You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In the modern era, children experiencing grief were encouraged to dry their tears and ‘be good soldiers.’ How was this phenomenon interrogated and deconstructed in the period's literature? Be a Good Soldier initiates conversation on the figure of the child in modernist novels, investigating the demand for emotional suppression as manifested later in cruelty and aggression in adulthood. Jennifer Margaret Fraser provides sophisticated close readings of key works by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, among others who share striking concerns about the concept of infantry — both as a collection of infants, and as foot soldiers of war. A phenomenon associated traditionally with Freud, Fraser instead uses a unique, Derridean theoretical prism to provide new ways of understanding modernist concerns with power dynamics, knowledge, and meaning. Be a Good Soldier establishes a pioneering, nuanced vocabulary for further historical and cultural inquiries into modernist childhood.
A family is only as functional as its parts. Humorous and heartbreaking, wise and demented, Every Happy Family explores the colourful n and sometimes repurposed n fabric of the Wright family. The stories mark turning points in the lives of the individual family members, as well as in their relationships with each other. Married parents Jill and Les are the warp of the Wright family tapestry n Jill beginning to lose her mother to Alzheimer's, Les diagnosed with a cancer he initially keeps secret from their children. Each family member's thread unravels from the others, as older son Quinn finds a dangerous way to combat shyness, younger son Beau seeks success and closure at boarding school, and adopted daughter Pema explores her roots. But past and present weave back together and towards the future, as everyone is called home for Les's elife celebration' n his eliving wake'. Alone and together, the Wrights crash along, unable to give up on themselves or each otherOhard as they might try.
A sassy collection of vivid and moving stores portraying edgy modern lives in highly-charged relationships. Not for the faint of heart, Crane's humour has a dark, almost sinister, edge. However, her tired pessimism is tempered with grace and frequent avenues of hope. A profusion of sex delivers surprises, not all of them pleasant. A new father, shopping for groceries with his baby and a hangover, worries that the child may not actually be his. An ultrasound technician, envious of her co-worker's sex life, has an unexpected second encounter with a creepy male patient. The wife of a hockey player is faced with his ambiguous sexuality. A young woman waits her turn at an abortion clinic, harbour...
Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death. Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as a child. In the Slender Margin is an insider's look at an experience that awaits us all, and that is at once deeply fascinating, frightening, and in modern society shunned. The book is an intimate invitation to consider death and our response to it withou...
None
The poems in this collection originated as a response to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing" and metamorphosed into poetic responses to quotations and epigraphs on a variety of subjects.
The End of the Ice Age brings together thirteen tales of hardscrabble characters in their lonely orbits.