Book picks similar to
The Animals in That Country by Margaret Atwood
poetry
fiction
canada
canadian
Bobcat and Other Stories
Rebecca Lee - 2010
A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.
Mauve Desert
Nicole Brossard - 1987
A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book – Mauve, the horizon – is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.
Disobedience
Alice Notley - 2001
Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored. Author Biography: Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. After a period of peripatetic traveling, she married poet Ted Berrigan. She has published more than twenty books and has been an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School of poetry.
Jonny Appleseed
Joshua Whitehead - 2018
Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages--and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
City of the Lost: Part Four
Kelley Armstrong - 2015
And where a hunter has now come to play.A sadistic killer is loose in Rockton, and whip-smart detective Casey Butler is on the job. Meanwhile, her best friend, Diana, has fallen so far in with the wrong crowd that Isabel, the owner of the local bar and brothel, accuses Diana of “freelancing.” Then evidence ofanother horrific murder shocks the town. Casey feels herself ever more drawn to the difficult, brooding sheriff, Eric Dalton—until his startling confession turns her world upside down…
The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Elizabeth Bishop - 1980
Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.
Blood and Guts in High School
Kathy Acker - 1984
Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing. One day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life, starting with "Parents stink" (her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her). With Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everything from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.~ groveatlantic.com
The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose
Ursula K. Le Guin - 2015
Le Guin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the Nebula Award-winning The Day Before the Revolution, and the Hugo-nominated Winter's King, which gave readers their first glimpse of the world later made famous in her Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness.Contents:The Wind's Twelve Quarters • (1975) • collection by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Compass Rose • (1982) • collection by Ursula K. Le GuinA Trip to the Head • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinApril in Paris • (1962) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinDarkness Box • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinDirection of the Road • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinForeword (The Wind's Twelve Quarters) • (1975) • essay by Ursula K. Le GuinNine Lives • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinSemley's Necklace • [Hainish] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin (variant of The Dowry of Angyar)The Day Before the Revolution • [Hainish] • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Field of Vision • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Good Trip • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Masters • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Rule of Names • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Stars Below • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Word of Unbinding • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThings • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinVaster Than Empires and More Slow • (1971) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinWinter's King • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinGwilan's Harp • (1977) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinIntracom • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinMalheur County • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinMazes • (1975) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinPreface (The Compass Rose) • (1982) • essay by Ursula K. Le GuinSchrödinger's Cat • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinSmall Change • (1981) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinSome Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinSQ • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinSur • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Diary of the Rose • [Orsinia] • (1976) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Eye Altering • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe New Atlantis • (1975) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Pathways of Desire • (1979) • novelette by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Phoenix • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Water Is Wide • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe White Donkey • (1980) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Wife's Story • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le GuinTwo Delays on the Northern Line • [Orsinia] • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Quintland Sisters
Shelley Wood - 2019
Emma cares for them through their perilous first days and when the government decides to remove the babies from their francophone parents, making them wards of the British king, Emma signs on as their nurse.Over 6,000 daily visitors come to ogle the identical “Quints” playing in their custom-built playground; at the height of the Great Depression, the tourism and advertising dollars pour in. While the rest of the world delights in their sameness, Emma sees each girl as unique: Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Marie, and Émilie. With her quirky eye for detail, Emma records every strange twist of events in her private journals.As the fight over custody and revenues turns increasingly explosive, Emma is torn between the fishbowl sanctuary of Quintland and the wider world, now teetering on the brink of war. Steeped in research, Quintland™ is a novel of love, heartache, resilience, and enduring sisterhood—a fictional, coming-of-age story bound up in one of the strangest true tales of the past century.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Morgan Parker - 2017
The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.
The Headmaster's Wager
Vincent Lam - 2012
Fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, he is quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided country, though he also harbors a weakness for gambling haunts and the women who frequent them. He devotedly ignores all news of the fighting that swirls around him, but when his only son gets in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities, Percival faces the limits of his connections and wealth and is forced to send him away. In the loneliness that follows, Percival finds solace in Jacqueline, a beautiful woman of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage whom he is able to confide in. But Percival's new-found happiness is precarious, and as the complexities of war encroach further into his world, he must confront the tragedy of all he has refused to see. Graced with intriguingly flawed but wonderfully human characters moving through a richly drawn historical landscape, The Headmaster's Wager is an unforgettable story of love, betrayal and sacrifice.
Life After God
Douglas Coupland - 1994
This collection of stories cuts through the hype of modern living, travelling inward to the elusive terrain of dreams and nightmares.
Blue Horses
Mary Oliver - 2014
Whether considering a bird’s nest, the seeming patience of oak trees, or the artworks of Franz Marc, Oliver reminds us of the transformative power of attention and how much can be contained within the smallest moments.At its heart, Blue Horses asks what it means to truly belong to this world, to live in it attuned to all its changes. Humorous, gentle, and always honest, Oliver is a visionary of the natural world.
On Love
Charles Bukowski - 2016
Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance and redemptive power.Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. “My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough,” he writes, “as the same cat crouches.”Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.
When Fox is a Thousand
Larissa Lai - 1993
Larissa Lai interweaves three narrative voices and their attendant cultures: an elusive fox growing toward wisdom and her 1000 birthday, the ninth-century Taoist poet/nun Yu Hsuan-Chi (a real person executed in China for murder), and the oddly named Artemis, a young Asian-American woman living in contemporary Vancouver.With beautiful and enchanting prose, and a sure narrative hand, Lai combines Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval China, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women’s bodies in order to cause mischief).