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Showing 1 - 20 of 42 items
By Rosemary Sullivan. 1995
Using the personal impressions of the poet's intimate friends, Rosemary Sullivan builds a composite portrait of Gwendolyn MacEwan, the Toronto…
poet who died in 1987 at the age of 46. The daughter of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, MacEwen's story is a painful one, yet the richness of her art and inner life redeemed the pain. Winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.By John Ayre. 1989
Northrop Frye authored three of the most influential books of literary criticism and his revolutionary theories established his international fame.…
In this biography, Ayre describes Frye's impoverished childhood and traces the progression of his work. Nominated for the City of Toronto and Trillium Awards.By Roger Duchêne. 1998
Molière n'a pas laissé de confidences. Pas une lettre, pas un mot. Il a près de quarante ans quand il…
commence à faire parler de lui. Sa vie et son oeuvre font scandale. On l'accuse de ruiner la religion, la famille, la morale. Et d'avoir épousé la fille de sa maîtresse, sa propre fille... Qui ne se priverait pas de le cocufier abondamment. Ses ennemis forgent sa légende noire, ses amis une légende dorée. Cette biographie les replace enfin dans leur contexte. En les prenant au sérieux, sans les tenir pour vraies, en les présentant au lecteur pour qu'il puisse juger à son tour. 1998.By Alberto Manguel. 2004
During the 1960s, Manguel, then a teenager, spent many evenings reading to Jorge Luis Borges, a giant of modern literature,…
because Borges had gradually become blind. As the author describes his visits to Borges in his dark, modest apartment, reading out loud and talking about books, we have a privileged look into the inner world of a literary legend, a window into the private life of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Winner of the Prix du Livre en Poitou-Charentes 2003.By Robert Calder. 1989
An examination of writer Maugham's homosexuality and unhappy marriage, his Victorian sense of propriety, his wanderlust, his verbal and financial…
generosity, and his turbulent relationship with his daughter. Winner of the 1989 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. 1989.By Peter Boardman, Joe Tasker. 1984
Recounts the endurance and determination of two British mountain climbers in making a forty-day ascent up the treacherous west wall…
of Changabang Mountain in the Indian Himalayas. Winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize. 1984.By Claire Martin. 1968
In the second part of her autobiography, the author describes her adolescence and early womanhood in her father's house, one…
of gloom and oppressive brutality. The attitudes of the times towards sex and women are bitterly attacked and ridiculed. Sequel to "In an iron glove" (DC00901). 1975, c1968. Uniform title: Dans un gant de fer, v. 2, La joue droite.By John Ralston Saul. 1995
Saul, a Canadian essayist and novelist, claims that 20th century ideologies have promoted truisms that undermine the acquisition of knowledge…
and reason and the quest for the public good. Instead, managers and technocrats are seen as gods, passive and conformist politics abound, and only salesmanship, style and fashion are seen as meaningful. Saul argues that the average citizen must rise above a smothering bureaucracy and today's mindless devotion to "corporatism" to pursue knowledge and active, publicly interested civic engagement. Winner of the 1996 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.By Norman Mailer. 1968
The story of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, skirmishes between armed guards and anti-war demonstrators, and the subsequent arrest…
of hundreds of people. The author describes his own experience as a demonstrator and also gives a historical account of the action. Winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. 1968.By Robert Lacey. 1971
Biography of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Follows his triumphs and disasters in the wars…
against Spain, an unsuccessful campaign in Ireland, his imprisonment and subsequent execution. 1971.By David Brin, Stephen W. Potts. 2017
A collection of short stories and essays examining the benefits and pitfalls of transparency in technology in a surveillance society.…
Includes pieces from, among others, Robert J. Sawyer, James Morrow, William Gibson, Jack McDevitt, Neal Stephenson, Ramez Naam, and Cat Rambo. Strong language. 2017By Tobias Wolff. 1989
By David Lubar. 2003
Eighth-grader Taylor and her twin brother, Ryan, are complete opposites. So when trouble-making Ryan discovers mysterious alien disks that enable…
him to become legends from the past--Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and others--Taylor tries to keep him out of trouble. For grades 5-8. 2003By Ryan Davison, Julia Vélez Ardaiz. 2014
Persuasión subliminal mientras el mundo se hundeFrank se gana la vida manipulando las opiniones de la gente en su trabajo…
de redactor creativo. Es contratado por su talento para ayudar a ganar las elecciones a un político que odia, ¿podrá revelarse su mente ante tantos hechos injustos? Su pareja y amor verdadero lo llama para reclamar su propia consciencia.Un futuro cercano, una mini novela sobre distopía y ciencia ficción:- Cambio climático y calentamiento global- Capitalismo- Consumismo- Persuasión subliminal e influencias, sobre todo en la publicidad- Cómo de fuerte es el hechizo de la publicidad y cómo influye en nuestros pensamientos- Contaminación del medio ambiente- Contaminación mental y emocional- La gran cantidad de envases y otros desechos que la sociedad tira- Campañas electorales en los mediosSi alguna vez te has sentido frustrado por el rechazo de la sociedad consumista hacia un estilo de vida menos materialista en beneficio del planeta, o si alguna vez te has sentido frustrado por esa sensación de no importa cuánto trabajes o cuánto dinero ganes nunca te siente feliz del todo, o si alguna vez te has sentido influenciado por la publicidad en contra de tu voluntad... te verás reflejado en Laberinto de Espejos.By J. T. Mahany, Antoine Volodine. 2015
"The interconnected works of Volodine--think Faulkner, but after an apocalypse--constitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."--Maria ClementiThat is…
what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature. . . . It was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies. This fight was now confined solely to Bassmann's lips.Like with Antoine Volodine's other works (Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers), Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers--those who practice "post-exoticism"--have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.With its explanations of several key "post-exoticist" terms that appear in Volodine's other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature.Antoine Volodine is the author of dozens of books under a few different pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. These novels--several of which are available in English--articulate a post-exoticist universe filled with secrets, revolutionary writers, and spiders.J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation Studies program and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.By Isaac Asimov. 1994
Arguably the greatest science fiction writer who ever lived, Isaac Asimov also possessed one of the most brilliant and original…
minds of our time. His accessible style and far-reaching interests in subjects ranging from science to humor to history earned him the nickname "the Great Explainer. "I. Asimovis his personal story--vivid, open, and honest--as only Asimov himself could tell it. Here is the story of the paradoxical genius who wrote of travel to the stars yet refused to fly in airplanes; who imagined alien universes and vast galactic civilizations while staying home to write; who compulsively authored more than 470 books yet still found the time to share his ideas with some of the great minds of our century. Here are his wide-ranging thoughts and sharp-eyed observations on everything from religion to politics, love and divorce, friendship and Hollywood, fame and mortality. Here, too, is a riveting behind-the-scenes look at the varied personalities--Campbell, Ellison, Heinlein, Clarke, del Rey, Silverberg, and others--who along with Asimov helped shape science fiction. As unique and irrepressible as the man himself,I. Asimov is the candid memoir of an incomparable talent who entertained readers for nearly half a century and whose work will surely endure into the future he so vividly envisioned.By Jad Smith. 2012
Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934-1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction…
authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. In this first intensive review of Brunner's life and works, Jad Smith carefully demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, Smith approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including Brunner's uneasy association with the "New Wave" of science fiction in the 1960s and '70s. This landmark study shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction and between hard and soft science fiction and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.By Walidah Imarisha, Adrienne Maree Brown. 2016
Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision,…
and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres-sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism-but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.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.Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to…
the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from "The Horror on the Links” (1925) to "The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.