Download or read book Illustrations for Two Novels by Marie Claire Blais written by Mary Meigs and published by Exile Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 1977 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Life Lines written by Bella Brodzki and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography raises a vital issue in feminist critical theory today: the imperative need to situate the female subject. Life/Lines, a collection of essays on women's autobiography, attempts to meet this need.

Download or read book Arrival written by Nick Mount and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2017-09-02 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most important book to be written in more than 40 years about the rise of Canadian literature... Arrival: The Story of CanLit brims and crackles, in equal measure, with information and energy.” — Winnipeg Free Press A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book National Post 99 Best Books of the Year In the mid-twentieth century, Canadian literature transformed from a largely ignored trickle of books into an enormous cultural phenomenon that produced Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler, and so many others. In Arrival, acclaimed writer and critic Nick Mount answers the question: What caused the CanLit Boom? Written with wit and panache, Arrival tells the story of Canada’s literary awakening. Interwoven with Mount’s vivid tale are enlightening mini-biographies of the people who made it happen, from superstars Leonard Cohen and Marie-Claire Blais to lesser-known lights like the troubled and impassioned Harold Sonny Ladoo. The full range of Canada’s literary boom is here: the underground exploits of the blew ointment and Tish gangs; revolutionary critical forays by highbrow academics; the blunt-force trauma of our plain-spoken backwoods poetry; and the urgent political writing that erupted from the turmoil in Quebec. Originally published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, Arrival is a dazzling, variegated, and inspired piece of writing that helps explain how we got from there to here.

Download or read book Francophone Women Coming of Age written by Debra Popkin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book began as a panel of University professors on the theme of Francophone Women, Coming of Age, Memoirs of Childhood and Adolescence, presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, 2006. The essays center on the plight of growing up female in male-dominated Francophone cultures. Issues of culture, tradition, religion (Catholic and Muslim), parental conflicts and sibling rivalry are addressed in the works of authors from France, Quebec, Africa and the Caribbean. Authors whose memoirs and fiction are analyzed in this study span three continents––europe, North America (Quebec and the Caribbean) and Africa––but they share a common search for identity and self-definition.Dr. Beth Gale (Clark University) analyzes role-play and the use of language in the works of Annie Ernaux (France) and Assia Djebar (North Africa). Post-colonial angst and cross-cultural misunderstanding are the focus of the study of Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail (Senegal, West Africa) by Dr. Natalie Edwards (Wagner College). Two chapters focus on Caribbean authors, from Guadeloupe: Dr. Debra Popkin (Baruch College CUNY) analyzes Giséle Pineau's special relationship with grandmother who gave her a sense of cultural identity; Dr. Leah Tolbert Lyons (Middle Tennessee State University) discusses the negative impact of the bad mothering in Myriam Warner-Vieyra's first novel, As the Sorcerer Said ... Three chapters are devoted to writers from French-speaking Canada: Dr. Myrna Delson-Karan (St. John's University) traces the portraits of children and adolescents in the works of Gabrielle Roy; Dr. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey (Kutztown University, Pennsylvania) explores the tormented childhood of Marie-Claire Blais's Pauline Archange; Dr. Edith B. Vandervoort (Defense Language Institute in Monterey) examines the search for identity and tortured father-daughter relationships in the novels of Gabrielle Gourdeau, Monique Proulx, and Marie Laberge (contemporary writers from Quebec), The seven chapters in this book explore the challenges faced by women from late 19th century through the 20th and into the 21st century as they gradually gained a voice to express their changing roles in society. Themes to be examined include sexual awakening, teenage pregnancy, and the rituals of coming of age. Conflicts occur between daughter and parents who inculcate traditional values and try to restrict their child's freedom. The importance of writing as a source of liberation and self-definition will be explored in light of the young girl's quest for freedom. Why write memoirs? Why write in French? These issues are discussed especially in cases where French is the language of the colonizer (Assia Djebar and Giséle Pineau) or where French is essential to the preservation of one's cultural identity, as it is for Quebec writers. This book will be a fine resource for college and university professors and students in programs of French, Women's Studies, and French/Francophone Literature as well as African, Caribbean, and Quebec Studies.

Download or read book Private and Fictional Words Routledge Revivals written by Coral Ann Howells and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1987, this is an introductory study of the most widely read Canadian women novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. At its centre lies the question of how the search for a distinctive cultural identity relates to the need for a national cultural identity in the post-colonial era. Coral Ann Howells argues that Canadian women’s fiction throughout the period of study represents how the Canadian cultural identity exceeds its geographical limits, and those traditional structures of patriarchal authority need revision if women’s alternative views are to be taken into account. Including short biographical sketches and a complete list of the books published by the authors under discussion, writers examined include Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence.

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 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women writers have made significant contributions to Quebec's ongoing process of cultural self-definition. Because the novel has traditionally played a central role in the construction of national identity, Quebec literary history has seen the continued production of identity narratives, which Jacques Godbout calls the "national text." Using the tools of contemporary feminist criticism and building on a tradition of work on Quebec women's writing, Mary Jean Green considers issues of national and cultural self-definition, situating the literary texts of Quebec women within a unique political and historical context while also relating them to the work of women writing in other cultural situations, from nineteenth-century Europe to the postcolonial francophone world.

Download or read book Fifteen Years in Exile written by Barry Callaghan and published by Exile Editions, Ltd.. This book was released on 1992 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 Augustino and the Choir of Destruction written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Augustino and the Choir of Destrucion literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals. With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single harmonic texture.

Download or read book Nothing for You Here Young Man written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2014-05-16 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the latest installment in her award-winning series, Marie-Claire Blais reintroduces us to Petites Cendres, familiar from other books in the cycle, and lets us into the lives of two other unforgettable characters. She shows us, once again, how creativity and hope and suffering and exclusion intersect. There is the writer who is stranded in an airport of the South Island, he is held captive because of a delayed flight. And a teenage musician, a former child prodigy living on the streets with his dog, wonders where he will get his next meal. Then there is Petites Cendres, who no longer dances or sings and refuses to get out of bed to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Night. By superimposing these three worlds, Blais continues her ambitious, compelling exploration of life in contemporary North America

Download or read book A Writer s Life written by The Writers' Trust of Canada and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For anyone who loves great literature -- or aspires to write it -- this is an essential collection, full of insight, wisdom, humour, and candour from Canada's most important and beloved literary figures. For the past twenty-five years, the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual lecture series, the Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture, has invited some of Canada's most prominent authors to discuss the theme of "A Writer's Life" in front of their peers. Hugh MacLennan, Mavis Gallant, Timothy Findley, W.O. Mitchell, Pierre Berton, P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay, Alistair MacLeod, and Margaret Atwood, among others, have shared the personal challenges they faced in forging their own paths as writers, at a time when such a career was still unusual in this country. Intimate, frank, and revealing in tone, their lectures -- collected for the first time in celebration of the series' twenty-fifth anniversary -- provide a unique account of a period when a national writing community was just being formed, and give us unprecedented access to the heroes and heroines of Canadian literature as they share their insights into their work, the profession of writing, the growing canon of our literature, and the cultural history of our country.

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 198 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 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 215 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 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 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 Rebecca Born in the Maelstrom written by Marie-Claire Blais and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2009-09-15 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 (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom), 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 some critics have 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. As the GG jury wrote, this breathtaking paroxysm of a novel turns any commonly held vision of the world upside down. Blais' transcendent prose illuminates her characters with an extraordinary light. Nigel Spencer is Marie-Claire Blais' long-time translator and a Governor General's Award winner for his work on this series of books. He gives us Blais' singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.