Revival: An Anthology of the Best Black Canadian Writing

Book Description

The success of George Elliott Clarke’s anthology Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature, published a decade ago, demonstrated the growing interest in black Canadian writing. In this exciting, provocative new collection, literary journalist Donna Bailey Nurse provides an up-to-date and fresh perspective on this vibrant, significant, and thriving literature.

Drawing on fiction, poetry, and memoir, this anthology brings together an impressively varied selection of outstanding work by both well-known writers and new voices. Donna Bailey Nurse’s lively and invaluable introduction deftly explores the various themes and motifs that define and illuminate the meaning of being black, while tracing the evolution of this influential literature through colonialism, post-colonialism, and decolonization.

This engaging collection celebrates a body of writing that holds an increasingly visible and important place within Canadian literature, and stands among the finest literary anthologies in the country.

Customer Reviews:

An interesting & informatively diverse introduction to the engaging dynamics of twenty-nine contemporary black Canadian writers.......2006-04-06

Revival: An Anthology Of Black Canadian Writing, deftly compiled and edited by literary critic and journalist Donna Bailey Nurse, is an inherently interesting and informatively diverse introduction to the engaging dynamics of twenty-nine contemporary black Canadian writers. Educating its readers on the history and particulars of the cultural influence and timely contribution of Canadian blacks and their progression through a duration of barriers, Revival ably presents the development and expression of black Canadian writing, including themes, motifs, the communities from which it arose, and the exuberant intricacies of adaptation and cultural diversity, drawing from an extraordinary collection of writings, fiction, poetry, memoir, and prose, exclusively found in black Canadian culture. Revival is very highly recommended to all students of the Canadian culture, and most particularly those with an interest in Canadian literature.

Average customer rating:

Disappointing

A Promise Broken

When asked to name my favourite book ever - THIS is it.

One of the Top Five Books I've Ever Read

Impossible Possibilities
Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection
Charles de Lint
Manufacturer: Orb Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

De Lint, Charles | ( D ) | Authors, A-Z | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
General | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
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Forests of the Heart (Newford)

Moonlight & Vines (Newford)

Someplace to Be Flying (Newford)

Trader (Newford)

Memory and Dream (Newford)

ASIN: 0765306794

Book Description

Welcome to Newford. . . .Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.Like Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and John Crowley's Little, Big, Dreams Underfoot is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all who seek magic in everyday life.

Customer Reviews:

Disappointing.......2007-10-05

I've really tried to enjoy this author, and this was my third try. Somehow, nothing he writes engages me on any level - the characters are cliches, the "fantasy" is cartoonish (balloon men? walking boogers? hello?), the stories are poorly structured and lack satisfying resolution, and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a kick in the head. I bought this one because the blurb on my edition compared it to Helprin's "Winter's Tale" and Crowley's "Little, Big". It has as much in common with those great works as a raisin has with a glass of wine. It contains words and is marketed as fantasy - that's where the comparison ends. I could not bring myself to finish the book, a rarity for me. Buyer beware.

A Promise Broken.......2005-01-18

What a great title, laden with the promise of darkness,mystery, surreality... it leads one to expect a fanatasy with a subterranean feel. Unfortunately the book does not live up to the promise its title makes.

Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint is an ambitious collection of urban faery stories, all bound together by several common threads and characters. But several factors hold these stories back from being all that they can be.

At first one is enchanted with, if not de Lint's somewhat lackluster prose, at least by the unique themes and plotlines. Unique up until the third or fourth story, that is, when one begins to realize the sad sameness of all these tales. After the first few stories the book becomes a rather tedious read, and one's willingness to forgive de Lint's unremarkable writing style dissipates, like ghosts fleeing daylight.

I can see what de Lint is trying to do with the characters. veiling the extraordinary behind a veneer of ordinariness. Most everyone in the books has brown hair - this seems to be his concept of ordinary. But all the women are pretty and petit - because everyone knows fat bowsers never experience anything supernatural I guess. He's only a little more diverse with the males he portrays; they come off just faintly more realistic than his impossible women. The problem with his characters is not that they are not complex and interesting, its that the devices he uses to make them complex and interesting are so transparent and obvious. One can actually see his formulae for character creation laid out on the page like algebra, and it feels like being cheated.

De Lint flirts a lot with the themes of poverty and homelessness, but he writes it insincerely, romanticizing it shamelessly, and comes off like the proud bearer of white liberal guilt, rather than someone who's been there. I think he wants his ghetto, the 'Tombs', to read like some bitterly cruel otherworld, but it comes off like a series of cardboard cutouts, a rough facade.

It was an interesting enough idea to set his stories in an invented Canadian town. One doesn't see it everyday. But try as he might he never quite manages to make the town seem real enough. And he just doesn't make Canada spooky enough.

Dreams Underfoot is a great idea that would have been better written by someone else.

When asked to name my favourite book ever - THIS is it........2004-11-15

Reading Dreams Underfoot was truly a life-altering experience for me. It shifted my perception of the world around me; suddenly I was seeing magic in the everyday, magic all around in what used to be the most mundane of things.

Another reviewer wrote that Dreams Underfoot is a gift. This could not be more true. Charles de Lint has created a universe parallel to the one in which we live, but he has crafted it so delicately, so skilfully, and so beautifully, that it becomes achingly real to us, the readers.

I have purchased several copes of this book. I feel compelled to lend it to every person I know and love, since it was through a borrowed book that I first read Dreams Underfoot myself. After my personally perchased copy of the book took numerous journeys, it became quite tattered and forlorn, so I purchased another. And when it was leant out on all the occasions I wanted to return to Newford, I decided to purchase a 'stay-at-home' copy, just for me.

I cannot encourage you enough to read this book, and all the Newford tales to follow. If you have ever had a day where you felt the need to reconnect with the beauty and truth and magic that lives both within and outside us - this book contains that spark.

Read this book. It changes everything...

One of the Top Five Books I've Ever Read.......2004-11-01

I'm not usually drawn to collections of short stories. It was entirely on a whim I even picked up this book by an author I had never heard of at the time. It ended up being the book that I insist people to read if they've never read it. I buy copies of this just so I can give it to them. Charles De Lint writes stories that are modern fairy-folk tales, with a twist of 'The Twilight Zone'. Only these stories don't all end with a happily ever after, which feels right. It makes you want to read the next collection of short stories by him, just to see how their life continues to unfold. It's about the journey, not the destination.

Impossible Possibilities.......2004-08-11

Charles de Lint is a creator of unique stories that mix fantasy with urban legends; featuring the outcasts, oddballs, eccentrics, and the unfortunate of the fictitious city of Newford, which curiously has familiar aspects of both New England and the Pacific Northwest (in my somewhat well-traveled opinion). Thus, engagingly human characters and settings interact with the whimsical spirits and creatures of classic fantasy writing, with the running theme being that only those who truly believe can see the other side of reality. A nice gimmick is that some of these stories are supposedly from the mind of fictitious writer Christy Riddell, who is constructed as de Lint's fantasy world alter-ego, so you are sometimes transported into the imaginations of both the author and the characters.

The stories range from the whimsical, such as a street kid setting the spirits of bicycles free, to several tales of abused and unloved children turning to other realms of belief for support (offering some unexpectedly chilling or shocking moments from de Lint), to tales of lost loves and quests to find one's inner strengths. This collection of inter-related short stories centered on the mystically-minded residents of Newford does suffer from some inconsistency. Some stories such as "Romano Drom" or "The Sacred Fire" (among others) suffer from poor plot development, with a lot of all-of-a-sudden's and from-out-of-nowhere's. Some of the characters are so whimsical, eccentric, and kind-hearted that they stretch the bounds of believability; while the recurring themes of hope and belief get a bit heavy-handed. However, de Lint has created his own very unique world(s) of fantasy, for readers looking for creative and offbeat mysticism. [~doomsdayer520~]

Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection

Average customer rating:

Urban Fantasy at its absolute grandest!!!
Exquisite and poignant urban fantasy

Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Charles De Lint
Manufacturer: Tor Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0312852053

Customer Reviews:

Urban Fantasy at its absolute grandest!!!.......1998-02-03

Dreams Underfoot is the first book I ever read by Charles De Lint, and he became my favorite author half way through the text. Although I have read every other De Lint book or story I can find, and they are all simply breathtaking, (check out Memory and Dream!!) Dreams Underfoot has remained my favorite. Sentimentality, no doubt. Dreams Underfoot is a tapestry novel, with characters and events that weave themselves together to give you a fabulous picture of the city of Newford and all its strange and wonderful aspects. De Lint's writing style is brilliant, both lyrical and funny, both sad and strange. If you like Fantasy novels, in particular Urban Fantasy, then do not, under any circumstances, miss this book. De Lint is considered one of the seminal authors of the Urban Fantasy genre, and there is no doubt in my mind that he is a master of his craft.

Exquisite and poignant urban fantasy.......1997-09-24

Skillfully interweaving magic, music, art, compassion, and contemporary issues such as child abuse and homelessness, Charles DeLint is hardly an escapist. However, in this anthology he offers glimpses of a well-realized world much like our own, just different enough to allow faerie to wander city streets barefoot in winter, or for a practical joke involving a gorilla suit to lead to a fleeting encounter with a genuine yeti. My favorite story in the collection is a gorgeous, heartbreaking retelling of 'The Little Mermaid'.

Average customer rating:

Dreams Underfoot - Newford Collection
Charles De Lint
Manufacturer: Tor: Tom Doherty Associates
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K1U37O

Average customer rating:

Dreams Underfoot - Newford Collection
Charles De Lint
Manufacturer: Tor: Tom Doherty Associates
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K1U5V8

Average customer rating:

Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection
Charles De Lint
Manufacturer: Tor Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GYZSHK

Book Description

BEYOND AURORA AWAITS A BRAVE NEW WORLD...OF ROBOTS

A man without a memory flees a city of robots gone wild. At his side, a mysterious young woman whose own identity is eroded by an insidious disease. Journeying to Earth, the two must find a way to save her life and learn at last the secret to Robot City, Dr. Avery, and their true identities!

Asimov meets Hitchcock in this fast-paced thriller set in the timeline of his robot and Foundation universes. In Robot City, the late science fiction genius challenged a talented group of science fiction writers to resolve the conundrums he set for them in the context of his famous Three Laws of Robotics.

This pair of robot mysteries, enhanced with a pair of essays by Asimov himself, reflects the colorful world of thinking robots, subterranean Earth dwellers and witty repartee that characterized the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning landscape of the beloved author of The Caves of Steel and Robots and Empire.

Two Complete Novels

Customer Reviews:

A Continuing Saga.......2000-06-16

The saga of Robot is continued in this novel, which can only be described as exellent, with a dose of brilliant, and a side of superlative. The story of Robot City is expressed through the further development of the characters Derec, a man who crash landed in the aptly named Robot City, a city run and inhabited entirely by robots. Having lost his memory in the crash landing, he takes the name of Derec, which is the manufacturer of his jump suit. Throughout his journey, he meets the mysterios Katherine. After a bout of being captured by extraterrestrials, and such other madcap antics, Derec and Katherine are deposited in Robot City together. It is here that the plot begins to thicken, and the character development becomes signifigant. This volume of the series is a perfect book for any science fiction fan, and perfectly expresses the three laws of Robotics and their applications in the real world.

Book Description

Compassionate, caring gift for the bereaved speaks of both pain and hope through meditations, poems, and Scripture.

Customer Reviews:

A perfect gift!.......2007-06-26

This is the perfect little book to give someone while attending a wake or funeral or someone who has just lost a loved one. It is also useful to get the Christian message out there to people. I order these little books by the dozen because they are a comfort and encouragement to those who read it.

Great Comfort In a Time of Grief.......2000-05-01

As a pastor I have given this book to dozens of people when they have expereinced the death of a loved one. It is full of material that not only provide comfort and hope but also help to put death in perspective. This little book is big in helping answer the questions that one has when someone dies. It is full of Scripture references and also reflections that other's who have been through the experience of losing a loved one are willing to share. It also contains poems from some of the great poets, like Edgar Guest, John G. Whittier and William C.Bryant. Wernecke has created a timeless masterpiece.

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When Loved Ones Are Called Home
Herbert Wernecke
Manufacturer: Baker Book House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Death & Grief | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0801095042

Product Description

Inspirational poems & short stories / Scripture Quotes & Meditations to Comfort those left behind.

Average customer rating:

When Loved Ones Are Called Home
Herbert H. Wernecke
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000GJA4HE

When loved ones are called home: A book of comfort for the bereaved

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When loved ones are called home: A book of comfort for the bereaved
Herbert Henry Wernecke
Manufacturer: Old Orchard Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0007HFP4M

Book Description

In Hawai'i, we eat a wide variety of delicious noodles. Noodles have been popular since Marco Polo first brought them back from China, and in the Islands we have adopted noodles from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Italy. With the Little Hawaiian Noodle Cookbook, you'll find a collection of more than thirty of the best-loved island noodle recipes. There are delicacies like Cold Chinese Noodles with Cucumber and Somen Salad, as well as heartier fare like Pad Thai with Shrimp and Easy Macaroni Casserole. There are also local favorites like Easy Fried Saimin and Chicken Long Rice. Get ready to take a culinary tour of Hawai'i's cultures while enjoying some of the finest noodle dishes around.

Book Description

The hard-to-find information, sources, and addresses that collectors need for repairing, caring for, and finding buyers for antiques and collectibles are all in this book. To gather the information for this book, Ralph and Terry Kovel contacted more than 3,000 suppliers, clubs, auctions, services, and other industry sources around the country, making this the most up-to-date and complete reference of its kind.

Kovels' Guide To Selling Your Antiques And Collectibles -updated (Kovel's Guide to Selling, Buying, and Fixing Your Antiques and Collectibles)

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Kovels' Guide To Selling Your Antiques And Collectibles -updated (Kovel's Guide to Selling, Buying, and Fixing Your Antiques and Collectibles)
Ralph Kovel
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Care & Restoration | Antiques & Collectibles | Home & Garden | Subjects | Books

General | Antiques & Collectibles | Home & Garden | Subjects | Books

Reference | Antiques & Collectibles | Home & Garden | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 051758008X
Release Date: 1990-09-05

Book Description

Magnificent collection of rare illustrations, selected from Victorian artist's superb stylebook, depicts 300 black-and-white foliage designs. Based on painted motifs found in woven textiles, woodcarvings, iron- and stonework, the lovely images depict leaves from oak, maple, poppy, ivy, ferns, and thistle, as well as designs incorporating fruits, flowers, and animals.

Book Description

During the first part of the twentieth century, Hollywood experienced an influx of European filmmakers seeking new lives in America. With them came unique perspectives and styles from their home countries that forever affected American film production. Well-known talents like Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock all made America their filmmaking base, as did other less known but equally influential filmmakers. This is the complete guide to directors, screenwriters, artistic directors, cinematographers, and composers of European birth who made at least one film in the United States. The book is arranged by country, and each chapter begins with that country's cinema history. Each filmmaker from that country is then given a separate entry, including biographical and professional highlights, and synopses and analyses of their better-known films. Photographs from films that featured European talent are included. An index of names and titles allows for easy reference, and a complete bibliography is also included.

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