Search results for ""Author Sheila Fischman""

Atonement is Sheila Fischman's translation of Gaetan Soucy's brilliant novel, originally published in French as L'Acquittement. Twenty years after leaving the tiny village of Saint Aldor, Louis Bapaume has come home to make amends. During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underway, he meets old villagers, forgotten neighbours, and characters who are either imagined or real. But there's only one person he seeks: the von Croft twin he taught to read music and to whom he wants to atone. Soucy creates a world where nothing is left to chance and the line between dream and reality is always shifting.

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Twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the peaceful shade of their family's orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys' grandparents, the war that plagues their country changes their lives forever. Blood must repay blood, and, in order to avenge their grandparents' deaths, one brother must offer the ultimate sacrifice. Years later, the surviving twin -- now a student actor in a wintry Montreal -- is given a role which forces him to confront the past. Tremblay, an actor and director himself, poses the difficult question: can art ever adequately address suffering? Both current and timeless, written with the sharp purity of desert poetry, The Orange Grove depicts the haunting inheritance of war and its aftermath.

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La Guess, Yes Sir! is a wedding, a funeral, and best of all, a full company of Carrier's joyful, blaspheming, vigorous characters.

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New York, at the end of the 1920s. Xavier X. Mortanse, a seventeen-year-old apprentice demolition man, who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary, falls into a hole -- the beginning of myriad bizarre humiliations he suffers, only to be shown mercy by a hairdresser named Peggy Sue who will later suffer a grotesque fate. When Xavier loses his job, he and his singing frog are hired to perform in a vaudeville show, where freakish and sordid acts attempt to outdo each other. Violence and ugliness blend cartoonishly with comedy and music as Gaetan Soucy dares us to look into the darkest sides of human experience. No one in this fascinating tableau is who he or she appears including Xavier himself, who is, as his mother says, too many people and no one.

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The A List edition of one of the major achievements in recent Quebec literature — Roch Carrier’s La Guerre trilogy is a vital, moving, and assured portrait of life in Quebec. This volume includes:La Guerre, Yes Sir! A surrealist fable set in rural Quebec during WWI. Canadian Literature greeted its first appearance in these terms: “It is the French-Canadian writer Roch Carrier who comes closest to the significance, power, and artistry of Faulkner at his best … He might well be able to do for French Canada what Faulkner did for the American South." Floralie, Where Are You? In the second installment, Carrier reaches back to the wedding night of the Corriveau parents, whom we first meet in La Guerre, Yes Sir!. Once again, a single night expands until it becomes a world in itself. But this time it is a very different concoction, mingling desire and guilt, nightmare and fantasy, as Anthymo drives Floralie back to his village through the forest. Is It the Sun, Philibert? In the final installment, Young Philibert hitchhikes down to Montreal to make his fortune, and meets a different world. As he scrambles from job to job, he discovers a new Quebec — urban, industrial, and dedicated finally to the death of the person. 
In this moving trilogy, Roch Carrier’s savage vision comes across with great urgency and Sheila Fischman’s fluid translations sing with vivacity and grace.

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An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013Romain was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. At 18, he leaves his family for a home in the forest, learning to live off the land rather than his family's wealth. Éléna flees a house of blood and mayhem, taking refuge in a monastery and later in the rustic village of Rivière-aux-Oies. One day, while walking in the woods, Éléna hears the melody of a clarinet and comes across Romain, who calls himself Starling and whom Éléna later renames Douglas, for the strongest and most spectacular of trees. Later a child named Rose is born. Fade to black. When the story takes up again, Douglas has returned to the forest, Rose is in the village under the care of others, and Éléna is gone. From these disparate threads, Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times. As the years pass, the story broadens to capture others in its elegant web — a doctor with a bruised heart, a pharmacist who may be a witch, and a teacher with dark secrets. Together they raise this child with the mysterious heritage, transforming this story into an ode to friendship and family, a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion. The Douglas Notebooks was originally published in French as Les carnets de Douglas. This edition was translated by Sheila Fischman.

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Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife addresses themes of destiny and the repercussions of our choices. Before she dies, actress Alma Joncas instructs her husband to bury her ashes where she was happiest. He decides that was their garden. But relatives, friends and Alma's colleagues disagree. After they tell him where they think she was happiest, not only is he no longer sure about the garden, he wonders if he truly knew the woman he was married to for twenty-four years.

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War takes no prisoners. It involves everyone - even children.Twin brothers, Amed and Aziz, live in the peaceful shade of their family's orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys' grandparents, they become pawns in their country's civil war. Blood demands more blood and, at the command of a local militant group, either Ahmed or Aziz must strap on a belt of explosives and make the ultimate sacrifice. Years later, the surviving twin works as an actor in wintry Montreal. A theatre director gives him a role that forces the young man to reconsider his decisions. Will Ahmed - or is it Aziz? - release himself from the past?

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The Hockey Sweater, the title story in this 20-story collection, has become an enduring classic: a Quebec boy and Habs fan is shipped a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. It encapsulates everything you need to understand French and English Canada, told with humour and love. This edition features a new introduction.

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Exploring contemporary life and the penetrating energy of youth, this novel follows Anna, an introspective, alienated teenager without hope. Anna and her friend Michelle have experienced what life today has to offer—they have experimented with drugs and sex and have taken dance and music lessons in an attempt to find some meaning in their existence—and yet they have rejected its premise and instead remain alone and empty. Chilling and often terrifying, this chronicle portrays two young women who are not bored but are instead without hope of finding peace or even living long enough to begin the search.

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The first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’ prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais’ masterful series won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais’ novel to life for English-speaking readers.A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past and an uncertain future, between the beauty of the world and the horrors of history.During her time here, Renata becomes tormented by thirst — for justice, for pleasure, for intoxication — while all around her, festivities are going on in joint celebration of the birth of baby Vincent and the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of three days and three nights a flock of characters assembles — an entire spectrum of humanity is depicted in the grip of doubt and suffering. In this swirling, baroque fresco, Marie-Claire Blais captures the essence of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.

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