Search results for ""Author Barry Callaghan""

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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A periodic writing about some of the most complex of ideas and people, rendered in prose.

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Short story collection

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This memoir is a book about story tellers.

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Short story collection

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A collection of perfectly-wrought stories peopled with flawed characters striving to understand themselves and the world around them.

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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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Callaghan's writing is wide ranging but often takes on the perspective of a marginalized individual's view of the human experience. These tales are told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, Holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the "ordinary"—all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that "happiness is overrated." The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humour, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty.

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Barry Callaghan and Joe Rosenblatt, poets of perspicacity, pizzazz, and probity, have been combative, ecstatic compadres for over 40 years, with Callaghan donning an array of chapeaus, the man of belles lettres and hog flaneur-on-the-hoof from Smooth City, while Rosenblatt decades ago declared his unconditional allegiance to the buzzzers, chirpers, and purrers of the natural world, to remain at peace by his pond, aloof from the human horde. This most unlikely pair are conjoined by their shared dedication to the Word, to those rare moments of ascendent insight that are contained in bedrock language, to disputation about all matters of gravity and gullibility, and to the sharing of extraordinary paintings and ink drawings come from their nether surreal and noumenal worlds. Hoggwash, a convergence by epistle, is a tribute not just to their enduring friendship but to the life of the imagination itself. There is no record of correspondence like this, anywhere in the world.

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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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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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