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Sophia Tolstoy: a biography
By Alexandra Popoff. 2010
As Leo Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. Drawing on newly available archival…
material, including Sophia's unpublished memoir, Alexandra Popoff presents a dramatically different and accurate portrait of the woman and the marriage. Some descriptions of sex. c2010.Mises au jeu: les sports féminins à Montréal, 1919-1961
By Élise Detellier. 2015
" À Montréal au début du siècle dernier, des bourgeoises anglo-protestantes montaient à bicyclette, en dépit des diktats et des…
réticences de certains médecins craignant que cette activité puisse mener à l'orgasme. Les risques qu'encouraient les nouvelles sportives étaient multiples: attiser les passions de la chair, nuire à leur vertu, s'éloigner du foyer ou, pire, devenir masculines. Pour les Canadiennes françaises, l'accès au sport se fit plus tard, à la faveur de l'ouverture en 1919 de la Palestre nationale rue Cherrier. La toute-puissante Église catholique, avec ses idées bien arrêtées sur la vocation d'épouse et de mère, est-elle seule responsable de ce délai? Le nationalisme canadien-français qui imprégnait la Palestre nationale aurait-il freiné l'essor des sports féminins? Et parallèlement, la non-mixité au YWCA aura-t-elle permis aux anglophones d'exceller? Si le sport est le lieu par excellence où se définit l'identité masculine, la participation des femmes ne s'est pas faite sans heurts. Ce livre révèle l'histoire méconnue et foisonnante des sports féminins à Montréal durant la première moitié du 20e siècle. En plus d'analyser les discours des médecins, des professeur.e.s d'éducation physique, des clercs de l'Église catholique et des sportives, Mises au jeu fait revivre les pratiques d'une autre époque et nous fait découvrir des figures marquantes dont Myrtle Cook et Cécile Grenier. " -- 4e de couv.Douze coups de théâtre: récits (Récits)
By Michel Tremblay. 1992
Douze récits d'enfance sur la découverte du cinéma. L'auteur ouvre la porte aux souvenirs et commence l'exploration à rebours des…
moments drôles et tragiques qui ont tracé sa ligne de vie et éveillé ses passions et ses états nationalistes. Une enfance à fleur de peau qui nous vaut douze coups au coeur! 1992.Lake of the prairies: a story of belonging
By Warren Cariou. 2002
Cariou's memoir on growing up in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, where he witnessed the discrimination, anger and fear directed at the…
town's Cree and Métis populations by the European settlers. While he has absorbed these prejudices as his own, he is forced to confront the politics of race as an adult. Then, he discovers secrets that his family had kept hidden for generations, secrets that would alter forever his sense of identity and belonging in Meadow Lake. Winner of the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize of the 2003 Writers' Trust of Canada Awards. 2002.The sleeping buddha: the story of Afghanistan through the eyes of one family
By Hamida Ghafour. 2007
In 2003, journalist Ghafour was sent to Afghanistan, which she had fled in 1981, to cover the country's reconstruction. In…
a place totally changed from the world her parents had described, she discovered a school which teaches women a new kind of independence, her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign, and the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization in the form of a giant sleeping Buddha. Some descriptions of violence. 2007.The notebooks: interviews and new fiction from contemporary authors
By Michelle Berry, Natalee Caple. 2002
An anthology of interviews and unpublished work from 17 of Canada's finest younger authors. The writers include Esta Spalding and…
Michael Winter to Derek McCormack, Steven Heighton, and Eden Robinson. Each writer has provided not only a manuscript page facsimile but also a previously unpublished piece of fiction or poetry along with their interview. Some descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. 2002.The complete short novels: Introduction by Richard Pevear (Everyman's Library Classics Series)
By Anton Chekhov, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. 2004
Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be…
called short novels, here brought together in one one volume for the first time, in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa VolokhonskyThe richer, the poorer: stories, sketches, and reminiscences
By Dorothy West. 1995
A collection of works by the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. West includes her first short story, The…
Typewriter, written when she was seventeen, along with later stories and essays recounting everyday experiences: needing money, relating to family members, and coping with death. 1995P.G. Wodehouse, a literary biography
By Benny Green. 1981
Reviews the life of the British comic novelist who is most noted for his 'schoolboy' writing style and as creator…
of Jeeves the Butler, Bertie Wooster, and Psmith. Considers the relationship between Wodehouse's works and his real life experiences as student, bank clerk, and screenwriter. 1981Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited (Vintage International Ser.)
By Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. 1989
Autobiographical sketches chronicle the author's upper-class childhood in Russia, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that forced his family into exile in…
Europe, and his 1940 move to the United States. First published in 1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence and revised in 1966. 1947L'autre fille (Les affranchis)
By Annie Ernaux. 2011
"Yvetot, un dimanche d'août 1950. Annie a dix ans, elle joue dehors, au soleil, sur le chemin caillouteux de la…
rue de l'Ecole. Sa mère sort de l'épicerie pour discuter avec une cliente, à quelques mètres d'elle. La conversation des deux femmes est parfaitement audible et les bribes d'une confidence inouïe se gravent à jamais dans la mémoire d'Annie. Avant sa naissance, ses parents avaient eu une autre fille. Elle est morte à l'âge de six ans de la diphtérie. Plus jamais Annie n'entendra un mot de la bouche de ses parents sur cette soeur inconnue. Elle ne leur posera jamais non plus une seule question. Mais même le silence contribue à forger un récit qui donne des contours à cette petite fille morte. Car forcément, elle joue un rôle dans l'identité de l'auteur. Les quelques mots, terribles, prononcés par la mère ; des photographies, une tombe, des objets, des murmures, un livret de famille : ainsi se construit, dans le réel et dans l'imaginaire, la fiction de cette " aînée " pour celle à qui l'on ne dit rien. Reste à savoir si la seconde fille, Annie, est autorisée à devenir ce qu'elle devient par la mort de la première..." -- 4e de couvLe dernier Américain
By Elizabeth Gilbert. 2009
« Depuis l'âge de 17 ans, Eustace Conway renonce au confort et rejette la vie en société, le progrès et…
le matérialisme, pour vivre dans les bois. Cela fait donc plus de vingt ans qu'il habite dans un tipi, frotte du bois pour faire du feu et chasse pour se nourrir et se vêtir. Charmant, charismatique, heureux, irritant et plein de contradictions, il cherche à convertir les autres à son mode de vie. » -- 4e de couvLe mystère Villeneuve (Roman)
By Jean Beaunoyer. 2000
Presents Wright's complete autobiography for the first time, combining his childhood in the South (Black Boy) with his life as…
an adult in the North (American Hunger). Also contains his 1953 novel (The Outsider), a literary chronology, and extensive notes. Sequel to Richard Wright: Early Works (DB 41552, BR 10299). Violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sexLa nuit (Documents)
By Elie Wiesel. 1999
Ce que j'affirme, c'est que ce témoignage qui vient après tant d'autres et qui décrit une abomination dont nous pourrions…
croire que plus rien ne nous demeure inconnu, est cependant différent, singulier, unique... L'enfant qui nous raconte ici son histoire était un élu de Dieu. Il ne vivait, depuis l'éveil de sa conscience, que pour Dieu, nourri du Talmud, ambitieux d'être initié à la Kabbale, voué à l'Eternel. Avions-nous jamais pensé à cette conséquence d'une horreur moins visible, moins frappante que d'autres abominations, - la pire de toutes, pourtant, pour nous qui possédons la foi : la mort de Dieu dans cette âme d'enfant qui découvre d'un seul coup le mal absolu ?Tiff: A life of timothy findley
By Sherrill Grace. 2021
Timothy Findley (1930-2002) was one of Canada's foremost writers—an award-winning novelist, playwright, and short-story writer who began his career as…
an actor in London, England. Findley was instrumental in the development of Canadian literature and publishing in the 1970s and 80s . During those years, he became a vocal advocate for human rights and the anti-war movement. His writing and interviews reveal a man concerned with the state of the world, a man who believed in the importance of not giving in to despair, despite his constant struggle with depression. Findley believed in the power of imagination and creativity to save us. Tiff: A Life of Timothy Findley is the first full biography of this eminent Canadian writer. Sherrill Grace provides insight into Findley's life and struggles through an exploration of his private journals and his relationships with family, his beloved partner, Bill Whitehead, and his close friends, including Alec Guinness, William Hutt, and Margaret Laurence. Based on many interviews and exhaustive archival research, this biography explores Findley's life and work, the issues that consumed him, and his often profound depression over the evils of the twentieth-century. Shining through his darkness are Findley's generous humour, his unforgettable characters, and his hope for the future. These qualities inform canonic works like The Wars (1977), Famous Last Words (1981), Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), and The Piano Man's Daughter (1995)The Parable Book
By Per Olov Enquist, Deborah Bragan-Turner. 2013
"The love that dare not speak its name . . ." Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15, cutting across a…
garden, chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of. Can it never be spoken of?Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, has decided to "come out" - but in ways entirely novel and unexpected. He has written the book that smoldered unwritten within him his entire life. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write.This poignant memoir of love as a religious experience - as a modern form of the Resurrection - is also a deeply felt reflection on the transitoriness of friendship, the fraught nature of family relationships, and the importance of giving voice to what cannot be forgotten. A parable as hauntingly intense as any Bergman film.Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-TurnerThe Unknown Kerouac (LOA #283)
By Jack Kerouac, Todd Tietchen, Jean-Christophe Cloutier. 2016
In On the Road and other iconic works, Jack Kerouac created a quintessentially American voice and a revolutionary prose style.…
This remarkable gathering of previously unpublished writings reveals as never before the extraordinary literary journey that led to his phenomenal success—a journey with deep roots in the language and culture of Kerouac’s French Canadian childhood.Edited and published with unprecedented access to the Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the especially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac’s own partial translations.Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles, and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a brief stay in Denver—where he works on an early version of On the Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo—and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital, charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since Hemingway. This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his longtime friend and fellow Beat John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked for celebrity.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.Ursula K. Le Guin: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
By Ursula K. Le Guin, David Streitfeld. 2019
“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” —Ursula K. Le Guin…
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable East Coast publishing circles. The interviews collected here—spanning a remarkable forty years of productivity, and covering everything from her Berkeley childhood to Le Guin envisioning the end of capitalism—highlight that unique perspective, which conjured some of the most prescient and lasting books in modern literature.Once a Runner: A Novel
By John L. Parker Jr.. 1990
Originally self-published in 1978, Once a Runner captures the essence of competitive running—and of athletic competition in general—and has become…
one of the most beloved sports novels ever published.Inspired by the author’s experience as a collegiate champion, the story focuses on Quenton Cassidy, a competitive runner at fictional Southeastern University whose lifelong dream is to run a four-minute mile. He is less than a second away when the turmoil of the Vietnam War era intrudes into the staid recesses of his school’s athletic department. After he becomes involved in an athletes’ protest, Cassidy is suspended from his track team. Under the tutelage of his friend and mentor, Bruce Denton, a graduate student and former Olympic gold medalist, Cassidy gives up his scholarship, his girlfriend, and possibly his future to withdraw to a monastic retreat in the countryside and begin training for the race of his life against the greatest miler in history. A rare insider’s account of the incredibly intense lives of elite distance runners, Once a Runner is an inspiring, funny, and spot-on tale of one man’s quest to become a champion.