Big Rock Candy Town is the story of two sisters who arrive from Ontario to live with their father and his new wife and family in the small mining town of Fernie, in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia. But it is also - or perhaps more so - the story of Fernie itself in the 1950s, told from various points of view, which unfolds in the lives of immigrants from all parts of the world who seek in the Rockies the fulfillment of their dreams.
Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune - in the hotel business, in new farmland and eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. In this affecting narrative, Wallace Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century. Wallace Stegner was the author of, among other works of fiction, Remembering Laughter (1973); Joe Hill (1950); All the Little Live Things (1967, Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star (1961); Angle of Repose (1971, Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird (1976, National Book Award); Recapitulation (1979); Crossing to Safety (1987); and Collected Stories (1990). His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954); Wolf Willow (1963); The Sound of Mountain Water (essays, 1969); The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard deVoto (1964); American Places (with Page Stegner, 1981); and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements.
A classic novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. Here is the incredible, moving sequel to the bestselling Big Rock Candy Mountain by the "dean of Western writers" (The New York Times). Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not for his aunt’s funeral, but to encounter the place he fled in bitterness forty-five years ago. A successful statesman and diplomat, Mason had buried his awkward childhood and sealed himself off from the thrills and torments of adolescence to become a figure who commanded international respect. Both the realities of the present recede in the face of ghosts of his past. As he makes the perfunctory arrangements for the funeral, we enter with him on an intensely personal and painful inner pilgrimage: we meet the father who darkened his childhood , the mother whose support was both redeeming and embarrassing, the friend who drew him into the respectable world of which he so craved to be a part, and the woman he nearly married. In this profound book, the sequel to the bestselling The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner has drawn an intimate portrait of a man understanding how his life has been shaped by experiences seemingly remote and inconsequential.
Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called "the dozens."At its simplest, the dozens is a comic concatenation of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube. Wald explores the depth of the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore.In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.
Uncle John’s latest compendium of the most bizarre and entertaining information imaginable: a Worldwide Weird-opedia! Good news: It’s not you, the world really is going crazy! And Uncle John is barely sane enough to guide you through it all in this whirlwind tour of all things strange and weird. Yes, loyal Throne Room readers, these 432 all-new pages of pure crazy will shock and confound you . . . and make your side split open from laughing. (Uncle John takes no legal responsibilities for split sides.) So fire up your egg-beater, strap on your tinfoil hat, and plunge on into . . . * The secret government plot to poison Earth’s skies * Animal-human hybrids and what role they’ll have in society * “Sexy Finding Nemo” and other inappropriate Halloween costumes * A cow that eats chicken, therapeutic snake massages, and killer kangaroos * The lady who married the Eiffel Tower, and the man who hugs and kisses his car * Enjoying the world’s craziest festivals, where you can eat fried lamb testicles, ride on a ship through the desert, or pierce your skin with a bicycle * Jackasses who copied Jackass and barely lived to tell about it * How to tell if you have Exploding Head Syndrome * Decoding the Mayan Prophecy * Clergy gone wild, and much much more!
Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifing from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks outhis fortune--in the hotel business, on new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the threacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Bo chases after the promise of the American dream through Minnesota, the Dakotas, Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah and Nevada, but ultimately there is no escaping the devastating reach of the Depression and his own ruinous fate. In this affecting narrative, a defining masterpiece by the "dean of Western writers" (The New York Times), Wallace Stegner portrays more than three decades in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survivle during the lean years of the early twentieth century. With an introduction by Robert Stone.
A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.
Now a major film! New York Times bestselling author and “one of America’s top cultural critics” (Entertainment Weekly) Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel brilliantly captures the charm and dread of small-town life. Somewhere in rural North Dakota, there is a fictional town called Owl. They don’t have cable. They don’t really have pop culture, but they do have grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. But that’s not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it’s perfect. Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. A history teacher, she gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer. Widower and local conversationalist Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. They all know each other completely, except that they’ve never met. But when a deadly blizzard—based on an actual storm that occurred in 1984—hits the area, their lives are derailed in unexpected and powerful ways. An unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where local mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing, Downtown Owl is “a satisfying character study and strikes a perfect balance between the funny and the profound” (Publishers Weekly).
A year after the Cassidy family moves from British Columbia to the family farm (Rosewood), the mother dies of polio. Their story is told by the second daughter.
