Augustino and the Choir of Destruction PDF Download

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1770890718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

View

Book Description
In Augustino and the Choir of Destrucion literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals. With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single harmonic texture.

Author: Andrew David Irvine
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776627414
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 419

View

Book Description
The definitive bibliography of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Antonine Maillet, Carol Shields, Marie-Claire Blais, Gilles Vigneault... For over three quarters of a century, the Governor General’s Literary Awards have been instrumental in recognizing many of Canada’s best authors, illustrators and translators. The result is impressive: between 1936 and 2017, 705 titles have been recognized with this prestigious award. With careful attention to detail, Andrew Irvine presents the history and evolution of the Awards and extols their importance for the careers of authors, illustrators and translators, as well as for the development of Canada’s national literature. The heart of the book contains the first comprehensive bibliography of the awards, including the first list of winning books organized according to their historically correct award categories; information about five books wrongly omitted from previous lists of winning titles; detailed information about award ceremonies, film adaptations and jury members; and other key information. This is a seminal work that belongs on the shelf of every scholar and every lover of Canadian literature. This book is published in English. - Une bibliographie incontournable des Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général du Canada Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Antonine Maillet, Carol Shields, Marie-Claire Blais, Michael Ondaatje, Gilles Vigneault... Les écrivains canadiens sont depuis longtemps encensés sur la scène nationale comme à l’échelle mondiale, et les Prix du Gouverneur général jouent un rôle clé dans la reconnaissance de certains de nos meilleurs auteurs, illustrateurs et traducteurs. La liste est impressionnante : ce prestigieux prix a récompensé 705 oeuvres entre 1936 et 2017. Avec un souci minutieux au détail, Andrew Irvine présente l’histoire et l’évolution des Prix et vante leurs vertus indispensables à la carrière des écrivains et des traducteurs ainsi que dans l’élaboration d’une littérature nationale au Canada. Cette bibliographie est la toute première recension complète des Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général et donne des renseignements détaillés au sujet des cérémonies, des adaptations cinématographiques, des membres des jurys ainsi que d’autres informations clés. Le livre présente aussi une copie exhaustive et exacte de données bibliographiques tirées d’archives, une première dans le monde de l’édition. En somme, une référence incontournable. Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887848257
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

View

Book Description
With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces, Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais’ writing has acquired a new, buoyant, electrifying rhythm — a rhythm described as "the heartbeat of the world." As we follow a central character named Rebecca, the voice in the novel becomes the voice of the world inventing itself, and the future playing itself out. Here Nigel Spencer, Marie-Claire Blais’ longtime translator, gives us Blais’ singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487004591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

View

Book Description
The first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’ prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore. Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais’ masterful series won the Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais’ novel to life for English-speaking readers. A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past and an uncertain future, between the beauty of the world and the horrors of history. During her time here, Renata becomes tormented by thirst — for justice, for pleasure, for intoxication — while all around her, festivities are going on in joint celebration of the birth of baby Vincent and the end of the twentieth century. Over the course of three days and three nights a flock of characters assembles — an entire spectrum of humanity is depicted in the grip of doubt and suffering. In this swirling, baroque fresco, Marie-Claire Blais captures the essence of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 177089196X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

View

Book Description
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award: Translation. Shortlisted for the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation. In Mai at the Predators' Ball, Marie-Claire Blais, literary legend and four-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, offers a mesmerizing and unforgettable portrait of imaginary beings who seem to embrace the whole of humanity. Every night in the Saloon, after darkness falls, a group of boys are transformed into creatures we see only in dreams. They adorn themselves in colourful dresses and wigs and they take to the stage to sing and dance. They open their arms to those who are excluded -- both men and women, triumphant and threatened, both free and bound -- and every evening is a carnival of freedom and transgression. With this masterful novel, Blais invites us to share the drama of perfect joy, the tragedy of happiness, and she gives us her best work yet.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 177089358X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

View

Book Description
In the latest installment in her award-winning series, Marie-Claire Blais reintroduces us to Petites Cendres, familiar from other books in the cycle, and lets us into the lives of two other unforgettable characters. She shows us, once again, how creativity and hope and suffering and exclusion intersect. There is the writer who is stranded in an airport of the South Island, he is held captive because of a delayed flight. And a teenage musician, a former child prodigy living on the streets with his dog, wonders where he will get his next meal. Then there is Petites Cendres, who no longer dances or sings and refuses to get out of bed to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Night. By superimposing these three worlds, Blais continues her ambitious, compelling exploration of life in contemporary North America

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487004265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

View

Book Description
The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition. Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled. Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first. This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487002491
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215

View

Book Description
The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined. Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done? In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487000189
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

View

Book Description
What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal? With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

Author: Marie-Claire Blais
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487006330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description
The ninth novel in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s extraordinary Soifs cycle, Songs for Angel is an impassioned interrogation of violence and hate that takes us into the soul of a white supremacist on the verge of a racist attack. In the penultimate installment of the magnificent and ambitious Soifs cycle, widely regarded as one of the most original and ambitious endeavors ever to be undertaken in contemporary literature, renowned novelist Marie-Claire Blais once again marries the highest artistic standards with the most pressing human and political concerns. Revisiting figures from the previous novels in a swirling fresco of more than a hundred characters, Blais also takes us into the soul of “the Young Man,” a white supremacist preparing to attack a Black church and murder its entire congregation. This is an extraordinary portrait of the times that jostles and discomboluates the reader while inviting us to see the world in all its injustice and distress, but also its promise and beauty. Songs for Angel reminds us that Blais is a writer who never ceases to situate us in the world and the roles we play in it, and that reading her is always an unforgettable human experience.