Download or read book Lullabies for Little Criminals written by Heather O'Neill and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A beautiful book. . . . There are phrases in here that will make you laugh out loud, and others that will stop your heart. A definite triumph.” — David Rakoff, author of Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish From Heather O'Neill, the Giller-shortlisted author of Daydreams of Angels and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, a heartbreaking and wholly original novel about a young girl fighting to preserve a bruised innocence on the feral streets of a big city Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father Jules is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance. Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl; he wants her body and soul—and what the johns don’t take he covets for himself. At the same time, a tender and naively passionate friendship unfolds with a boy from her class at school, who has no notion of the dark claims on her—which even her father, lost on the nod, cannot totally ignore. Jules consigns her to a stint in juvie hall, and for the moment this perceived betrayal preserves Baby from terrible harm—but after that, her salvation has to be her own invention. Channeling the artlessly affecting voice of her thirteen-year-old heroine with extraordinary accuracy and power, O’Neill’s dazzles with a novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets—and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for survival.

Download or read book The Girl Who Was Saturday Night written by Heather O'Neill and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An enchanting story of twins, fame, and heartache by the much-praised author of Lullabies for Little Criminals"--

Download or read book Daydreams of Angels written by Heather O'Neill and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventive, outlandish, and tender fairy tales from a bestselling author The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transformed the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She described the smallest of things—a stray cat or a second-hand coat—with an intensity that made them otherworldly. In Daydreams of Angels, O'Neill's first collection of short stories, she gives free reign to her imaginative gifts. In "The Ugly Ducklings," generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In "Dear Piglet," a teenaged cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood—fairy tales, storybooks, Bible stories—to uncover the deepest truths of family life.

Download or read book The Lonely Hearts Hotel written by Heather O'Neill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE BOSTON GLOBE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "So filled with vivid descriptions and complex characters that the reader's experience is virtually cinematic. . . Utterly compelling." – The Washington Post From the author of When We Lost Our Heads, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans – in love with each other since they can remember – whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future. The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins. It might also take true love. Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen. Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes – after years of searching and desperate poverty – the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same. With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O’Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.

Download or read book When We Lost Our Heads written by Heather O'Neill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.” Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and intensity, Marie and Sadie attract and repel each other in ways that thrill them both. Their games soon become tinged with risk, even violence. Forced to separate by the adults around them, they spend years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity. And when a singular event brings them back together, the dizzying effects will upend the city. Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal’s wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender, sex, desire, class, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can’t let someone go.

Download or read book Two Eyes are You Sleeping written by Heather O'Neill and published by DC Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length collection of poems by Heather O'Neill, a writer and performer living in Montreal. two eyes are you sleeping is a linked collection of personal and political lyrics, written in a voice that reflects both the rootlessness and violence of the urban landscape and a metaphorical brilliance that transforms the ordinary into the visionary. These are poems of the street, poems of defenselessness, strength, perversity and generosity, poems of drug addicts, alcoholics, con-men and sexual adventurers, poems to shout out in the bathtub with the radio blaring out the song you loved when you were fourteen. Most of all they are about growing up human in the drab beauty of the city.

Download or read book A Complicated Kindness written by Miriam Toews and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award In this stunning coming-of-age novel, the award-winning author of Women Talking balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart. “Brilliant.” —New York Times Book Review “A darkly funny and provocative novel.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

Download or read book Wisdom in Nonsense written by Heather O'Neill and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I broke all the rules that my dad gave me. It was he who had given me, in part, the confidence to think of my life as being worthy to mix with those of the geniuses. —Heather O’Neill With generosity and wry humour, novelist Heather O’Neill recalls several key lessons she learned in childhood from her father: memories and stories about how crime does pay, why one should never keep a diary, and that it is good to beware of clowns, among other things. Her father and his eccentric friends—ex-bank robbers and homeless men—taught her that everything she did was important, a belief that she has carried through her life. O’Neill’s intimate recollections make Wisdom in Nonsense the perfect companion to her widely praised debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals (HarperCollins).

Download or read book French Exit written by Patrick deWitt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND LUCAS HEDGES A tragedy of manners from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers 'My favourite book of his yet' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette 'Pure joy' Mail on Sunday 'Buoyantly insane' New Yorker Frances Price is in dire straits. Scandals swirl around the recently widowed New York socialite, and her adult-aged, toddler-brained son Malcolm is no help. Cutting their losses, they grab their cat, Small Frank, and head for the exit. Paris becomes the backdrop for a giddy drive to self-destruction, helped along by a cast of singularly curious characters. Brimming with pathos, warmth and wit, French Exit is a riotous send-up of high society and a moving story of mothers and sons.

Download or read book Bone and Bread written by Saleema Nawaz and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia. When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son. Saleema Nawaz's characters compel us, intrigue us, and delight us with their raw, complicated humanity, and her sentences sing in the gorgeous cadences of a writer who chooses every word with the utmost care. Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

Download or read book Whiskey Words a Shovel III written by r.h. Sin and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: r.h. Sin’s final volume in the Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel series expands on the passion and vigor of his first two installments. His stanzas inspire strength through the raw, emotional energy and the vulnerability of his poems. Relationships, love, pain, and fortitude are powerfully rendered in his poetry, and his message of perseverance in the face of emotional turmoil cuts to the heart of modern-day life. At roughly 300 pages, this culminating volume will be his lengthiest yet.

Download or read book Bottle Rocket Hearts written by Zoe Whittall and published by Cormorant Books. This book was released on 2007-04-14 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to ’90s Montreal. It’s been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. Revolution seems possible to eighteen-year-old Eve, who is pining to get out of her parent’s house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della: ten years older, mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, and an avid separatist. Their explosive beginning and volatile relationship paves a path for the personal and political to collide on the night of the referendum.

Download or read book Observatory Mansions written by Edward Carey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Easily the most brilliant fiction I've seen this year -- it proves the potential brilliance of the novel form." -- John Fowles, author of The Magus Observatory Mansions, once the Orme family's magnificent ancestral home set on beautiful grounds, is now a crumbling apartment block stranded on a traffic island, peopled with eccentrics. Thirty-seven-year-old Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions with his peculiar parents and a collection of misfits. By day he is a street performer, earning money as "a statue of whiteness" in the park, wearing white gloves to ensure that his skin never touches anything. He steals items for his museum of significant objects (996 in all), not for their monetary value but because they have been loved, often bringing grief to their erstwhile owners. His bedridden mother, Alice, who has created for herself an alternative time frame called "fiction," and his father, Francis, are among the occupants set apart from the rest of the busy city by their histories, their memories, and their relationships with the other seven inhabitants of the flats. Each of the house dwellers has his or her own story, as seen through Francis's eyes, and the careful routine and harmony of the house are shaken when along comes a new resident, the half-blind, vulnerable Anna Tap. She is sympathetic and resourceful, and slowly the desperately lonely residents begin to open up their long-closed hearts. As the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions begins to shift, Francis finds himself having to protect the secrets of his past and the sanctity of his collection, while growing emotionally closer to Anna. Hailed as no less than a tour de force, Observatory Mansions is a debut novel of immense originality--a strangely haunting landscape occupied by compelling and unforgettable characters.

Download or read book Sharp Edges written by Leah Mol and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of My Dark Vanessa and Lullabies for Little Criminals, this important, electrifying novel about the agony and exhilaration of being a teenage girl will challenge you, unsettle you and ask you to look at your own experiences with perversions of power. Katie is used to being let down. Her best friend abandoned her for a boy, her mom is a hypochondriac who spends most days on the couch, and the guys at school can do whatever they want while the girls are stuck following the rules. All Katie wants is to be seen. So when she finds an online world where women aren't ashamed of what they want and consent doesn't feel like the grey area she's used to, she thinks she's finally in control. But as Katie becomes more and more enmeshed in this virtual playground, she begins to realize her newfound power may just be an illusion. Sharp Edges is the story of a girl lost in a grown-up world far darker than she could have imagined—searching for someone to guide her to a place where she can be sixteen again.

Download or read book We Only Know So Much written by Elizabeth Crane and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A funny and moving debut novel that follows four generations of a singularly weird American family, all living under one roof, as each member confronts a moment of crisis in a narrative told through a uniquely quirky, charming, and unforgettable voice. Acclaimed short story writer Elizabeth Crane, well known to public radio listeners for her frequent and captivating contributions to WBEZ Chicago’s Writer’s Block Party, delivers a sublime, poignant, and often hilarious first novel, perfect for fans of Jessica Anya Blau’s The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals. “Crane has a distinctive and eccentric voice that is consistent and riveting.” —New York Times Book Review

Download or read book A is for Artisanal written by Matthew Goldenberg and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Alphabet Book for the Hip, Modern Baby.

Download or read book Lullabies for Little Criminals written by Heather O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 2007-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: