Books : Literature & Fiction : World Literature : Canadian : Poetry : Poets, A-Z

DIVISADERO

MICHAEL ONDAATJE
The English Patient-Rack Size

Michael Ondaatje
Book of Longing

Leonard Cohen

Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is one of the legendary writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Book of Longing is his dazzling new collection of poetry -- twenty years in the making -- written on southern California's Mount Baldy and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. Following his highly acclaimed 1984 publication, Book of Mercy, and containing Cohen's own playful and provocative line drawings, Book of Longing brings together all the elements that have elevated Leonard Cohen's artistry to worldwide recognition.
The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje
Running in the Family

Michael Ondaatje

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
Beautiful Losers

Leonard Cohen
Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje
Autobiography of Red : A Novel in Verse

Anne Carson
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

Leonard Cohen

For the first time in paperback--the selected work of the legendary singer, poet, and performer. Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including 11 previously unpublished poems--and demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.
Emily Climbs (New Canadian Library)

L.M. Montgomery

In the second volume of the celebrated Emily trilogy, Lucy Maud Montgomery traces the often stormy course of Emily Starr’s life as she moves from the world of childhood into that of school and adolescence.

Emily Climbs unsentimentally reveals the world of the young as it really is – with its great moments of unalloyed wonder and joy, as well as its cruelty and suffering.

Along with Emily of New Moon and Emily’s Quest, Emily Climbs is a vivid, heartfelt portrait of youth and the road to maturity.
Book of Mercy

Leonard Cohen
Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.
Dance Me to the End of Love (Art & Poetry)

Leonard Cohen
In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (New York Review Books Classics)

Euripides

Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. “Euripides,” the classicist Bernard Knox has written, “was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.” His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless—women and children, slaves and barbarians—for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides’ plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides’ latest tragedies.

Four of those tragedies are here presented in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” and “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra.”
Let Us Compare Mythologies

Leonard Cohen

Published in 1956 when he was twenty-two years old, Let Us Compare Mythologies is Leonard Cohen's first book. Long out of print, it is now available exactly as it appeared fifty years ago as one of the four hundred copies published by the McGill Poetry Series in Canada, with its original cover and illustrations by Canadian artist Freda Guttman.
The Favorite Game

Leonard Cohen

In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal. Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling colour – a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands, and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.

From the Paperback edition.
Eros the Bittersweet

Anne Carson

A book about love as seen by the ancients, Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly interesting, Eros is an utterly original book by an author whose acclaim has been steadily growing since the book was first published in 1986 by Johns Hopkins.
Cinnamon Peeler, The

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s new selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Michael Ondaatje

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel, a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth, about William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid, " a bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint. "Ondaatje's language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets."--Annie Dillard.