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Shirley, goodness & mercy: a childhood memoir
By Chris Wyk. 2005
Despite van Wyk's later becoming involved in the anti-apartheid 'struggle', this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it…
is a delightful account of one boy's special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours - often decidedly quirky - who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak, dusty townships. In the book, the author creates a remarkable record of life in the Coloured community, at once both informative and vastly entertaining. 2005.Something in the blood: the untold story of Bram Stoker, the man who wrote Dracula
By David J Skal. 2016
Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead Count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Skal…
exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in splendidly gothic detail. 2016.Something to declare: Essays
By Julia Alvarez. 1998
Alvarez, the author of "How the Garcia girls lost their accents" and other works, reminisces about her childhood in the…
Dominican Republic and her family's escape to New York City. Also describes how she became an author and how to experience the writing life. 1998.Small beneath the sky: a prairie memoir
By Lorna Crozier. 2009
Poet Crozier vividly depicts her hometown of Swift Current, with its one main street, two high schools, and three beer…
parlours - where her father spent most of his evenings. She writes unflinchingly about the grief and shame caused by poverty and alcoholism, while at the heart of the book is her fierce love for her mother, Peggy. The narratives of daily life - sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking - are interspersed with prose poems. Some strong language. 2009.Sit how you want
By Robin Richardson. 2018
Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: "When I…
say I'm fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy." In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson's poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: "It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate." Winner of the 2019 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. 2018.Steal my rage: new native voices
By Joel T Maki. 1995
An anthology of poetry, short stories, and essays by aspiring Native writers from across the country. Topics range from spirituality,…
traditional values, and the recovery of aboriginal languages, to self-government, urban life, and healing. 1995.Starting from Ameliasburgh: the collected prose of Al Purdy
By Al Purdy, Sam Solecki. 1995
A collection of essays, anecdotes, travel pieces, and criticism by Canadian poet Al Purdy. The pieces are divided into essays…
on encountering the world through Canadian sensibilities, opinions on other writers like Charles Bukowski, Margaret Atwood, and Bliss Carman, and reviews of poets like bill bissett and Russian Anna Akhmatova. 1995.Sharp: the women who made an art of having an opinion
By Michelle Dean. 2018
Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet…
Malcolm. Their lives intertwine as they cut through the cultural and intellectual history of America in the twentieth century, arguing as fervently with each other as they did with the sexist attitudes of the men who often undervalued their work as critics and essayists. 2018.Shirley Jackson: a rather haunted life
By Ruth Franklin. 2016
Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the…
American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as 'The Haunting of Hill House' and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. Placing Jackson within an American gothic tradition of Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror" drawn from an era hostile to women. With its exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaged childhood and a troubled marriage, this is the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant. Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for best critical / biography book. 2016.Storyteller: the authorized biography of Roald Dahl
By Donald Sturrock. 2010
Biography of writer Roald Dahl (1916-1990), author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (DC00453). Chronicles Dahl's English boarding-school education; World…
War II service that involved aerial combat and espionage; and family tragedies, including the death of his daughter Olivia and his first wife Patricia Neal's stroke. 2010.South toward home: travels in Southern literature (Southern voices)
By Margaret Eby. 2015
A literary travelogue that ventures deep into the heart of classic Southern literature. From Mississippi (William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard…
Wright, Barry Hannah) to Alabama (Harper Lee, Truman Capote) to Georgia (Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews) and beyond, Eby--herself a Southerner--travels through the Deep South to the places that famous Southern authors lived in and wrote about, reveals how they took these places and the lives of their inhabitants and transmuted them into lasting literature. 2015.Stereoblind
By Emma Healey. 2018
In "Stereoblind", no single thing is ever perceived in just one way. Shot through with asymmetry and misconception, the prose…
poems in Emma Healey’s second collection describe a world that’s anxious and skewed, but still somehow familiar--where the past, present, and future overlap, facts are not always true, borders are not always solid, and events seem to write themselves into being. An on-again, off-again real estate sale nudges a quartet of millennial renters into an alternate universe of multiplying signs and wonders; an art show at Ontario Place may or may not be as strange and complex (or even as “real”) as described; the collusion of a hangover and a blizzard carry our narrator on a trancelike odyssey through Bed Bath & Beyond. Using a diverse range of subjects--from pharmaceutical research testing to Tinder--to form an inventory of ontological disturbance, Healey delves moments when the differences between things disappear, and life exceeds its limits. 2018.Stephen Leacock (Extraordinary Canadians)
By John Ralston Saul, Margaret MacMillan. 2009
Macmillan has great affection for Leacock's gentle wit and sharp-eyed insight. The renowned historian examines Leacock's life as a poor…
but ambitious student who rose to become an economist, celebrated academic, and, most importantly, the beloved humourist who taught Canadians to laugh at themselves. c2009.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.Starting out, 1920-1947
By Pierre Berton. 1987
Stay me, oh comfort me: journals and stories, 1933-1941
By M. F. K Fisher. 1993
Shortly before her death in 1992, Fisher decided to publish a memoir about the end of her first marriage and…
her brief, tragic second marriage. She wanted a record of how she felt at the time instead of a version reinterpreted by her older self. Fisher put together unpublished letters, short stories, and excerpts from journals of that period to tell her story. Sequel to "Long Ago in France" .1993.Stars come out within
By Jean Little. 1990
Renowned author Jean Little describes her childhood with a visual impairment, the early death of her father, the shock of…
losing her remaining sight to glaucoma, and her battle with depression. A talking computer and her guide dog, Zephyr, brought her independence and freedom. Sequel to "Little by Little".Song of Rita Joe: autobiography of Mi'kmaq poet
By Lynn Henry, Rita Joe. 1996
Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe reflects on the tumultuous events of her life. Raised in foster homes and educated in an…
Indian residential school, she endured prejudice, sexism, and poverty. She began to write poetry, and soon discovered the voice through which she could reclaim her Aboriginal heritage. 1996.Spiritus mundi: essays on literature, myth, and society
By Northrop Frye. 1976
This collection of essays reflects Frye's personal views and the experiences in his life which fostered them. The essays are…
divided into three sections: Contexts of literature; Mythological universe; and Four poets, which are studies of John Milton, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens.Song of Erne
By Robert Harbinson. 1987