Parasites of Heaven


Book Description

To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1966, Parasites of Heaven came in the wake of the success of Cohen's second novel, Beautiful Losers. While not as ambitious as his three previous collections, Parasites of Heaven is an essential document in Cohen's evolution as it contains poems that would go on to form the basis of some of his most beloved songs, including "Suzanne" and "Avalanche."




Parasites of Heaven


Book Description




The Parasites


Book Description

When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island - they never choose the Delaneys. They don't even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests . . . Maria, Niall, and Celia have grown up in the shadow of their famous parents - their father, a flamboyant singer and their mother, a talented dancer. Now pursuing their own creative dreams, all three siblings feel an undeniable bond, but it is Maria and Niall who share the secret of their parents' pasts. Alternately comic and poignant, The Parasites is based on the artistic milieu its author knew best, and draws the reader effortlessly into that magical world.




The Spice-Box of Earth


Book Description

To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1961, The Spice-Box of Earth was Leonard Cohen's breakout book, announcing the arrival of a major talent, and a popular one—the first edition sold out in less than three months, and one reviewer hailed Cohen as "probably the best young poet in English Canada right now." In his second collection, Cohen deepens his engagement with subjects that would define his career; as biographer Sylvie Simmons argues, "the poems dance back and forth across the border between the holy and the worldly, the elevated and the carnal."




37 Seconds


Book Description

“Riveting . . . inspiring. . . . the story of what happened to this woman when she died for 37 seconds will make you rethink how we all should live.” —Maureen Maher, CBS News correspondent, 48 Hours When she was pregnant with her second child, Stephanie Arnold had a sudden and overwhelming premonition that she would die during the delivery. Though she tried to tell the medical team and her family what was going to happen, neither the doctors nor her loved ones gave her warnings credence. Finding no physical indications that anything was wrong, they attributed her foreboding to hormones and anxiety. One member of the medical team did take her concerns seriously enough, and made the fateful decision to order extra units of blood “just in case.” Then, during the delivery, Stephanie suffered a rare Amniotic Fluid Embolism. She went into cardiac arrest and flat-lined for 37 seconds. She died. Using the supplementary blood, the medical team revived her, and she remained unconscious for more than six days. After months of recovery, Stephanie began to remember details of her experience, details she knew because she had witnessed the entire dramatic event, including her death, from outside her body—beside other spirits that were with her. In this remarkable true story, Stephanie recounts her harrowing journey and shares her surprising spiritual discoveries: we are not alone and have more loving help than we can imagine surrounding us. “Stephanie Arnold’s journalistic instincts made this remarkable happening a compelling reading experience.” —Dennis Swanson, President of Station Operations at Fox Television “Arnold’s amazing, enthralling, and revealing story . . . could redefine the way clergy, physicians, and scientists think about dying.” —Dr. Rachael Ross, co-host of The Doctors




Parasite Rex


Book Description

IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites control the minds of their hosts, sending them to their destruction. IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites are masters of chemical warfare and camouflage, able to cloak themselves with their hosts' own molecules. IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE parasites steer the course of evolution, where the majority of species are parasites. WELCOME TO EARTH. For centuries, parasites have lived in nightmares, horror stories, and in the darkest shadows of science. Yet these creatures are among the world's most successful and sophisticated organisms. In Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer deftly balances the scientific and the disgusting as he takes readers on a fantastic voyage. Traveling from the steamy jungles of Costa Rica to the fetid parasite haven of southern Sudan, Zimmer graphically brings to life how parasites can change DNA, rewire the brain, make men more distrustful and women more outgoing, and turn hosts into the living dead. This thorough, gracefully written book brings parasites out into the open and uncovers what they can teach us about the most fundamental survival tactics in the universe.




Beautiful Losers


Book Description

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy--and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.




Flowers for Hitler


Book Description

In Flowers for Hitler, Leonard Cohen’s third collection of poetry, Cohen first experiments with his self-consciously "anti-art" gestures: an attempt, in his own words, to move "from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer." Haunted by the image of the Nazi concentration camps, the poems within are deliberately ugly, tasteless, and confrontational, setting out to destroy the image of Cohen as a sweet romantic poet. Instead, it celebrates the failed careers and destroyed minds of such "beautiful losers" as Alexander Trocchi, Kerensky, and even Queen Victoria. Cohen, in Flowers for Hitler, is an author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play, underlining the process of self-recovery and self-discovery that is at the center of these poems.




Death of a Lady's Man


Book Description

To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1978, Death of a Lady's Man reinvented Cohen on the printed page, featuring a daring series of poems and prose poems, each of which is addressed—and often rebutted—in accompanying pieces of commentary. Maddening, thrilling, and truly singular, Cohen's sixth book contains some of the most challenging and startling work of his oeuvre. It is a genre-busting masterpiece well ahead of its time.




The Energy of Slaves


Book Description

To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, The Flame, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1972, The Energy of Slaves is Cohen's fifth collection, and one of his most controversial. A dark and intense book, described by one critic as "deliberately ugly, offensive, bitter, anti-romantic," Cohen considered it a document of his struggle—"I've just written a book called The Energy of Slaves," he told an interviewer at the time, "and in there I say that I'm in pain." Bracing, challenging, and equally beautiful and off-putting, it remains one of his most compelling and complex works.