Search results for ""Author Olive Senior""

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The Pain Tree is Olive Senior at her very best, unforgettable short stories set in Jamaica and Canada, now available in this beautiful UK and Caribbean edition from Peepal Tree Press.Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is — along with her characteristic “gossipy voice” — reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (“The Goodness of my Heart”), a bargain with the Devil (“Boxed-in”), a Cinderella story (“The Country Cousin”), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (“Flying”) and a narrator’s belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (“The Pain Tree”). “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

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Longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.

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Relates Marguerite Long's working and personal association with Gabriel Faure. This book uses musical examples to discuss the interpretation of many of Faure's compositions.

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