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Autumn Bird and the Runaway
By Melanie Florence, Richard Scrimger. 2022
Two kids from different worlds form an unexpected friendship.Cody’s home life is a messy, too-often terrifying story of neglect and…
abuse. Cody himself is a smart kid, a survivor with a wicked sense of humour that helps him see past his circumstances and begin to try to get himself out.Autumn is, quite literally, on the other side of the tracks from him. Her home life is loving and secure, and she is “in” with the popular girls at school, even if she has a secret life as a glasses-wearing, self-professed comic book nerd at home. And even if the pressure to fit in at school requires hours of time spent making herself look “perfect.”Returning home from a movie one evening, Autumn comes across Cody, face down in the laneway behind her house. All Cody knows is that he can’t take another beating from his father like the one he just narrowly escaped. He can’t go home, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go either. Autumn won’t turn her back on him, even if they never really were friends at school. She agrees to let him hide out in her dad’s art studio at night.Over the next couple of days of Autumn sneaking Cody food and bandages, his story comes out. And so does hers.Told in alternating narratives, Autumn Bird and the Runaway is a breathtaking collaboration by two of Canada’s finest writers of books for young readers. Infused with themes of identity, belonging and compassion, it’s a story that reminds us that we are all more than our circumstances, and we are all more connected than we think.A Bucket of Stars
By Suri Rosen. 2023
A story of two kids trying to save the world they know and heal the families they have.It’s the summer…
of 2003 and thirteen-year-old astronomer Noah Cooper has just moved to Queensport, a small town with a vast amateur sky full of stars. There he meets Tara Dhillon, a lonely girl and aspiring filmmaker. When the two team up to produce an astronomy movie and enter a film contest, they discover a secret plan to turn their rural hamlet into a huge subdivision.Noah and Tara must use their unique skills to identify the culprits who plan on paving over the historic county — and try to save the infinite beauty of the stars. As if that’s not enough to have at stake, Noah needs to win the prize money to buy a new telescope for his unemployed father — an ex-astronomer who’s almost given up on the stars, as well as life on earth.Touching on themes of activism, environmental anxiety and mental health, A Bucket of Stars will have readers cheering for Noah, a boy whose head is in the stars, and Tara, a girl who lives in a world of digital images — and their special bond that just might mend the world around them.RX
By Rachel Lindsay. 2018
A graphic memoir about the treatment of mental illness, treating mental illness as a commodity, and the often unavoidable choice…
between sanity and happiness.In her early twenties in New York City, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Rachel Lindsay takes a job in advertising in order to secure healthcare coverage for her treatment. But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an antidepressant drug. She is the audience of the work she's been pouring over and it highlights just how unhappy and trapped she feels, stuck in an endless cycle of treatment, insurance and medication. Overwhelmed by the stress of her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, she begins to destabilize and while in the midst of a crushing job search, her mania takes hold. Her altered mindset yields a simple solution: to quit her job and pursue life as an artist, an identity she had abandoned in exchange for medical treatment. When her parents intervene, she finds herself hospitalized against her will, and stripped of the control she felt she had finally reclaimed. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she struggles in the midst of doctors, nurses, patients and endless rules to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.Glass Grapes: and Other Stories
By Martha Ronk. 2008
Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha…
Ronk. Ronk's work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk's fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.The Clouds
By Juan Saer, Hilary Dobel. 2016
Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language --Ricardo Piglia What Saer presents marvelously is…
the experience of reality and the characters attempts to write their own narratives within its excess --BookforumIn modern-day Paris Pich n Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript--which might be fictional or could be a memoir--by Doctor Real a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum Their trip which ends in disaster and fire is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone--even the other patients--into sleeping with her Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer s typically gorgeous Proustian style The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile--a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers--as well as an examination of madness Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation The author of numerous novels and short-story collections including Scars and La Grande Saer was awarded Spain s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University She is the author of two manuscripts and in addition to Saer she has translated work by Carlos PintadoThe Dark
By Sergio Chejfec, Heather Cleary. 2000
Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, The Dark employs…
Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. The Dark is the most captivating example of Chejfec's unique narrative approach.Shadow Man
By Jeffrey Fleishman. 2012
Foreign correspondent James Ryan was there whenever the world changed: in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the former…
Soviet bloc. But now he can't remember these events; he can't recall anything long-term, except the summer of his fifteenth year following his mother's death. It was the summer his father told him to call him Kurt. The summer the mysterious and enchanting Vera burst into their lonely, quiet lives. The summer his own world opened, then irrevocably changed.James, at fifty-two, suffers from a severe case of early onset Alzheimer's. The novel unravels James's predicament through the clear glimpses he retains of that long ago summer, and through the desperate attempts of his wife and his nurse to bring him back to the present, if only for stolen moments. Each has her motives: his wife trying not to lose the man with whom she shared so much - wars, death, love, loss of a child, history. And his nurse, the half sister he never knew he had, needing James's adolescent memory to understand the biological father and mother she never met. Told from the perspective of a man betrayed by his own mind, Shadow Man is a novel of identity and suspense that travels across continents and deep into the pasts that make us each who we are. It explores the power of memory to heal and to mask, and of the limits of unconditional love. Set in Philly and the eastern shore of yesteryear, in the Middle East, and throughout Eastern Europe, Fleishman's trademark descriptive but spare lyricism shines. Shadow Man is a touching and haunting novel perhaps most similar to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though it is a work of fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.Maleficium
By David Homel, Fred A. Reed, Martine Desjardins. 2009
Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth century…
Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie dares to violate the sanctity of the confessional in this confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afflicted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men's individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.Baroque in its complexity, Kafka-like in its inexorable mechanics, Maleficium by turns astonishes, amuses, and beguiles. Then author Martine Desjardins's Vicar Savoie-as in any confession worth its communion wafer-saves the best (or worst) for last.Maleficium won the Prix Jacques Brossard and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award (French Fiction), the Prix des libraires du Québec, the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, and the Prix France-Québec.Mother to Mother
By Sindiwe Magona. 1998
Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who…
remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation's first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor's son. Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl's mother. The murderer's mother, Mandisi, writes about her life, the life of her child, and the colonized society that not only allowed, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid. The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence.I Was There the Night He Died
By Ray Robertson. 2014
"Ray Robertson is an irrepressible voice, with brass balls, and a heart of gold. I Was There the Night He…
Died is a hilarious, moving, insightful, and timely piece of modern realism, delightfully void of literary pretension. Here, at last, is a novel that rocks and rolls."-Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving"So," she says. "Who died tonight?"Sam Samson, meet Samantha. Sam's a novelist: his dad has Alzheimer's, his mother died of stroke, his wife was killed seventeen months ago in a car crash. Samantha, eighteen, is a cutter. She lives across the street from Sam's parents' house. Marijuana and loneliness spark an unlikely friendship, which Sam finds hard to navigate, especially as his dad's condition worsens and the money for his care suddenly vanishes. Yet somehow, between a record player and a park bench, through late-night conversations about the deaths of Sam's musical heroes, and ultimately through each other, Sam and Samantha learn to endure the things they fear most.Starring a 40-something writer who stumbles through the small town he thought he'd left behind forever, and a marooned teenager who wishes she were anywhere else, I Was There The Night He Died is a saucy, swaggering look at loss, love, and the redeeming power of music in the twenty-first century.Praise for Ray Robertson,A Women's National Book Association Great Group Reads Author, 2013Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize, 2011and the Trillium Prize, 2008 "Ray Robertson is the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American Letters."-Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners "Both playful and profound, laced with insight from music to history, politics to literature, high to low culture."-National Post "Robertson's art is as character-driven as Mordecai Richler's ... he wants us all to behave better and doesn't care who he angers along the way."-Globe and MailGood People
By David Lindsay-Abaire. 2011
"A lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives. . . . Mr. Lindsay-Abaire…
has shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves."--The New York Times With his latest play Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire returns to Manhattan Theatre Club where four of his previous works were produced, including his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole. The play premiered there in winter 2011 in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan (who also directed Rabbit Hole), and featuring Frances McDormand in the role of protagonist Margie Walsh. Good People is set in South Boston, the blue-collar neighborhood where Lindsay-Abaire himself grew up: Margie Walsh, let go from yet another job and facing eviction, decides to appeal to an old flame who has made good and left his Southie past behind. Lindsay-Abaire offers us both his "quiet three-dimensional depth" (Los Angeles Times) and his carefully observed humor in this exploration of life in America when you're on your last dollar. David Lindsay-Abaire is the author of Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo, A Devil Inside, Wonder of the World, and Rabbit Hole, in addition to the book for the musicals High Fidelity and Shrek. His plays have been produced throughout the United States and around the world.The Language of Silence
By Peggy Webb. 2014
Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this…
masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction.Peggy Webb won raves for her debut novel, The Tender Mercy of Roses*, with novelist Pat Conroy calling her "a truly gifted writer." Now Webb has crafted a poignant portrayal of a woman on the edge seeking solace in the past.Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband, Wayne, beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear--the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly. At the same time, Ellen learns more about her feisty, fiery relative, and the heritage that is hers for the taking--if she dares. With her violent husband hot on her trail, Ellen must learn to stand up and fight for herself, to break the cycle of abuse, and pass down a story of love and redemption to her children.*writing as Anna MichaelsBob Stevenson
By Richard Wiley. 2016
"A witty, roller-coaster ride of uncertain identity set against the gritty certainties of New York City. In compelling, unadorned prose,…
Richard Wiley gives us a bewitching and ultimately moving tale." -Caryl Phillips, author of A Distant Shore and The Lost ChildDr. Ruby Okada meets a charming man with a Scottish accent in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street.Who is the mysterious man? Is he Archie B. Billingsly, suffering from dissociative identity disorder and subject to brilliant flights of fancy and bizarre, violent fits? Or is he the reincarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson, back to haunt New York as Long John Silver and Mr. Edward Hyde? Her career compromised, Ruby soon learns that her future and that of her unborn child depend on finding the key to his identity. With compelling psychological descriptions and terrifying, ineffable transformations, Bob Stevenson is an ingenious tale featuring a quirky cast of characters drawn together by mutual fascination, need, and finally, love.Richard Wiley is the author of eight novels including Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Ahmed's Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California and Tacoma, Washington.Inhabited
By Charlie Quimby. 2016
"Charlie Quimby is a writer with a big talent, big heart, and big social conscience. In his second novel, Inhabited,…
characters finely drawn and memorable live amidst the crisscrossing lines of moral conscience, political juggling and economic expediency, a tough neighborhood. I was staggered by the authenticity of these people and their dilemmas."-FAITH SULLIVAN, author of Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse and The Cape Ann"Charlie Quimby is the sharpest shooter in the West. Inhabited is a dramatic, honest, humane portrait of a Colorado city in the throes of great change and great choice. The characters and the setting are indelibly rendered...We're all in the mix here-rich and poor, homeless and over-housed, rancher and eco-activist, native politician and outside scoundrel. Inhabited is a vivid, compelling story delivered with 21st-century true grit."-ALYSON HAGY, author of Boleto"A thoroughly enjoyable novel that masterfully takes the reader on an emotionally rewarding exploration of 'home' and the power the concept has on the human psyche."-JONATHAN ODELL, author of Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League"Inhabited transforms a typical community 'homeless problem' into a layered drama about our responsibilities to each other and the blunders and scars we must endure. I salute Charlie Quimby for following the path of Steinbeck and Orwell in writing empathetic portraits of the ignored and the shunned."-JIM LYNCH, author of Before the WindMeg Mogrin sells pricey houses, belongs to the mayor's inner circle, and knows more than she's letting on about her sister's death. Isaac Samson lives in a tent and believes Thomas Edison invented the Reagan presidency. When their town attracts a game-changing development, Isaac is displaced by the town's crackdown on vagrancy. As Isaac struggles to regain stability, Meg contends with conflicting roles of assisting the developer while serving on the homeless coalition. Isaac's quest to return a lost artifact soon intrudes into Meg's tidy world, digging up a part of her past she'd rather remained buried. Inhabited, a sister novel to Charlie Quimby's acclaimed Monument Road, returns to the Grand Valley of western Colorado to explore the dimensions of loss, the boundaries of compassion, and the endurance of love.Charlie Quimby is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next List pick and Booklist Editors' Choice in 2013. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.Inhabited
By Charlie Quimby. 2016
"Charlie Quimby is a writer with a big talent, big heart, and big social conscience. In his second novel, Inhabited,…
characters finely drawn and memorable live amidst the crisscrossing lines of moral conscience, political juggling and economic expediency, a tough neighborhood. I was staggered by the authenticity of these people and their dilemmas."-FAITH SULLIVAN, author of Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse and The Cape Ann"Charlie Quimby is the sharpest shooter in the West. Inhabited is a dramatic, honest, humane portrait of a Colorado city in the throes of great change and great choice. The characters and the setting are indelibly rendered...We're all in the mix here-rich and poor, homeless and over-housed, rancher and eco-activist, native politician and outside scoundrel. Inhabited is a vivid, compelling story delivered with 21st-century true grit."-ALYSON HAGY, author of Boleto"A thoroughly enjoyable novel that masterfully takes the reader on an emotionally rewarding exploration of 'home' and the power the concept has on the human psyche."-JONATHAN ODELL, author of Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League"Inhabited transforms a typical community 'homeless problem' into a layered drama about our responsibilities to each other and the blunders and scars we must endure. I salute Charlie Quimby for following the path of Steinbeck and Orwell in writing empathetic portraits of the ignored and the shunned."-JIM LYNCH, author of Before the WindMeg Mogrin sells pricey houses, belongs to the mayor's inner circle, and knows more than she's letting on about her sister's death. Isaac Samson lives in a tent and believes Thomas Edison invented the Reagan presidency. When their town attracts a game-changing development, Isaac is displaced by the town's crackdown on vagrancy. As Isaac struggles to regain stability, Meg contends with conflicting roles of assisting the developer while serving on the homeless coalition. Isaac's quest to return a lost artifact soon intrudes into Meg's tidy world, digging up a part of her past she'd rather remained buried. Inhabited, a sister novel to Charlie Quimby's acclaimed Monument Road, returns to the Grand Valley of western Colorado to explore the dimensions of loss, the boundaries of compassion, and the endurance of love.Charlie Quimby is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next List pick and Booklist Editors' Choice in 2013. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.Against the Wind
By Howard Scott, Madeleine Gagnon, Phyllis Aronoff. 2012
Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take…
drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity.Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation.After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death.In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.The Vampire of Ropraz
By Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
"Silky prose in this harrowing account of crime and punishment."--Kirkus Reviews "Using spare, effective prose, Chessex brilliantly renders both the…
inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.'--London Review of Books"A superb novel, hard as a winter in these landscapes of dark forests, where an atmosphere of prejudice and violence envelops the reader."--L'Express"It's beautiful; it's pure, like a blue sky over a black forest. Giono without garlic and olives."--Le Point"Far from just telling us a simple story Chessex has had the intelligence to integrate a dose of poetry, of the aesthetics of sin, and of the metaphysics of the monster."--LireJacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize, takes a true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty.1903, Ropraz, a small village near the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated, and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stableboy with bloodshot eyes, is arrested and placed in psychiatric care. He escapes, enlists in the Foreign Legion as the First World War begins, and is sent into battle in the trenches of the Somme.Jacques Chessex, born in 1934, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize for his novel A Father's Love. He is considered one of Switzerland's greatest living authors. He lives in Ropraz.A Slight Case of Fatigue
By Stéphane Bourguignon. 2002
At forty-one, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life--a wife he adored, a young son, a…
cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he's separated from his wife, estranged from his son, he's let his garden grow wild--like the rest of his life, it's totally out of control. When his son, Maxime, tired of being embarrassed by his father's dilapidated house, his garden gone to seed and his old beater of a car, decides to leave home and live with his cool, professional mother--who immediately demands twice the alimony--Eddy goes on a rampage, smashing his son's furniture and hurtling it and his possessions through windows he neglects to open first. Ending up in the hospital, the doctor diagnoses "a slight case of fatigue." As Eddy plunges deeper into despair, insomnia and self-destruction, frantically searching for a way to live an authentic life, punching out his boss and finally threatening his best friend with a gun, the narrative voice of the novel changes, and we begin to see Eddy, his parents, his childhood and his past loves through the eyes of his wife, friends and companions. Stéphane Bourguignon, the creator of the much-loved television series La vie, la vie, about a group of thirty-somethings in Montreal, has said that he wanted this book to look at the darker side of life. Written like a surrealist Camus on steroids, in multiple voices, with an uncanny eye and ear for graphic physicality and keen psychological insight, Bourguignon's examination of relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, past wounds and present possibilities is filled with a raucous warmth and humanity--but it is also intensely, darkly and almost unbearably humorous. Translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard ScottOne of Us Is Sleeping
By Martin Aitken, Josefine Klougart. 2016
"Scandinavia now has its own Virginia Woolf. Few get as close to the human mind as Klougart"--Mari Nymoen Nilsen, VGThe…
English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms.Working in the vein of Anne Carson, Josefine Klougart's novel is both true-to-life and incredibly poetic in its relating of a brief, intense love affair and the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. While she recounts the time with her lover, the narrator is also heading back home, where her mother is dying of cancer. This contrast between recollection and the belief that certain things will always be present in your life--your parents, your childhood home, your love--and the fact that life is a continual series of endings runs throughout the book, underpinning the striking imagery and magnificent prose.A powerful novel that earned Klougart numerous accolades and several award nominations--including the Readers Book Award--One of Us Is Sleeping marks the launch of a major new voice in world literature.Josefine Klougart has been hailed as one of Denmark's greatest contemporary writers. She is the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She's been compared to a range of authors, including Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.Martin Aitken has translated dozens of books from the Danish, including works by Dorthe Nors, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Peter Høeg, and Kim Leine, among others.Truth in Fiction: Rethinking Its Logic (Synthese Library #391)
By John Woods. 2018
This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author…
structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows?It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of the sentences of fiction is that they areunambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn’t in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it?Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction.The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition.