Woolf's acclaimed first novel, a moving depiction of the thrills and confusion of youth, traces a shipboard journey to South America in a captivating exploration of a young woman's growing self-awareness.
Exciting and provocative essays in a collection that is fun, entertaining, and deeply serious. In words and images that explore our environment, culture and architecture, that reflect on literary and artistic creation, mortality, mental health, depression, the North (as a place both real and imagined) and education, Imagined Spaces returns the essay to its original activity of having a go, trying and weighing something out, taking a risk.
Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer’s Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality – and how the two came to shape each other – places Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.
"Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less
Displaced by war and conflict, a refugee family sets out on a voyage into the unknown. Told in only a few words (one word per page) this is the powerful story of a family fleeing their war-torn country and making a dangerous trip across the ocean to a new life in a new land. ‘Chaos’ begins the story, as the family escapes. ‘Wild’ is the midway point, as the small boat battles through a storm. ‘Companion’ marks the sighting of a whale that briefly keeps them company as their voyage continues. ‘Beauty’ is the sight of a green, beautiful land ahead of them. ‘Safe’ is the beginning of their new life in their new home. Simple, yet evocative, The Voyage gives new meaning to the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words," as Robert Vescio’s sparse text and Andrea Edmond’s beautiful illustrations encourage young readers to create their own background story and thus identify more deeply with the plight of refugees and those less fortunate.
A major new novel by the award-winning author of Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows, about two sisters who live aboard a merchant ship on a fateful voyage through the South Pacific. "Up from underneath comes a blue-black swell, a whale rising in a long arc. Kay waits, hovering in the difference between herself and the creature." What is the difference between ourselves and other humans? Between human and animal? Where does that difference persist in our minds? These are the questions Marina Endicott, one of our most beloved storytellers, explores in this sweeping, intoxicating novel set on the Morning Light, a ship from Nova Scotia sailing the South Pacific in 1912. Thea and Kay are half-sisters, separated in age by more than a decade. After the death of their stern father, head of a residential school in western Canada, the elder sister, Thea, returns east for her long-awaited marriage to the captain of the ship. She cannot abandon her younger sister, so Kay joins her, and together they embark on a life-changing voyage around the world. At the heart of The Difference is one crystallizing moment in Micronesia: Thea forms a bond with a young boy from one of the islands, and takes him as her own. The repercussions of this act reverberate through the novel--forcing Kay to examine her own assumptions about what is forgivable, and what is right. Taking inspiration from the true story of a small boy who was brought on board a Canadian sailing ship in the South Seas, Marina Endicott shows us a vanished world in all its wildness and wonder, and its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty too. She also brilliantly illuminates our own times through Kay's preoccupation with the idea of "difference"--between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs, and species. A breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most celebrated authors, a writer with the astonishing ability to bring a past world to vivid life while revealing the moral complexity of our own.