Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless stranger in a strange land. Norman himself was then a stranger in a strange land, but he was not alone. In Churchill he encountered Helen Tanizaki, an Anglo-Japanese woman embarked on a similar project--to translate the tales into Japanese. An extraordinary linguist and an exact and compelling friend, Tanizaki became Norman's guide through the characters, stories, and customs he was coming to know, and a remarkable intimacy sprang up between them--all the more intense because it was to be fleeting; Tanizaki was fatally ill. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Howard Norman's In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures with vivid immediacy a brief but life-shifting encounter and the earthy, robust stories that occasioned it.
Returning from his Carolina coast security job to upstate New York, Jack, haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, is hired to search for a lawyer's missing nephew, a search that brings Jack into the dark underworld of his hometown. By the author of Girls and A Memory of War. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.
Mesmerizing sci-fi from the author the Denver Post calls "one of the literary giants of science fiction." The melancholy memoir of Alden Dennis Weer, an embittered old man living in a small midwestern town, reveals a miraculous dimension. For Weer's imagination has the power to obliterate time and reshape reality, transcending even death itself.
Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women. The Bird Artist is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.
A memoir details the haunting and redemptive events of the author's life, covering such topics as his con-man father's betrayal, the murder-suicide of a houseguest, and his decade spent in the Arctic as a translator of Inuit tales.
Ray Bradbury, the iconic author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, believed that a collection of his letters could someday illuminate the story of his life in new ways. That story emerges across time and memory in the pages of Remembrance. Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers and creative dreamers of our time. The many honors he received, which included an Emmy and Academy Award nomination for adaptations of his work, culminated in the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a 2004 National Medal of Arts, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. For many years NASA and the Disney Studio felt the impact of Ray Bradbury’s creativity, and his fiction has found its way into hundreds of anthologies, textbooks, and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program. His enduring legacy as a storyteller, novelist, and space-age visionary radiated out into popular adaptations for stage, film, and television, and now the fascinating narratives and insights of his personal and professional correspondence are revealed for the first time. Remembrance offers the first sustained look at his life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade. Bradbury’s correspondence was far-reaching—he interacted with a rich cross-section of 20th-century cultural figures, writers, film directors, editors, and others who simply wanted insights or encouragement from a writer who had enriched their lives through his stories and novels. Bradbury scholar and biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, organized this volume into categories of correspondents, showing Bradbury’s progression through life as he knew it, and not necessarily as the public perceived him. Letters to and from mentors and other writers are followed by correspondence with such film directors as John Huston, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Letters with publishers and agents are followed by letters that capture moments of national and international recognition, the shadows of war and family members who shared the memories of his life. Among the writers whose letters illuminate Remembrance are Theodore Sturgeon, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, Dan Chaon, Bernard Berenson, Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Anaîs Nin, Gore Vidal, Carl Sandburg, and Jessamyn West. Remembrance illuminates the most elusive aspect of Ray Bradbury’s wide-ranging writing passions—the correspondence he sent and received throughout his long life, each letter intended for an audience of one.
