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Stet: a memoir
By Diana Athill. 2001
For nearly five decades Diana Athill helped shape some of the finest books in modern literature. She edited (and nursed…
and coerced and coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language. The word 'stet' is an instruction on corrected proofs sent to a printer, meaning 'let the original stand'. This candid memoir writes 'stet' against the pleasures, intrigues and complexities of her life spent among authors and manuscripts. 2001.Somewhere towards the end: A Memoir
By Diana Athill. 2009
Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs. Now aged ninety, and freed from…
any inhibitions that even she may once have had, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. This is a lively narrative of events, lovers and friendships: the people and experiences that have taught her to regret very little, to resist despondency and to question the beliefs and customs of her own generation. 2009.Smart blonde: Dolly Parton
By Stephen Miller. 2008
Dolly Parton is the most famous person ever to have emerged from the American country music scene with her iconic…
cartoon image. This book includes interviews with family members, musicians and producers who have worked with her over the years. It includes a detailed assessment of her music, as a songwriter and singer over the last forty years. c2008.Stars between the sun and moon: one woman's life in North Korea and escape to freedom
By Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland. 2014
Born in the seventies in North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in…
the factories, and the family scraped by on government rations of rice and what little food they could grow in their small garden. For the nation, it was the beginning of a chaotic period. The country would face a decade-long famine resulting in more than a million dead. In this bleak landscape Jang dedicates herself to helping her parents and siblings survive. Eventually, she risks everything to flee her home country forever, determined to start a new life. This is her story. c2014.Stories about storytellers: publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and others
By Anthony Jenkins, Douglas Gibson. 2011
An autobiography that reviews the author’s accomplishments working - and playing - alongside some of Canada’s greatest writers. Relates the…
projects he brainstormed for writer Barry Broadfoot, how he convinced eventual Nobel Prize contender Alice Munro to keep writing short stories, his early morning phone call from a former Prime Minister, and his recollection of yanking a manuscript right out of Alistair MacLeod’s own reluctant hands, which ultimately garnered MacLeod one of the world’s most prestigious prizes for fiction. Provides an inside view of Canadian publishing that is rarely revealed. Some strong language. 2011.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.Steal away home: one woman's epic flight to freedom-- and her long road back to the South
By Karolyn Smardz Frost. 2017
Fifteen-year-old slave Cecelia Reynolds made her dangerous bid for freedom from the United States, across the Niagara River and into…
Canada. Escape meant that she would never see her mother or brother again. She would be cut off from the young mistress with whom she grew up, but who also owned her. Cecelia found a new life in Toronto’s vibrant African American expatriate community. Her rescuer became her husband, a courageous conductor on the Underground Railroad helping other freedom-seekers reach Canada. Widowed, she braved the Fugitive Slave Law to cross back into the United States, where she again found love, and followed her William into the battlefields of the Civil War. Finally, with a wounded husband and young children in tow, she returned to the Kentucky she had known as a child. But her home had changed: hooded Night Riders roamed the countryside with torches and nooses at the ready. When William disappeared, Cecelia relied on the support and affection of her former mistress - the Southern belle who had owned her as a child. Winner of the 2018 Speaker's Book Award. 2017.Something fierce: memoirs of a revolutionary daughter
By Carmen Aguirre. 2011
Covering the decade from 1979 to 1989, Aguirre takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's…
Chile. She captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the resistance movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality. Winner of Canada Reads 2012. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence. 2011.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.Sixtyfive roses: a sister's memoir
By Heather Summerhayes Cariou. 2006
At the age of four, Cariou's sister Pam was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, a terminal disease of the lungs and…
pancreas marked by severe coughing and malnutrition; unable to pronounce her condition, young Pam dubs it instead "Sixtyfive Roses." Written to fulfill a deathbed promise Cariou made to write "our" story, and a promise to her mother to tell the truth, the result is an honest and gritty description of a family dealing with chronic illness. Canada Reads 2012. 2006.Simple things: the story of a friendship
By Karen Lavut. 1999
Karen Lavut recounts her friendship with painter Christiane Pflug who killed herself at Easter, 1972. She celebrates the joy and…
memories left by her lost friend, and laments the fact that she chose to leave life so early on. 1999.Shania Twain: on my way
By Dallas Williams. 1997
Snowshoes & spotted dick: letters from a wilderness dweller
By Chris Czajkowski. 2003
The uplifting and often humourous story of one woman's life in the raw wilderness. The author describes her experiences as…
she builds a cabin in the wilderness and relates the complications of the "simple life" - how she breaks trails by snowshoe, encounters grizzly bears, builds a stone oven and learns to bake bread - and spotted dick. 2003.Still I rise: the persistence of phenomenal women
By Laurel Corona, Marlene Wagman-Geller. 2018
Still I Rise takes its title from a work by Maya Angelou, and it resonates with the same spirit of…
an unconquerable soul, a woman who is captain of her fate. This book profiles inspiring women who embody this strength of character. Each chapter outlines the fall and rise of great women heroes who smashed all obstacles, rather than let all obstacles smash them. 2018.At nine years old, Eugenie Clark developed an unexpected passion for sharks after a visit to the Battery Park Aquarium…
in New York City. At the time, sharks were seen as mindless killing machines, but Eugenie knew better and set out to prove it. Despite many obstacles in her path, Eugenie was able to study the creatures she loved so much. From her many discoveries to the shark-related myths she dispelled, Eugenie made wide scientific contributions that led to her being nicknamed Shark Lady. Winner of 2018 Forest of Reading The Blue Spruce Award. Grades K-3. 2017.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.Stalin's daughter: the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
By Rosemary Sullivan. 2015
Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin.…
Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy--the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, in 1967 Svetlana shocked the world by defecting to the United States. But she could not escape her father's legacy; her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Winner of the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the 2016 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize. Bestseller. 2015.