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Six Days. Five Inmates. One Guard. Traversing the vast, serene wilderness in Northern Saskatchewan, a group of prisoners sets out on a six day canoe trip. Quinn, an inmate trustee, has been recruited for the pilot project meant to physically and emotionally challenge a small set of inmates about to be released after long terms inside for violent crimes. Their leader, Leggett, only thinks he’s in charge. Inviting along a new parole officer, Martha, and her teenage son, Brian, is just the first of his mistakes. An insect plague of biblical proportions has taken over the north country, and the inmates have always had a secret plan. The river quickly becomes a place of reckoning. Except for Qu...
Punctuate his title as you like but T.F. Rigelhof considers This is Our Writing a declaration, an enquiry and an exclamation. As a writer of half a dozen, a reviewer of dozens upon dozens, and as a reader of a multitude more books, Terry Rigelhof knows much about writing in Canada. In these eleven essays, he asks what is best in what has been written by Canadians in the twentieth century. He examines selected works of some writers whose accomplishments need serious revaluation. What are the real achievements of Robertson Davies, Carole Corbeil, Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Hugh Hood, Leonard Cohen and George Grant? Rigelhof comes up with a list that will surprise some and dismay others. ...
The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers.20 represents the best of the best—one story from each of the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and original characters, settings, and emotions, charting the evolution of the short story over the past two decades. One of the most p...
The characters in Jane McCafferty’s Director of the World and Other Stories are often distanced, lonely, or displaced from others and the events around them, yet they are almost always ready to act, to become involved with others, and to change. In “Eyes of Others,” a woman, stopping with her family at a Howard Johnson’s during a trip, becomes fascinated by the meeting of two strangers and attempts to connect with them as she has been unable to connect with her own family. Implicit in these stories is a rootlessness that gives way to yearning and a passion for remembering. In the title story, a disturbed child, whose father has recently abandoned the family, attempts, in language reflecting her shattered sense of the world, to recapture some of their last experiences together. These characters, and others in the collection, attempt to make sense of their broken lives and shattered thoughts. As John Wideman writes of the stories, there is “a sense of commitment to the struggle of making silent worlds speak, of forcing what is threatening or evil or destructive into some form we can see and conjure with.”
Six Days. Five Inmates. One Guard.Traversing the vast, serene wilderness in Northern Saskatchewan as part of a "pre-release canoe trip", run as a pilot project in hopes of preparing five future ex-convicts for life in the real world, no one knows quite what to expect. But what follows in this novel is anything but serene. The rules dictating prison life are a hard habit to break as each inmate struggles with his own place in the group, and each one tries to figure out his first real-world steps after being released. Some ideas are more legal than others.By the end of day six, the men find themselves grappling with violence, mutiny, and a plot to harvest and sell drugs down the river, all of which echoes off the incessant buzzing that surrounds them as thousands of mysterious insects follow along in the forest, destroying anything they come across - plants, animals, even humans...
The more than 175 biographies in this volume together tell the story of writing in Saskatchewan. As David Carpenter notes in his Introduction to the volume: "The writers whose lives are told in these pages are part of an extraordinary cultural community that has touched and been touched by the people and landscape of this province."
Geoffrey Becker's Dangerous Men was selected by Charles Baxter as the winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His manuscript was selected from nearly three hundred submitted by published writers.In these tightly drafted stories, Becker creates a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd stettings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one's place in the world. "It was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I'd been grasping all along," the music-student narrator of "Dangerous Men" says after an evening involving drugs, a fight, and a car accident, "the...
Rachel Dilworth received her MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis and her BA from Yale. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, AGNI Online, American Literary Review, Chautauqua, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland for creative writing, a Jack Straw Writers Program residency, Yale's Clapp Fellowship for poetry, scholarship support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Dorothy Prize, and other awards.
A landmark special edition celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Journey Prize. Since its inception in 1989, the Journey Prize anthology has been widely celebrated for introducing readers to a who’s-who of up-and-coming Canadian literary voices, many of whom have gone on to become some of our most beloved writers. This special thirty-fifth-anniversary edition of Canada’s most prestigious annual fiction anthology gathers thirty-one timeless stories from throughout the prize’s history—some contemporary classics, some hidden gems—as chosen by two modern masters of the short story, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Alexander MacLeod, who are themselves previous Journey Prize contributors. ...
The stories in this extraordinary collection are set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the center for more than thirty years of fighting between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown. Cornell is not preoccupied, however, with the details of the war. Her stories explore the emotional and psychological consequences of the struggle to endure not only violence, but loss, failure, and the inability to believe.