Search results for ""author grant buday""

A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, 'White Lung' is a sardonic portrait of B.C.'s racial conflicts and chaotic economy. Buday's writing is lean and crisp, thoroughly engaging, and incisive." - Quill & Quire "This is Vancouver novelist Grant Buday's best book yet." - Broken Pencil Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

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After ten years the Trojan War is at a deadlock. Both sides are exhausted, and Odysseus, cleverest of men, wants more than anything to return to Ithaka and his wife and son and orange grove. He aches for home, but not without a certain fear that he will return a stranger to the son he hasn't seen in ten years. When Agamemnon, King of the Greeks, asks Odysseus to devise a scheme to settle the conflict once and for all, Odysseus comes up with the idea of the great horse. No Trojan, he thinks, can resist a magnificent horse. Yet many think the idea mad. The comic and iconoclastic Odysseus will have more than his ingenuity tested before he can set sail for home. This deeply imagined and exquisitely written novel details the last days of the Trojan War. Told from Odysseus' perspective, it fleshes out the myth and mystery of one of the greatest stories in the Western canon.

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Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal. Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived the Holodomor, Stalin's systematic starving of the Ukraine in the 1930s during which two million people died. Cyril's mother carries the scars and memories of a past she can't let go of; she mourns the early death of her husband and feels responsible for the malnourished, brittle bones of her eldest son, Paul. Cyril is a mystery to her: he wants to be an artist he draws incessantly and talks about going to art school. He draws his late-father's tools saws, drills, hammers, wrenches, everything. When Cyril produces a series of large commemorative "Stalin stamps" his mother questions her son's insensitivity; when an act of impassioned violence erupts in the house, it is Cyril's sanity that is called into question. The Delusionist is a darkly comic novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history. Praise for Grant Buday: "Buday's genius is that of the storyteller." The Vancouver Sun "mordantly funny" The National Post "a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of unforgettable characters" Quill & Quire (on White Lung)

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Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction. Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althusser, who escaped prosecution for strangling his wife in France on an insanity plea. Althusser is heading to a Saskatchewan hospital for LSD therapy. Pursuing them is Jean Claude Piche, a veteran of the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, contracted to execute Althusser for the unpunished murder. The 1950s were Greenberg's decade. Yet by 1962, everywhere Greenberg looks he is bedevilled by Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, just as everywhere Althusser looks he sees capitalist decay. Jean Claude catches Greenberg and Althusser at Niagara Falls. The enigmatic arch patriot Swen catches all three in North Dakota. Convinced that they are communist subversives, Swen imprisons and interrogates them even as, hour by hour, minute by minute, Khrushchev and Kennedy threaten to launch World War III. An absurdist romp, Atomic Road charts its own course between historical veracity, fictional invention, and the unfettered egotism of two mad intellectuals.

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