Download or read book Better Living Through Plastic Explosives written by Zsuzsi Gartner and published by Penguin Canada. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada's most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney's. In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye on evolution and modern manhood when an upscale cul-de-sac is thrown into chaos after a redneck moves into the neighbourhood, international adoption, war photography, real estate, the movie industry, motivational speakers, or terrorism, Gartner filets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, glorious measure. These stories ruthlessly expose our most secret desires, and allow us to snort with laughter at the grotesque world we'd live in if we all got what we wanted.
Download or read book Better Living Through Plastic Explosives written by Zsuzsi Gartner and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of satirical and darkly humorous stories set in Vancouver which tackle themes of evolution, manhood, international adoption, real estate, the movie industry, science and faith, art, and terrorism.
Download or read book All the Anxious Girls on Earth written by Zsuzsi Gartner and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the Anxious Girls on Earth marks the debut of a startingly original literary voice. Zsuzsi Gartner's exuberant prose gives voice to unforgettable characters who survive by their wits as they cope with indifferent relationships, lackluster jobs, and the myriad curve-balls life throws their way. A woman calls in fake bomb threats from the nineteenth floor of a bank tower as revenge against her ex-lover. The mother of a girl killed by a teenage urban guerilla thrives spectacularly in her industrious grief, transforming herself into a forgiveness guru and talk-show host. Lured into the wilderness by her desire for a man who rebuilds vintage airplanes, a young woman finds she lusts more for biscotti and city sidewalks. A small, heroic child makes a guileless request for pajamas and creates a psychic storm at the center of her anxious, achievement-mad parents' lives. Rendered in a jittery, jazzed-up prose that has been compared to that of Lorrie Moore and Mary Flanagan, these stories brilliantly capture the pathos, beauty, and alienation of contemporary life and signal the arrival of a writer to watch.
Download or read book The Better Mother written by Jen Sookfong Lee and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master of family dynamics comes this vivid tale of two misfits who find each other while stumbling toward their own true identities. In 1958, eight-year-old Danny Lim has been sent to buy cigarettes for his father, when he realizes that he has lost the money. Frantic, he rushes through Vancouver's Chinatown and behind a nightclub, where he sees Miss Val, a long-time burlesque dancer. Danny is enraptured with her sequined garters and silk robe, and Val, touched by his fascination, gives him a pack of cigarettes and her silk belt. Years later, Danny spends his days working as a wedding photographer and his nights cruising Stanley Park, far away from the home where his parents and sister live. He realizes that the key to understanding himself and his family lies in his connection to Miss Val, and he is determined to find her. Before she became the Siamese Kitten, a major player on the North American circuit, Miss Val was Valerie Nealy, a feisty girl growing up in a rundown house beside the Fraser River. But to find the stardom she thought she wanted, she had to make a series of seemingly irrevocable decisions. Set mostly during an unseasonably hot summer in Vancouver in 1982 when HIV/AIDS was spreading rapidly, The Better Mother brims with undeniable tragedy, but resounds with the power of friendship, change and truth. It will cement Jen Sookfong Lee's reputation as one of this country's finest young novelists.
Download or read book The Swan Suit written by Katherine Fawcett and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2020-03-14 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending banalities of everyday human routines and dilemmas with elements of fairy tales, magic, the macabre and the downright inventive, Katherine Fawcett’s fiction is anything but predictable. In this collection, reimagined folktales appear alongside stories entirely new, serving to defamiliarize us from the undeniably odd tales we continue to pass down generation after generation, and lend a vague familiarity to the stories of Fawcett’s invention. One of the three little pigs launches a line of high-end, easy-to-prepare, wolf broth–based meals. The Devil is on a mission to steal a child’s soul, but is distracted when he develops a massive crush on the day-care worker. A man stands in the shower contemplating his future when he discovers tiny mushrooms growing in his body’s various nooks and crannies. Fawcett’s wry humour and prodigious imagination are an addictive mix. The weird becomes normal, and the normal, fascinating. Subverting expectations at every turn, her matter-of-fact style and narrative skill make this collection a must-read for any lover of short fiction.
Download or read book The Canterbury Trail written by Angie Abdou and published by Brindle and Glass. This book was released on 2011 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Canterbury Trail brings together a motley collection of ski bums, hippies, yuppies, poseurs and snowmobile-riding rednecks on a late winter trip into the mountains around the fictional Coalton, B.C. Coalton is a close fit with Abdou's home of Fernie, a powder-skiing haven that uneasily combines an economic base of coal mining with a mountain escape for Calgary's moneyed classes.
Download or read book Darwin s Bastards written by Zsuzsi Gartner and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2010 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social satire, fabulist tales and darkly humorous dystopian visions by some of Canada's most adventurous and distinguished writers. The 23 stories in Darwin's Bastards take us on a twisted, wild ride into some future times and parallel universes where characters as diverse as a dead boy, a one-legged international actuarial forensics specialist, a pharmaceutical guinea pig, and a far-sighted fetus engage in their own games of the survival of the fittest. The collection includes the first new short story by William Gibson to be published since 1997, as well as original, previously unpublished fiction by Lee Henderson, Timothy Taylor, Heather O'Neill, Mark Anthony Jarman, and others. From recent Trillium Award-winner Pasha Malla's hilarious take on the apocalypse, where Prince is the only man left alive, to newcomer Matthew J. Trafford's brilliant triptych about the fallout from the cloning of Jesus Christ, to iconoclast Sheila Heti's meditative romp about beleaguered physicists and Oracle of Delphi-like BlackBerrys, Darwin's Bastards is a fast-moving, thought-provoking reading extravaganza.
Download or read book Ripley Under Ground written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-09-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."—Frank Rich Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In these volumes, we find Ripley ensconced on a French estate with a wealthy wife, a world-class art collection, and a past to hide. In Ripley Under Ground (1970), an art forgery goes awry and Ripley is threatened with exposure; in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld; and in Ripley Under Water (1991), Ripley is confronted by a snooping American couple obsessed with the disappearance of an art collector who visited Ripley years before. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
Download or read book Too Much Happiness written by Alice Munro and published by Douglas Gibson Books. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning collection of stories demonstrates once again why Alice Munro is celebrated as a pre-eminent master of the short story. While some of the stories are traditional, set in “Alice Munro Country” in Ontario or in B.C., dealing with ordinary women’s lives, others have a new, sharper edge. They involve child murders, strange sex, and a terrifying home invasion. By way of astonishing variety, the title story, set in Victorian Europe, follows the last journey from France to Sweden of a famous Russian mathematician. This daring, superb collection proves that Alice Munro will always surprise you.
Download or read book Room written by Emma Donoghue and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-07 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor's garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma's games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.
Download or read book Better Living Through Origami written by Nellianna van den Baard and published by SewandSo. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Take the mindful craft of origami to a new practical level and make your own designer lighting and home accessories. In this innovative DIY interiors book, Dutch design duo Studio Snowpuppe show you how to use origami and other papercraft techniques to make unique sustainable accents for your home. Features 20 stylish paper projects of varying complexity, all made using craft store materials and basic folding techniques. A fun and inexpensive way to create contemporary lampshades, ingenious clocks, extraordinary wall art and much more. Everyone can make the projects in this book, following the step-by-step diagrams and comprehensive instructions."--Page [4] of cover.
Download or read book Icebound written by Dean Koontz and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The arctic night is endless. The fear is numbing. Screams freeze in the throat. Death arrives in shades of white. And cold-blooded murder seems right at home. Conducting a strange and urgent experiment on the Arctic icefield, a team of scientists has planted sixty powerful explosive charges that will detonate at midnight. Before they can withdraw to the safety of their base camp, a shattering tidal wave breaks loose the ice on which they are working. Now they are hopelessly marooned on an iceberg during a violent winter storm. The bombs beneath them are buried irretrievably deep . . . and ticking. And they discover that one of them is an assassin with a mission of his own.
Download or read book Angle of Repose written by Wallace Stegner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of personal, historical, and geographic discovery Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family. "Cause for celebration . . . A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." —The Atlantic Monthly "Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enchantment of life." —Los Angeles Times This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Jackson J. Benson. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Seven Down written by David Whitton and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this quirky, character-driven debut novel seven hotel employees puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt — the next read for fans of Fredrik Backman (Anxious People) and Matt Haig (The Midnight Library). Finalist for the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best First Novel Seven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, Reservations, Management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them. The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of those interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause any one of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness. Both sinister and absurd, Seven Down is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations. A RARE MACHINES BOOK
Download or read book The Cat s Table written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Michael Ondaatje: an electrifying novel, by turns thrilling and deeply moving—one of his most vividly rendered and compelling works of fiction to date. In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly "Cat's Table" with an eccentric and unforgettable group of grownups and two other boys. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys find themselves immersed in the worlds and stories of the adults around them. At night they spy on a shackled prisoner—his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. Looking back from deep within adulthood, and gradually moving back and forth from the decks and holds of the ship to the years that follow the narrator unfolds a spellbinding and layered tale about the magical, often forbidden discoveries of childhood and the burdens of earned understanding, about a life-long journey that began unexpectedly with a sea voyage.
Download or read book Songs of the Dead written by Derrick Jensen and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serial killer stalks the streets of Spokane, acting out a misogynist script from the dark heart of this culture. Across town, a writer named Derrick has spent his life tracking the reasons--political, psychological, spiritual--for the sadism of modern civilization. And through the grim nights, Nika, a trafficked woman, tries to survive the grinding violence of prostitution. Their lives, and the forces propelling them, are about to collide. Derrick’s current project is a book called Possession, which asks the ontological question of who is responsible for the culture of domination that’s destroying the earth. Who actually benefits from a dead planet, the endgame that’s fast approaching? What if the answer is something way bigger than humans? Meanwhile, with motivations opposite to Derrick’s, the serial killer is asking much the same question of the women he kidnaps as his final act of possession--and Nika is next. Derrick’s metaphysical explorations suddenly take on more urgency as visions both terrifying and sacred begin to intrude, and past and future collapse without warning. All Derrick knows is Nika’s name and her impending death. The only person who believes him is his partner Allison, a woman with both strengths and scars, whose past has led her to a commitment to justice no matter what the cost. As the visions intensify and the killer draws nearer, Derrick and Allison are compelled to act, making themselves the next targets. Derrick must learn to negotiate a world of spirits and demons, living and dead, before it’s too late. And what hangs in the balance is not just their lives, but also the fate of life on earth. With Songs of the Dead, Derrick Jensen has written more than a thriller. This is a story lush with rage and tenderness on its way to being a weapon.
Download or read book The Quiet American written by Graham Greene and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian). It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing. Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).
