Conversations with Alistair MacLeod


Book Description

This volume, accessible to all of Alistair MacLeod's readers and fans, offers the transcript of an in-depth interview with Alistair MacLeod which took place in Windsor during the Spring of 2009. It is introduced by Douglas Gibson, Alistair MacLeod's long lime editor and trusted friend. Alistair MacLeod has been described as a "quiet literary giant" and there is no better way of encapsulating his talent and character in only three words. He is the recipient of many literary awards, including the IMPAC award and thirteen honorary degrees. In the interview, Alistair Macleod throws light on the creative process and gives us insight. into his craft. As his comments come in response to questions on Bach individual story as well as on the novel No Great Mischief, the transcript is divided into sections dedicated to cach one of the stories and the novel. Quotes from previous interviews have been added and organized thematically in a section entitled "Collected Comments from Previous Interviews". The last part of this volume includes the summaries of these works. The aim of these summaries is to refresh the reader's memory and guide him through the conversation with Alistair Macleod and also to provide useful references for all students, academics and enthusiastic readers wishing to embark on a critical analysis of Alistair MacLeod's work.




No Great Mischief


Book Description

Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendents became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.




Island: The Complete Stories


Book Description

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award: “The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”—Colm Tóibín The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in Island prove Alistair MacLeod to be a master. Quietly, precisely, he has created a body of work that is among the greatest to appear in English in the last fifty years. A book-besotted patriarch releases his only son from the obligations of the sea. A father provokes his young son to violence when he reluctantly sells the family horse. A passionate girl who grows up on a nearly deserted island turns into an ever-wistful woman when her one true love is felled by a logging accident. A dying young man listens to his grandmother play the old Gaelic songs on her ancient violin as they both fend off the inevitable. The events that propel MacLeod's stories convince us of the importance of tradition, the beauty of the landscape, and the necessity of memory.




Being/s in Transit


Book Description

This fifth volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the topics of travelling, migration, and dislocation. All migrants are travellers, but not all travellers are migrants. Migration and the figure of the migrant have become key concepts in recent post-colonial studies. However, migration is not such a new or exceptional phenomenon. From the eighteenth century onward there have been migrations from Europe to what are now called 'post-colonial' countries, and this prepared the ground for movement back to the old but also to the new centres of Europe and elsewhere. Travel and travel experience, on the other hand, have been part of the cultural codes not only of the West and not only of imperialism. The essays in this volume look at both kinds of movement, at their intersections, and at their (dis)locating effects. They cover a wide range of topics, from early seventeenth-century travel reports, through nineteenth-century women's travel writing, to such contemporary writers as Michael Ondaatje and Janette Turner Hospital.




Double-Takes


Book Description

The widest-ranging exploration to date of the interaction between English Canadian literature and film.




Tropes and Territories


Book Description

Tropes and Territories demonstrates how current debates in postcolonial criticism bear on the reading, writing, and status of short fiction. These debates, which hinge on competing definitions of "trope" (motif vs rhetorical turn) and "territory" (political or aesthetic), lead to studies of space, place, influence, and writing and reading practices across cultural divides. The essays also explore the character of diasporic writing, the cultural significance of oral tale-telling, and interconnections between socio/political issues and strategies of style.




Scottish Exodus


Book Description

Millions of Scots have left their homeland during the last 400 years. Until now, they have been written about in general terms. Scottish Exodus breaks new ground by taking particular emigrants, drawn from the once-powerful Clan MacLeod, and discovering what happened to them and their families. These people became, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, Aboriginal and African-American activists, Canadian mounted policemen and Confederate rebels. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. This gripping account of Scotland's worldwide diaspora is based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories. It is also based on the author's travels in the company of today's MacLeods - some of them still in Scotland, others further afield. Scottish Exodus is a tale of disastrous voyages, famine and dispossession, the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their journeyings began.




Rapt in Plaid


Book Description

Illustrate a long-lasting connection between Scottish and Canadian literary traditions and illuminates the way Scottish ideas and values still wield surprising power in Canadian politics, education, theology, economics and social mores.




The Lost Salt Gift of Blood


Book Description

The stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father. Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, the seven stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood map the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child.







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