Book picks similar to
Granta 141: Canada by Catherine Leroux
fiction
short-stories
granta
canada
Sherlock Holmes: The American Years: The American Years
Michael Kurland - 2010
Klinger, editor and compiler of all three volumes of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, this collection of ten original stories brings light to one of the least examined periods in the life of the great detective--his time in the former colonies, the United States. This Holmes is a youthful one--a young man not yet set upon his course in life and in his famous lodgings at 221B Baker Street. In Richard Lupoff 's Inga Sigerson Weds, he's come to America to represent the family at his sister's wedding. In My Silk Umbrella, Mark Twain narrates his fateful encounter with Holmes at a baseball game in Hartford, Connecticut; Steve Hockensmith narrates the meeting of the young William Gillette and the object of his later, most famous turn upon the stage; and Peter Tremayne reveals the intersection of Holmes and the Irish in the 19th century American midwestern landscape. With further stories by Marta Randall, Rhys Bowen, Peter Beagle, and others, the legend, the mythology and even the history of the world's greatest detective is further enhanced by these charming, clever and mystifying tales.
Lonesome Traveler
Jack Kerouac - 1960
Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first bullfight in Mexico while high on opium; catching up with the beat night life in New York; burying himself in the snow-capped mountains of north-west America; meditating on a sunlit roof in Tangiers; or falling in love with Montmartre and the huge white basilica of Sacré-Coeur – Kerouac reveals the endless diversity of human life and his own high-spirited philosophy of self-fulfilment.
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
Yann Martel - 1993
Yann Martel's title story (described as "unforgettable...a truly stunning piece of fiction"*), won the 1991 Journey Prize to universal acclaim. The intensely human tragedy that lies at its heart is told with a spare, careful elegance that resonates long after it has ended--and is matched through all the stories by an immediacy an dazzling freshness.
Known and Strange Things: Essays
Teju Cole - 2016
The collection will include pre-published essays that have gone viral, like “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Haruki Murakami - 2006
From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all.
Dust to Dust
Timothy Findley - 1998
literally, from dust to dust. Readers will remember Vanessa Van Home, the elderly detective from The Telling of Lies, now involved in a murder mystery where a corpse confounds the line between the magical and the mundane. And the unforgettable Rosedale couple from Findleys "Minna and Bragg" stories, who reappear in two more haunting tales. In the stories that make up "All Must Come to Dust," we are taken into the ancient cultures of Europe, and there confronted by our preconceived notions of what constitutes history and memory.Each work in Dust to Dust is a beautifully rendered showcase for Timothy Findley's immense talent in evoking a time, a place and a mood. With their European settings, these stories render a territory formerly unexplored by Findley in his Short Fiction repertoire.
The American Fiancée
Éric Dupont - 2012
Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book.An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature.Published in Canada as Songs for the Cold of Heart by QC Fiction.
Frying Plantain
Zalika Reid-Benta - 2019
We see her on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig’s head in her great aunt’s freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother’s house, trying to cope with the ongoing battles between her unyielding grandparents.A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker. In her brilliantly incisive debut, Zalika Reid-Benta artfully depicts the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation Canadians and first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity and predominately white society.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration & the Eighteenth Century
M.H. Abrams - 1962
Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.
Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art (Modern Library)
The New Yorker - 2003
Sublime and ridiculous, sentimental and searing, Christmas at The New Yorker is a gift of great writing and drawing by literary legends and laugh-out-loud cartoonists.Here are seasonal stories, poems, memoirs, and more, including such classics as John Cheever’s 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” about an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building who experiences the fickle power of charity; John Updike’s “The Carol Sing,” in which a group of small-town carolers remember an exceptionally enthusiastic fellow singer (“How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom out when the male voices became King Wenceslas”); and Richard Ford’s acerbic and elegiac 1998 story “Crèche,” in which an unmarried Hollywood lawyer spends an unsettling holiday with her sister’s estranged husband and kids.Here, too, are S. J. Perelman’s 1936 “Waiting for Santy,” a playlet in the style of Clifford Odets labor drama (the setting: “The sweatshop of Santa Claus, North Pole”), and Vladimir Nabokov’s heartbreaking 1975 story “Christ-mas,” in which a father grieving for his lost son in a world “ghastly with sadness” sees a tiny miracle on Christmas Eve.And it wouldn’t be Christmas—or The New Yorker—without dozens of covers and cartoons by Addams, Arno, Chast, and others, or the mischievous verse of Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, and Ogden Nash (“Do you know Mrs. Millard Fillmore Revere?/On her calendar, Christmas comes three hundred and sixty-five times a year”).From Jazz Age to New Age, E. B. White to Garrison Keillor, these works represent eighty years of wonderful keepsakes for Christmas, from The New Yorker to you.From the Hardcover edition.
All Together Now: A Newfoundlander's Light Tales for Heavy Times
Alan Doyle - 2020
Is there a more sociable province than Newfoundland and Labrador? Or anywhere in Canada with a greater reputation for coming to the rescue of those in need?At this time of Covid, singer, songwriter and bestselling author Alan Doyle is feeling everyone's pain. Off the road and spending more days at home than he has since he was a child hawking cod tongues on the wharfs of Petty Harbour, he misses the crowds and companionship of performing across the country and beyond. But most of all he misses the cheery clamour of pubs in his hometown, where one yarn follows another so quickly you have to be as ready as an Olympian at the start line to get your tale in before someone is well into theirs already. We're all experiencing our own version of that deprivation, and Alan, one of Newfoundland's finest storytellers, wants to offer a little balm.All Together Now is a gathering in book form--a virtual Newfoundland pub. There are adventures in foreign lands, including an apparently filthy singalong in Polish (well, he would have sung along if he'd understood the language), a real-life ghost story involving an elderly neighbour, a red convertible and a clown horn, a potted history of his social drinking, and heartwarming reminiscences from another past world, childhood--all designed to put a smile on the faces of the isolated-addled.Alan Doyle has never been in better form--nor more welcome. As he says about this troubling time: We get through it. We do what has to be done. Then, we celebrate. With the best of them.
The Complete Stories
Franz KafkaEithne Wilkins - 1946
With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.
Atonement
Gaétan Soucy - 1997
During that one blustery winter solstice day, between the railway station and the church where a funeral mass is underway, he meets old villagers, forgotten neighbours, and characters who are either imagined or real. But there's only one person he seeks: the von Croft twin he taught to read music and to whom he wants to atone.Soucy creates a world where nothing is left to chance and the line between dream and reality is always shifting.
The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review
The Paris Review - 2015
But rather than trading on nostalgia, the storied journal—reconceived in 2010 by editor Lorin Stein—continues to search outside the mainstream for the most exciting emerging writers. Harmonizing a timeless literary feel with impeccable modern taste, its pages are vivid proof that the best of today’s writing more than upholds the lofty standards that built the magazine’s reputation.The Unprofessionals collects pieces from the new iteration of the Paris Review by contemporary writers who treat their art not as a profession, but as a calling. Some, like Zadie Smith, Ben Lerner, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, are already major literary presences, while others, like Emma Cline, Benjamin Nugent, and Ottessa Moshfegh, will soon be household names. A master class in contemporary writing across genres, this collection introduces the must-know voices in the modern literary scene.
Women Talking
Miriam Toews - 2018
For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.