Search results for ""Author Brian Doyle""

A family car trip across Canada brings Megan and her dad face to face with how sad and happy growing up can be.

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On the last day of summer, some years ago, a young college graduate moves to Chicago and rents a small apartment on the north side of the city, by the vast and muscular lake. This is the story of the five seasons he lives there, during which he meets gangsters, gamblers, policemen, a brave and garrulous bus driver, a cricket player, a librettist, his first girlfriend, a shy apartment manager, and many other riveting souls, not to mention a wise and personable dog of indeterminate breed. A love letter to Chicago, the Great American City, and a wry account of a young man's coming-of-age during the one summer in White Sox history when they had the best outfield in baseball, Brian Doyle's Chicago is a novel that will plunge you into a city you will never forget, and may well wish to visit for the rest of your days.

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Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica. Hounded by a mysterious enemy, reluctantly acquiring one new resident after another, Declan's lonely boat is eventually crammed with humour, argument, tension, and a resident herring gull.

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In this poignant and startlingly original book, Brian Doyle examines the heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn’t—and as a metaphor: the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. In a series of profoundly moving ruminations, Doyle considers the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart—from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to botany and Jesus. Weaving these strands together is the torment of Doyle’s own infant son’s heart surgery and the inspiring story of the young heart doctor who saved Liam’s life.First published in 2005, The Wet Engineis a book that will change how you feel and think about the mysterious, fragile human heart. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.

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Like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle’s stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it’s thinking…It’s the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

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Epiphanies & Elegies is a collection of delightful, accessible poems shot through with wonder, humor, faith, and Irish Catholic heritage. Brian Doyle has injected each piece with perception, insight, and compassion. These spiritual works contain the voice of a father, a husband, a man openly in love with his family, and proud of his heritage. Doyle illuminates seemingly ordinary, everyday events in poems that will immediately touch with the reader with their truth. These warm and insightful pieces are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant takes on the small wonders and inevitable tragedies of life. This book is a delightful addition to the world of spiritual and inspirational writing.

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Bestselling novelist Brian Doyle describes encounters with astounding beings of every sort and shape. In these short vignettes, Doyle explores the seethe of life on this startling planet, the astonishing variety of our riveting companions, and the joys available to us when we pause, see, savor, and celebrate the small things that are not small in the least.

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Albert Savelkoul, the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, has everything: power, money, magnificent horses, a family and a high-maintenance mistress. Despite problems with the mistress and his prostate he's convinced that he is invincible, his power untouchable. And so it goes until everyone seems to turn on him. Albert's wife, a member of the Belgian nobility, has set her sights on a title for her son. Opus Dei promises to help her if she transfers all her wealth to the secretive organisation. They stop at nothing in hounding Albert. A tale of blackmail and murder follows, leavened by Albert's interludes with his loving Polish maid, sadly soon deported by the frigid uber-Catholic wife.

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A playful, deeply moving book of spiritual essays -- for the spiritual and non-spiritual alike -- that excavate the rich seams of examined life and point to the miracles that surround us.

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What does it mean when people say "You can't compare apples and oranges"? Are comparisons across genres inherently invalid, or can they be insightful and illuminating? In this brilliant and provocative collection of essays, Dutch author Maarten Asscher maintains that comparisons can be the highest form of argument. Asscher makes his case with examples drawn from classical to contemporary history, art, and literature: Hamlet in Ithaca and Telemachus in Elsinore, the Mediterranean and the North Sea, writing from a prison cell and writing from a room at home, the "suicide" of Primo Levi and Japanese Kamikaze pilots, and so on. With graceful erudition and idiosyncratic wit, Asscher demonstrates how the comparative method can provide insight not only into two subjects simultaneously, but also into fundamental issues they may have in common.

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#1 SEATTLE TIMES BESTSELLER A playful and moving book of essays by a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times) who invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of the everyday

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