Brooklyn to a suburban New England synagogue, the characters in these 10 stories search for love and acceptance in a world scarred by loss and loneliness. In “The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim,” an Iraq war veteran sees a vision of the Virgin Mary on the eve of the Jewish high holidays. In “My Darling Sweetheart Baby,” a working-class drunk waits on his stoop for his disability check and the courage to proclaim his love to a local prostitute. And in the title story “There Is No Other,” a rage-filled Jewish boy, tormented by his African lineage, arrives at a school Purim party dressed as the prophet Mohammed. Magical, erotic, spiritually penetrating and terrifyingly realistic, these provocative tales continue the storytelling tradition of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander.

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In a fun but wise way, this novel examines the advantages and pitfalls of fame, wealth, celebrity, female independence, the myth of safety, and the surreal nature of heritage pushing through upbringing. Johnny Major, a Sicilian-born magnate and creator of a network of restaurant-club-casinos across Europe and North America, dies and his will goes missing. Johnny’s death then forces his beloved daughter Elissa—a small-animal veterinarian in East Anglia—to confront various ex-wives, her own fierce mother, twin half-siblings, duplicitous lawyers, and a village full of Sicilians, including her father’s ghost and old women paid to scream at funerals. Her journey explores the sometimes funny, sometimes deadly serious qualities of life.

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Cinematic and literary, this collection of poems reflects on the film icons of the 20th century, offering a fresh look at legends such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Béla Lugosi. This work exhibits meticulous tone and language while delving into the opulent world of classic films. Of interest to fans of both contemporary poetry and classic Hollywood, this collection further explores the intersection between film and literature.

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In the first book, Winter in the Country, Azarov imagines the enormous presence of the great poet, Pushkin, and his influence on the development of the modern Russian psyche. In On “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy’s great character, Ivan Ilyich, who suffered and died from a terminal illness. In doing so, he enlarges his own personal experience by giving the death of a close friend a mythic dimension. In the third book, An Atomic Cake, he explores a Moscow world of wild contradictions, surreal social hysteria, and periods of massive malaise, all occurring under the cloud of atomic bomb testing. This is when he met a passionate computer specialist whose father had witnessed the American atomic testing at Bikini Atoll. Together, trying to make sense of such a world, they talked, imagining into existence the spirit of Rita Hayworth as she rode on the side of the bomb in her negligée.

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