Download or read book Mad Shadows written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by New Canadian Library. This book was released on 1960 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A harrowing pathology of the soul, "Mad Shadows" centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Each character is ultimately annihilated by their own obsessions. Acclaimed and reviled when it exploded on the Quebec literary scene in 1959, "Mad Shadows" initiated a new era in Quebec fiction.
Download or read book These Festive Nights written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’ prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore. Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais’ masterful series won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais’ novel to life for English-speaking readers. A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past and an uncertain future, between the beauty of the world and the horrors of history. During her time here, Renata becomes tormented by thirst — for justice, for pleasure, for intoxication — while all around her, festivities are going on in joint celebration of the birth of baby Vincent and the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of three days and three nights a flock of characters assembles — an entire spectrum of humanity is depicted in the grip of doubt and suffering. In this swirling, baroque fresco, Marie-Claire Blais captures the essence of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.
Download or read book Songs for Angel written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ninth novel in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s extraordinary Soifs cycle, Songs for Angel is an impassioned interrogation of violence and hate that takes us into the soul of a white supremacist on the verge of a racist attack. In the penultimate installment of the magnificent and ambitious Soifs cycle, widely regarded as one of the most original and ambitious endeavors ever to be undertaken in contemporary literature, renowned novelist Marie-Claire Blais once again marries the highest artistic standards with the most pressing human and political concerns. Revisiting figures from the previous novels in a swirling fresco of more than a hundred characters, Blais also takes us into the soul of “the Young Man,” a white supremacist preparing to attack a Black church and murder its entire congregation. This is an extraordinary portrait of the times that jostles and discomboluates the reader while inviting us to see the world in all its injustice and distress, but also its promise and beauty. Songs for Angel reminds us that Blais is a writer who never ceases to situate us in the world and the roles we play in it, and that reading her is always an unforgettable human experience.
Download or read book Deaf to the City written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by Exile Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling story explores the motley crew of characters--including mother-turned-stripper Gloria, alcoholic Tim, frequent jailbird Charlie, and the suicidal wife of a rich doctor--who call the rundown Hôtel des Voyageurs home. Mesmerizing in its passion and humility, the narrative evokes the despair and innocence present in modern urban surroundings.
Download or read book A Season in the Life of Emmanuel written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1980 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her third and most powerful novel, Marie-Claire Blais explores, with sober compassion and realistic detail, a season in the life of Emmanuel, the sixteenth child of a poverty-stricken farmer's family in rural Quebec. First published in 1965, "A Season in the Life of Emmanuel" established Blais's international reputation when it won the Prix France-Quebec and the Prix Medicis of France. The novel has been translated into 13 languages.
Download or read book Mai at the Predators Ball written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2012-06-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award: Translation. Shortlisted for the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation. In Mai at the Predators' Ball, Marie-Claire Blais, literary legend and four-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, offers a mesmerizing and unforgettable portrait of imaginary beings who seem to embrace the whole of humanity. Every night in the Saloon, after darkness falls, a group of boys are transformed into creatures we see only in dreams. They adorn themselves in colourful dresses and wigs and they take to the stage to sing and dance. They open their arms to those who are excluded -- both men and women, triumphant and threatened, both free and bound -- and every evening is a carnival of freedom and transgression. With this masterful novel, Blais invites us to share the drama of perfect joy, the tragedy of happiness, and she gives us her best work yet.
Download or read book A Season in the Life of Emmanuel written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by London : Cape. This book was released on 1967 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marie Claire Blais written by Irene Oore and published by . This book was released on 1998-03 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive reference guide to one of Canada's most distinguished writers. A three-time Governor-General's Award winner, Marie-Claire Blais has changed the literary landscape of the nation. An indispensable source for information on both Blais's works and on the wealth of criticism devoted to the writer, this bibliography also provides accurate and insightful details about manuscript and archival material. Oore and MacLennan have fully annotated all of the critical material concerned with Blais's writing, and their book also includes thorough coverage of Blais-related radio and television broadcasts in France and Canada, as well as a guide to all published interviews with this important writer. An essential text to Blais scholars and of great interest to students and researchers in both Canadian and Québec literature, and in women's studies and comparative literature.
Download or read book Thunder and Light written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2018-08-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition. Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled. Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first. This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.
Download or read book The Angel of Solitude written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight lesbian women strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia and their own pasts and differences are abolished.
Download or read book A Twilight Celebration written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined. Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done? In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.
Download or read book Rebecca Born in the Maelstrom written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces, Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais’ writing has acquired a new, buoyant, electrifying rhythm — a rhythm described as "the heartbeat of the world." As we follow a central character named Rebecca, the voice in the novel becomes the voice of the world inventing itself, and the future playing itself out. Here Nigel Spencer, Marie-Claire Blais’ longtime translator, gives us Blais’ singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.
Download or read book The Acacia Gardens written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2016-06-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal? With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.
Download or read book Second Words written by Margaret Atwood and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifty essays in Second Words span the period from 1962 to 1980 and reveal Margaret Atwood's views on feminism, Canadian literature, the creative process, nationalism, sexism, as well as critical commentary on such writers as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more.
Download or read book Women and Narrative Identity written by Mary Jean Matthews Green and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2001 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A feminist re-reading of the Quebec literary tradition, from Laure Conan and Gabrielle Roy to contemporary figures such as France Théoret and Régine Robin.
Download or read book The Medusa Head written by Mary Meigs and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sensitive psychological portrait of a stormy three-way lesbian relationship.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of French Canadian Short Stories written by Richard Teleky and published by Brantford : W. Ross Macdonald School, 1985. (Toronto : CNIB). This book was released on 1983 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major historical collection of French-Canadian short stories in translation, spanning a century and a half, this anthology offers twenty-two stories that will entertain, charm, and often disturb. At the same time they reveal the development of the French-Canadian short-story form, and present many of the leading writers of French Canada.
