| SEPTEMBER 2008 |
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The English Major
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison has been called "a writer with immortality in him," by London's Sunday Times, and the New York Times Book Review has written that "[his] storytelling instincts are nearly flawless." Harrison's last novel, Returning to Earth, was one of his most praised in years, hailed by The Plain Dealer as "an artistic achievement worthy of Faulkner." Now Harrison gives us The English Major, a wryly funny novel that sparkles with the generous humanity of his vision.
"It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't." With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixtysomething man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the fifty states and a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them. Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student to a "snake farm " in Arizona owned by an old classmate to the highoctane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco.
The English Major is the map of a man's journey into -- and out of -- himself, and it is vintage Harrison -- reflective and replete with wicked wit.
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Payback
Margaret Atwood
The most prestigious and eagerly anticipated nonfiction series of the year teams up with legendary poet, novelist, and essayist Margaret Atwood to deliver a surprising look at the topic of debt - a timely subject during our current period of economic upheaval, caused by the collapse of a system of interlocking debts. In her wide ranging, entertaining, and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that debt is like air - something we take for granted until things go wrong. And then, while gasping for breath, we become very interested in it.
Payback is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon these subjects. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By investigating how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day through the stories we tell each other, through our concepts of "balance," "revenge," and "sin," and in the way we form our social relationships, Atwood shows that the idea of what we owe one another - in other words, "debt" - is built into the human imagination and is one of its most dynamic metaphors.
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| OCTOBER 2008 |
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Great Expectations
Dede Crane and Lisa Moore
In this exceptional collection of original essays, twenty-four celebrated writers share a most intimate and life-changing experience: giving birth. Uniquely honest and transformative, Great Expectations takes the reader on an emotional and physical journey like no other: Lynn Coady relates the painful memory of her teenage pregnancy and the anguish of having to give up her newborn for adoption; Peter Behrens expresses a father's feeling of utter helplessness and incomparable joy during the birth of his first child; Christy Ann Conlin describes pregnancy at age forty; Afua Cooper reflects upon the immigrant's experience of three pregnancies and childbirths in a new land with evolving customs; Anne Fleming chooses a male donor with her samesex partner; and Jaclyn Moriarty transcribes her grandmother's and her mother's birth stories, along with her own, to create a tender oral history spanning three generations.
Edited by master storyteller Dede Crane and award-winning author Lisa Moore, both of whom contribute their own stories, Great Expectations is a must-have collection for parents and parents-to-be.
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More Lost Massey Lectures
CBC Massey Lectures Series
Introduction by Bernie Lucht
The CBC Massey Lectures are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. This second volume of recovered lectures features:
- Nobel Peace Prize recipient Willy Brandt on the dangerous inequities between developing and industrialized nations in Dangers and Options: The Matter of World Survival;
- George Grant on the worsening predicament of the West through an examination of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche in Time as History;
- Claude Lévi-Strauss on the nature and role of myth in human history in Myth and Meaning;
- Frank Underhill on the deficiencies of the Canadian constitution in The Image of Confederation;
- Barbara Ward, in the very first Massey Lecture, on the origin and predicament of underdeveloped countries in The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations.
More Lost Massey Lectures includes an introduction by veteran CBC producer Bernie Lucht, who has been the executive producer of Ideas and the Massey Lectures since 1984.
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Our Lady of Pain
Elena Forbes
On a snowy February morning, London art dealer Rachel Tenison goes for a jog through Holland Park. Still giddy from the previous evening, her legs wobbly from too much drink and too little sleep, she trips and falls at the bottom of an icy hill. Lying on her back, enjoying the sensation of snowflakes melting on her skin, she savours the unexpected stillness of the moment. But then there's the sharp crack of a tree branch close behind her, followed by a voice, softly calling her name.
Two days later, when Rachel's naked, frozen body is discovered in the park, bound and arranged in a strangely symbolic manner, detectives Mark Tartaglia and Sam Donovan are assigned the case. Still haunted by "The Bridegroom," a chillingly seductive serial killer with a penchant for lonely girls and deadly heights, they're forced to put the past behind them as they try to uncover the identity of Rachel's murderer. But when a tip from a journalist draws their attention to similarities between this murder and an unsolved crime committed the year before, the web becomes more tangled than ever.
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Valmiki's Daughter
Shani Mootoo
In Valmiki's Daughter, Giller Prize finalist and bestselling novelist Shani Mootoo returns to some of the themes she first explored in her breakout book, Cereus Blooms at Night. The story circles around a well-to-do Trinidadian family, in particular, Valmiki, a renowned doctor and loving if confused father, and his youngest daughter, Viveka, lively, intelligent, and intent on escaping the gilded cage that protects but also smothers her. Father and daughter conceal painful secrets about their sexual identities, and it is Viveka's struggle to discover the truth about herself that threatens to unmask her father and shake the foundations of her family and her delicately calibrated society.
Mootoo writes with an unusual combination of clear-eyed affection and expansive humanity about society and its hierarchies, peeling back layers of prejudice and exposing the complex interaction of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Discerning but non-judgmental, she eases us deep into the fascinating lives of her characters and creates a juicy, sexy, beautiful book, full of the vigorous stuff of life alongside a yearning for transcendence.
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