Download or read book No Great Mischief written by Alistair MacLeod and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendents became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.
Download or read book Island The Complete Stories written by Alistair MacLeod and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award: “The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”—Colm Tóibín The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in Island prove Alistair MacLeod to be a master. Quietly, precisely, he has created a body of work that is among the greatest to appear in English in the last fifty years. A book-besotted patriarch releases his only son from the obligations of the sea. A father provokes his young son to violence when he reluctantly sells the family horse. A passionate girl who grows up on a nearly deserted island turns into an ever-wistful woman when her one true love is felled by a logging accident. A dying young man listens to his grandmother play the old Gaelic songs on her ancient violin as they both fend off the inevitable. The events that propel MacLeod's stories convince us of the importance of tradition, the beauty of the landscape, and the necessity of memory.
Download or read book As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories written by Alistair MacLeod and published by New Canadian Library. This book was released on 2010-12-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change. His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.
Download or read book Alistair MacLeod written by Irene Guilford and published by Guernica Editions. This book was released on 2001 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including personal interviews, background information, and criticism, this collection of essays examines renowned Canadian author Alistair MacLeod's life and the writing of his novel No Great Mischief. Various literary critics explore themes present in his work such as memory versus myth and the blending of history. One of the chief contemporary fiction writers, MacLeod has won such honors as the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Raddall Award for Fiction, and the Trillium Award for Fiction.
Download or read book To Every Thing There is a Season written by and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 1998 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The famous verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes are accompanied by exquisite illustrations, each rendered in the style of a different world culture...An ecumenical, artistic, and cultural experience, rich in beauty and expansive in its appreciation of ethnic variety." - School Library Journal, starred review. "Readers will be awed by the breadth and depth of the artwork...[and] the seriousness and thought the Dillons have put into the book.... [A] book that can be examined and thought about by generations of young readers." - Booklist, starred review
Download or read book Never Die Wondering written by Alistair MacLeod and published by Wordclay. This book was released on 2009 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an incredible Australian story of an ordinary man who has lived an extraordinary life, who has overcome seemly insurmountable obstacles to succeed in living his dreams and accomplishing his ambitions. Fighting droughts, a legal system after he had used a firearm in self defense, the injustice of the family law court, the rights of a father and son whilst enduring betrayals, both personal and business, are just some of the crushing battles fought in his life. These battles rendered him penniless in his later part of life. With his usual never-give up attitude he remarkably created a property portfolio in the millions in just 48 months, created from mentors, business minds of millionaires from the bush and the city.
Download or read book The Lost Salt Gift of Blood written by Alistair MacLeod and published by New Canadian Library. This book was released on 1989 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father. Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, the seven stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood map the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child.
Download or read book To Every Thing There Is a Season written by Alistair MacLeod and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.
Download or read book Remembrance written by Alistair MacLeod and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally celebrated author of No Great Mischief comes a moving short story of three generations of men from a single family whose lives are forever altered by the long shadow of war. In the early morning hours of November 11, David MacDonald, a veteran of the Second World War, stands outside his Cape Breton home, preparing to attend what will likely be his last Remembrance Day parade. As he waits for the arrival of his son and grandson, he remembers his decision to go to war in desperation to support his young family. He remembers the horrors of life at the frontlines in Ortona, Italy, and then what happened in Holland when the Canadians arrived as liberators. He remembers how the war devastated his own family, but gave him other reasons to live. As the story unfolds, other generations enter the scene. What emerges is an elegant, life-affirming meditation on the bond between fathers and sons, "how the present always comes out of the past," and how even in the midst of tragedy and misfortune there exists the possibility for salvation. His first new short story in over a decade, Remembrance is a powerful reminder of why Alistair MacLeod is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.
Download or read book Stories about Storytellers written by Douglas Gibson and published by ReadHowYouWant. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Here is my prize read for people who are interested in books, writers, Canada, life, and all that kind of thing.'' - Alice Munro, from the introduction ''I'll kill him!'' said Mavis Gallant. Pierre Trudeau almost did, leading him (''Run!'') into a whizzing stream of traffic that almost crushed both of them. Alistair MacLeod accused him of a ''home invasion'' to grab the manuscript of "No Great Mischief." And Paul Martin denounced him to a laughing Ottawa crowd, saying, ''If Shakespeare had had Doug Gibson as an editor, there would be no Shakespeare!'' On the other hand, Alice Munro credits him with keeping her writing short stories when the world demanded novels. Robertson Davies, with a nod to Dickens, gratefully called him ''My Partner Frequent.'' W.O. Mitchell summoned up a loving joke about him, on his deathbed. "Stories About Storytellers" shares these tales and many more, as readers follow Doug Gibson through 40 years of editing and publishing some of Canada's sharpest minds and greatest storytellers. Gibson is a terrific storyteller himself, and through his recollections we get an inside view of Canadian politics and publishing that rarely gets told. From Jack Hodgins' Vancouver Island to Harold Horwood's Labrador, from Alice Munro's Ontario to James Houston's Arctic, Doug Gibson takes us on an unforgettable literary tour of Canada, going behind the scenes and between the covers, and opening up his own story vault for all to read and enjoy.
Download or read book Poacher s Pilgrimage written by Alastair McIntosh and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an astonishing range of mysterious structures - stone circles, beehive dwellings, holy wells and 'temples' from the Celtic era. Over a twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis. The book is a walk through space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.
Download or read book Across Canada by Story written by Douglas Gibson and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More adventures from one of Canada's premier editors and storytellers Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country's leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada's finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers. Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist, he discovered even more about the land and its writers and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share. Now in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnson, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.
Download or read book Nosy White Woman written by Martha Wilson and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daughter explains to her mother why calling the police isn’t always a sound idea. A dad tries to understand how his influence over his children persists in their adulthood. A caretaking group of sisters must rely on each other, but one has a fierce drinking problem. Throughout Nosy White Woman, ordinary people, caught in the passing moments of their daily lives, confront the reality that the quiet societies they thought they knew aren’t really so simple after all, the morals not always obvious. In these sixteen stories, Martha Wilson turns a clear-eyed yet compassionate gaze on everyday experience, from rattled family discussions, to self-examination of body and voice, to increasingly present anxieties about the end of the world, stripping each one down with precision and sardonic wit to reveal surprising truths: that individual lives always intersect with the political, and that our small gestures and personal habits reverberate in the larger world of which we can’t help being citizens.
Download or read book Night Waking written by Sarah Moss and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.
Download or read book Alistair Grim s Odd Aquaticum written by Greg Funaro and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * "Dive head-, feet-, or face-first into this delicious danger." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review/DIV DIVWhen Grubb, an orphan and runaway chimney sweep, entered the wondrous world of the Odditorium, his life changed forever. Apprenticed to the mechanical marvel's strange proprietor, Alistair Grim, Grubb unfortunately must settle into his new position on the lam, as all of England is convinced that Alistair Grim is a villain. Grim, however, has come up with a plan to expose the real villain: Prince Nightshade, a wicked necromancer who wants the Odditorium's power source for himself. With the evil prince hot on their trail, Grim, Grubb and the rest of the Odditorium's crew embark on a perilous adventure to find the legendary sword Excalibur: the only weapon capable of penetrating Nightshade's magical suit of armor. As expected, their quest turns out to be anything but ordinary. Not only can the Odditorium fly, but it can also swim! And so the crew battens down the hatches and sets off on an underwater voyage to the otherworldly realm of Avalon, home to Excalibur. Along the way, they must battle a banshee assassin, sea monsters, and a witch who seeks revenge on Alistair Grim for stealing her magical objects. But that's not all. Unbeknownst to Grubb and the others, their fate has been written in an ancient Avalonian prophecy-a prophecy that holds the key to a destiny not even Alistair Grim could have imagined.
Download or read book Animal Person written by Alexander MacLeod and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, CBC Books, and the Globe and Mail. From Giller Prize finalist Alexander MacLeod comes a magnificent collection about the needs, temptations, and tensions that exist just beneath the surface of our lives. Named a Canadian Fiction title to watch by the CBC, Quill & Quire, and 49th Shelf, and a "must-read book" by Maclean's. Featuring stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Startling, suspenseful, deeply humane yet alert to the undertow of our darker instincts, the eight stories in Animal Person illuminate what it means to exist in the perilous space between desire and action, and to have your faith in what you hold true buckle and give way. A petty argument between two sisters is interrupted by an unexpected visitor. Adjoining motel rooms connect a family on the brink of a new life with a criminal whose legacy will haunt them for years to come. A connoisseur of other people’s secrets is undone by what he finds in a piece of lost luggage. In the wake of a tragic accident, a young man must contend with what is owed to the living and to the dead. And in the O. Henry Award-winning story “Lagomorph,” a man’s relationship with his family’s long-lived pet rabbit opens up to become a profound exploration of how a marriage fractures. Muscular and tender, beautifully crafted, and alive with an elemental power, these stories explore the struggle for meaning and connection in an age when many of us feel cut off from so much, not least ourselves. This is a collection that beats with raw emotion and shimmers with the complexity of our shared human experience, and it confirms Alexander MacLeod’s reputation as a modern master of the short story.
Download or read book Borders written by Thomas King and published by Little, Brown Ink. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Magazine Best Book Fall 2021 From celebrated Indigenous author Thomas King and award-winning Métis artist Natasha Donovan comes a powerful graphic novel about a family caught between nations. Borders is a masterfully told story of a boy and his mother whose road trip is thwarted at the border when they identify their citizenship as Blackfoot. Refusing to identify as either American or Canadian first bars their entry into the US, and then their return into Canada. In the limbo between countries, they find power in their connection to their identity and to each other. Borders explores nationhood from an Indigenous perspective and resonates deeply with themes of identity, justice, and belonging.
