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."
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."
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA 'One of the last century's most original literary talents' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Wickedly readable . . . every woman instinctively wants to read her' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ' Somehow more personal than Daphne du Maurier's other novels' KIRKUS REVIEWS '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 is a flamboyant singer and their mother is 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.
“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
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.
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 Metaphor of Celebrity is an exploration of the significance of literary celebrity in Canadian poetry. It focuses on the lives and writing of four widely recognized authors who wrote about stardom – Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Irving Layton, and Gwendolyn MacEwen – and the specific moments in Canadian history that affected the ways in which they were received by the broader public. Joel Deshaye elucidates the relationship between literary celebrity and metaphor in the identity crises of celebrities, who must try to balance their public and private selves in the face of considerable publicity. He also examines the ways in which celebrity in Canadian poetry developed in a unique way in light of the significant cultural events of the decades between 1950 and 1980, including the Massey Commission, the flourishing of Canadian publishing, and the considerable interest in poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a rapid fall from public grace, as poetry was overwhelmed by greater popular interest in Canadian novels.
WINNER of the EDNA STAEBLER AWARD for CREATIVE NON–FICTION From its opening image of the varied workforce at a Vancouver postal station, Stardust is a series of literary essays defining Bruce Serafin's world. The teenage Serafin is a captivating figure, freshly arrived from the United States and eager to immerse himself in the particular delights of a still largely frontier–era Vancouver. As a young man enrolled at SFU, he refuses the perm pressed upon him in a Chinatown barber shop and eavesdrops on his rowdy neighbours in a Powell Street apartment house. Working in the post office, Serafin discovers Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant and realizes for the first time that writing about working–class people is not only possible, but desirable. Later, Serafin embarks upon an intimate criticism of touchstones of Western culture. Roland Barthes and Daniel Defoe are counterparts, he suggests, and shows why. Leonard Cohen was read so avidly by the young proto–hippies of the era not because of his writing, but because he physically modelled a way to be cool. The ceremonial objects collected by anthropologists, according to Serafin, are not actually art but something else again. Serafin critiques literary magazines and western novels. He discusses the work of Don DeLillo, Terry Glavin, Steve McCaffery, Northrop Frye, and William Henry Drummond. There's an engagement to these essays that lightly sketches the workings of a mind forever learning.
