Light Shining Out of Darkness

Light Shining Out of Darkness
Author: Hugh Hood
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1771961899

Like the paintings of Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper, Hugh Hood’s short fiction looks hard at what some might call the surface of things. Like the finely wrought realism of those canvases, Hood’s super-realist style doesn’t just see—it sees into. While his early publications prompted his reputation as an originator of Canadian modernism, Hood’s work taken as a whole reveals a philosophy far older: that of the allegorist. Like Dante’s pilgrim, Hood’s narrator finds spiritual truths in recognizable forms, affirming again and again the imagination’s capacity for penetrating insight and the transcendental potential of art. As he wrote in 1971, “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subjects. I hope my gaze has helped to light them up.” With a foreword by John Metcalf, Light Shining Out of Darkness collects twenty-five of the best stories by this modern master of the form, whose sensibility set him apart from the writers of his generation and continues to distinguish his oeuvre as among the 20th century’s most enduring. Best understood as a suite of modern meditations, seemingly quotidian explorations of salvation, temptation, and damnation in an irreligious world, Hood balances insight into human failing with compassion for our shared condition.

Out of Darkness, Shining Light

Out of Darkness, Shining Light
Author: Petina Gappah
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982110341

A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.

God's Plenty

God's Plenty
Author: W. J. Keith
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1926845838

A companion volume to Canadian Odyssey: A Reading of Hugh Hood's The New Age, God's Plenty surveys the short fiction of the writer dubbed Canada's Proust. Hugh Hood, an unparalleled stylist, was equally accomplished in short forms and long: this straight-talking assessment of Hood's stories is thorough, insightful, readable, and profound. With its story-by-story breakdown and rigorous engagement with Hood's technique, God's Plenty offers an excellent introduction not just to an undersung master, but to the art of short fiction full stop. W.J. Keith is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

The Canadian Short Story

The Canadian Short Story
Author: John Metcalf
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 177196085X

No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be far less without his efforts. Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, Metcalf’s magisterial The Canadian Short Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List, Metcalf’s critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its author’s most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us all.

A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance
Author: Rohinton Mistry
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 834
Release: 2010-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1551991381

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel
Author: Margaret Laurence
Publisher: New Canadian Library
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2010-10-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1551993775

The film adaptation of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, starring acclaimed actresses Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Page, and introducing Christine Horne, opens in theatres May 9, 2008. This special fortieth-anniversary edition of Margaret Laurence’s most celebrated novel will introduce readers again to one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Hagar Shipley is stubborn, querulous, self-reliant, and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her, she makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence. As her story unfolds, we are drawn into her past. We meet Hagar as a young girl growing up in a black prairie town; as the wife of a virile but unsuccessful farmer with whom her marriage was stormy; as a mother who dominates her younger son; and, finally, as an old woman isolated by an uncompromising pride and by the stern virtues she has inherited from her pioneer ancestors. Vivid, evocative, moving, The Stone Angel celebrates the triumph of the spirit, and reveals Margaret Laurence at the height of her powers as a writer of extraordinary craft and profound insight into the workings of the human heart.

Shut Up He Explained

Shut Up He Explained
Author: John Metcalf
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2007-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1897231741

John Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained defies expectations and strict definition. Part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism -- wholly Metcalf -- it is thoughtful, engaged, contentious and often very funny. It offers a full does of Metcalfian wisdom and wit, and provides ample evidence that neither age nor indifference nor attack have withered him: he remains as sharp, critical, constructive and insightful as ever. Indeed, this may just be his most important and engaged book. Certainly it will be among his most controversial. What his critics will refuse to see, of course, is that it is also among his most positive, that it is a celebration of the best literature Canada has to offer, the birth of which Metcalf himself both witnesses and actively encouraged. Shut Up He Explained is magisterial, a virtuoso performance melding several seemingly different strands into one coherent narrative, which should delight and entertain as it serves to argue, elucidate and celebrate.