My New York Diary
by Julie Doucet
from Drawn and Quarterly
Maggie Cassidy
by Jack Kerouac
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
The Tin Flute (New Canadian Library)
by Gabrielle Roy
from New Canadian Library
The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding, this moving story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love.
An affecting story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during the Second World War, The Tin Flute won both the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Fémina of France. The novel was made into a critically acclaimed motion picture in 1983.
Marie Blythe (Hardscrabble Books)
by Howard Frank Mosher
from Vermont
Howard Frank Mosher is one of the best-loved writers of northern New England, one who has "created a literary landscape as textured as anything produced by the U. S. Geological Survey," according to USA Today. His "greatest gift," says the Washington Post, is "his talent for creating lively, living characters." One of his most vivid and memorable characters is Marie Blythe.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young girl with a felicitous name immigrates to Vermont from French Canada. She grows up confronting the grim realities of life with an indomitable spirit--nursing victims of a tuberculosis epidemic, enduring a miscarriage alone in the wilderness, and coping with the uncertainties of love. In Marie Blythe, Mosher has created a strong-minded, passionate, and truly memorable heroine.
Les Belles Soeurs: (Revised)
by Michel Tremblay
from Talonbooks
My Most Secret Desire
by Julie Doucet
from Drawn and Quarterly
Considered by many to be the most influential female cartoonist ever, Julie Doucet created an iconic body of work in the ten short years she solely devoted herself to her trailblazing comic-book series Dirty Plotte. Her comics are densely inked and detailed with a pulsating neurosis from a decidedly female point of view that set the comic-book world on its head when the series debuted. Doucet returns to comics after a five-year hiatus with a reworked edition of her dream journal My Most Secret Desire, complete with never-before-published material.
My Most Secret Desire is considered to be Doucet ’s most innovative work, exploring the longings, pressures, and exploits of the feminine subconscious. Nightmarish tales of pregnancy, menstruation, sex changes, and boyfriends haunt Doucet’s nocturnal psyche with a feverish and surreal pitch.
The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories
by Roch Carrier
from House Of Anansi
Thirty Acres (New Canadian Library)
by Ringuet
from New Canadian Library
One of the most important books to come out of Quebec, Thirty Acres traces the course of one man’s life as he enters into the age-old rhythms of the land and of the seasons. At the same time, it is a novel on a grand social scale, spanning and documenting the tumultuous half-century in which a new, industrial urban society crowded out Quebec’s traditional rural one.
Winner of the Governor General’s Award and numerous other national and international literary prizes, Thirty Acres is a universal story of birth and death, renewal and reversal, ascent and decline, and a masterpiece of irony and realism.
La Sagouine
by Antonine Maillet
from Goose Lane Editions
The premise is deceptively simple: a dirt-poor charwoman and former prostitute leans on her mop and tells her life story. But what a story! As she reminisces and rants, telling stories about herself, her friends and neighbours, the priest and his church, and every other aspect of life in her village, she is actually telling the story of Acadie. More than 25 years after its first publication in English, La Saguoine is available once again, this time in a new translation. Wayne Grady, one of Canada's most distinguised translators, faithfully recreates Acadian speech for an English readership in this new edition, bringing out the cultural richness of the language as well as La Saguoine's strength of character and irrepressible humour. La Saguoine launched the careers of both Antonine Maillet and the actress Viola Léger. with sales of ver 100,000 copies, it brought the existence of Acadian literature to a wide and admiring audience. This new edition will introduce it once again to a new generation of English readers.
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