Nowhere, Exactly

Nowhere, Exactly
Author: M.G. Vassanji
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385697732

From one of Canada's most celebrated writers, two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, comes a thoughtful meditation on what it means to belong in the world. Home is never a single place, entirely and unequivocally. It is contingent. The abstract "nowhere," then, is the true home. M.G. Vassanji has been exploring the immigrant experience for over three decades, drawing deeply on his own transnational upbringing and intimate understanding of the unique challenges and perspectives born from leaving one's home to resettle in a new land. The question of identity, of how to configure and see oneself within this new land, is one such challenge faced. But Vassanji suggests that a more fundamental and slippery endeavour than establishing one's identity is how, if ever, we can establish a sense of belonging. Can we ever truly belong in this new home? Did we ever truly belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? For many, the answer is nowhere exactly. Combining brilliant prose, thoughtful, candid observation, and a lifetime of exploring how we as individuals are shaped by the places and communities in which we live and the history that haunts them, Nowhere, Exactly examines with exquisite sensitivity the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, guilt and hope felt by so many of those who leave their homes in search of new ones.

Out of Nowhere Into Nothing

Out of Nowhere Into Nothing
Author: Caryl Pagel
Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1573661864

Essays on the apparitional, the incomprehensible, and the paranormal in conversation with art, travel, and storytelling The ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives are present in this collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder. Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.

Movies Showing Nowhere

Movies Showing Nowhere
Author: Yorik Goldewijk
Publisher: Pushkin Children's Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1782694110

A prizewinning middle grade fantasy adventure about memories, loss and time travel. ‘Strikingly original…A sensational book…The final, emotional twist is like a kick in the solar plexus…but in a good way’—The Guardian On the day Cato came into the world, her mother left it. Cato's dad has been a mere shadow of a person ever since, and Cato has given up reaching out to him. When she finds a mysterious card from an abandoned movie theatre and discovers it has reopened, Cato decides to go take a look. There appears to be something strange about the cinema. The movies showing there are no ordinary movies and somehow the cinema seems to be in connection with the past... Looking for adventure and the truth about her mother, Cato is swept into a dangerous journey through time and memories, straight to a place deep within her heart. A place she had always managed to keep locked away. And then she faces a choice that will change her life, and that of her father, forever.