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Peculiar Lessons
Shortlisted for the 2021 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-FictionPart memoir, part social history, this collection of ten essays explores the various physical and natural elements that form the backdrop to Braun's memories of growing up mid-20th century on a farm in southern Manitoba. From blackboard chalk to curling rocks in the chapter on stone, from mirages to straight-line winds in the essay on light and air, she reflects on her interactions with the elements as a child and how her responses influenced her evolution into adulthood. Braun includes intriguing tidbits about the science and history behind each element as it pertains to life in her unique location on our planet. The book highlights the value and beauty of the simple components of our surroundings that we take for granted growing up, exposes their true complexity, and reveals how the fascination with a "simple" thing can become a lifelong pursuit that sustains one's artistic and spiritual needs.
The Penance Drummer
Short story specialist Lois Braun returns with a new collection, The Penance Drummer. With her remarkable eye for detail, Braun keenly observes the subtle dynamics and complexities of family relationships. In "Assassins" a teenage girl copes with her three quarrelsome aunts and confronts the serious illness of her uncle as she learns that the world around her is always changing. In "Goldie" a listless young married woman fixates on the woman, and her property, to spark her own life. "In The Half-Town Folly", an artless big city man accompanies his ne'er-do-well brother and a shifty ex-con companion as they attempt the perfect crime when what he really dreams about is his own camper and a cross-country escape. The title story reveals how a long-married couple achieve an epiphany, and a renewal, at a bus stop in Victoria. With The Penance Drummer, Lois Braun begins in rural Manitoba and opens up a whole world.
The Montreal Cats
Braun's third collection of short fiction again reveals the unseen--the secret exceptions to the everyday hidden behind closed doors and inside her characters' collective unconscious."Lois Braun is a writer in the lineage of Flannery O'Connor."--Rudy Wiebe, author of Scorched Wood People and The Mad Trapper"There is often an element of mystery in Braun's stories, an eerie feeling that some things are unknowable... she writes with assurance and poise."--William French, The Globe and Mail
A Stone Watermelon
These unsentimental, passionate stories of modern rural life were nominated for the 1986 Governor General's Award. Retired farmers cruise and booze around the countryside; a farm wife contemplates an affair with the hired hand; a cropduster opens the No Place Bar and Grill."... a diamond hard realism and authenticity."--Books in Canada
The Pumpkin-eaters
These stories display again Braun's skill at evoking haunting images which recall a vanishing prairie ethos."Braun's tales are peopled with characters who, in an instant, turn the world upside down or make a reader stop to contemplate human nature."--Small Press Magazine
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Hochstadt Village, Kleinstadt School District Memories and Histories
"Kleinstadt history project spans the years 1880, when the first Mennonite immigrants settled there, until approximately 1967, when the school and the official Kleinstadt School District #781 closed ... The mandate of the project was to both record the history of this particular community, and to capture its culture, and so includes many photographs and memoirs that aim to achieve both goals"--page vii.
After Identity
For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity interrogates this prolonged preoccupation and explores the potential to move beyond it to a truly post-identity Mennonite literature. The twelve essays collected here view Mennonite writing as transitioning beyond a tradition concerned primarily with defining itself and its cultural milieu. What this means for the future of Mennonite literature and its attendant criticism is the question at the heart of this volume. Contributors explore the histories and contexts—as well as the gaps—that have informed and diverted the perennial focus on identity in Mennonite literature, even as that identity is reread, reframed, and expanded. After Identity is a timely reappraisal of the Mennonite literature of Canada and the United States at the very moment when that literature seems ready to progress into a new era. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Ervin Beck, Di Brandt, Daniel Shank Cruz, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Royden Loewen, Jesse Nathan, Magdalene Redekop, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Paul Tiessen.
