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Nowhere, exactly : on identity and belonging / by Vassanji, M. G.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.From one of Canada's most celebrated writers, two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, comes a thoughtful meditation on what it means to belong in the world. Home is never a single place, entirely and unequivocally. It is contingent. The abstract "nowhere," then, is the true home. M.G. Vassanji has been exploring the immigrant experience for over three decades, drawing deeply on his own transnational upbringing and intimate understanding of the unique challenges and perspectives born from leaving one's home to resettle in a new land. The question of identity, of how to configure and see oneself within this new land, is one such challenge faced. But Vassanji suggests that a more fundamental and slippery endeavour than establishing one's identity is how, if ever, we can establish a sense of belonging. Can we ever truly belong in this new home? Did we ever truly belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? For many, the answer is nowhere exactly. Combining brilliant prose, thoughtful, candid observation, and a lifetime of exploring how we as individuals are shaped by the places and communities in which we live and the history that haunts them, 'Nowhere, Exactly' examines with exquisite sensitivity the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, guilt and hope felt by so many of those who leave their homes in search of new ones.
Subjects: Belonging (Social psychology); Emigration and immigration; Identity (Psychology); Immigrants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Long players : writers on the albums that shaped them / by Gatti, Tom,editor.;
Includes bibliographical references.Our favorite albums are our most faithful companions: we listen to them hundreds of times over decades, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don't just soundtrack our lives but work their way deep inside us, shaping our outlook and identity, forging our friendships and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story. In Long Players, fifty of our finest authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock. Part meditation on the album form and part candid self-portrait, each of these miniature essays reveals music's power to transport the listener to a particular time and place. REM's Automatic for the People sends Olivia Laing back to first love and heartbreak, Bjork's Post resolves a crisis of faith and sexuality for a young Marlon James, while Fragile by Yes instils in George Saunders the confidence to take his own creative path. This collection is an intoxicating mix of memoir and music writing, spanning the golden age of vinyl and the streaming era, and showing how a single LP can shape a writer's mind.
Subjects: Essays.; Anecdotes.; Authors and music.; Sound recordings; Popular music; Authors;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Nishga / by Abel, Jordan,1985-author.;
"From Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel comes a groundbreaking and emotionally devastating autobiographical meditation on the complicated legacies that Canada's reservation school system has cast on his grandparents', his parents' and his own generation. NISHGA is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence. As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school--both of his grandparents attended the same residential school in Chilliwack, British Columbia--his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least. NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, then his father's generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous. Drawing on autobiography, a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Abel, Jordan, 1985-; Indigenous authors; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous children; Indigenous children; Indigenous peoples;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Orbital / by Harvey, Samantha,author.;
"A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots a day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space -- not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts -- from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan -- have left their lives behind to travel at warp speed as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative, and gorgeous, Orbital is a gift -- a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet"--
Subjects: Science fiction.; Novels.; Astronauts; Humanity; Satellites;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Mad men. [videorecording] / by Hamm, Jon,1971-; Hunter, Tim.; Jones, January,1978-; Moss, Elisabeth,1983-; Slattery, John,1963-; Taylor, Alan,1965-; Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm.; Alliance Films.; Lion's Gate Films.;
Disc 1. For those who think young -- Flight 1 -- The benefactor.Disc 2. Three Sundays -- The new girl -- Maidenform.Disc 3. The gold violin -- A night to remember -- Six month leave.Disc 4. The Inheritance -- The jet set --The mountain king -- Meditations in an emergency.Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Jon Hamm, January Jones.Returning for its second season, the Golden Globe winning series for Best TV Drama continues to blur the lines between truth and lies, perception and reality. Moving in a new direction, can Sterling Cooper keep up? Meanwhile, the private life of Don Draper becomes complicated in a new way. What is the cost of his secret identity?Canadian Home Video Rating: 14A.DVD ; Dolby digital ; widescreen presentation.Golden Globe's: Best Television Series, Drama, Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Drama; Emmy's: Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series
Subjects: Advertising agencies; Advertising; Businessmen; Competition (Psychology); Corporate culture; Man-woman relationships; Nineteen sixties; Television programs.; Video recordings for the hearing impaired.;
© c2012., Lions Gate Films ; Distributed by Alliance Films,
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Stone Yard Devotional A Novel [electronic resource] : by Wood, Charlotte.aut; cloudLibrary;
Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend. “Stone Yard Devotional is as extraordinary as you’ve heard.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post “An exquisite, wrenching novel of leaving your life behind.” —Lauren Christensen, New York Times Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past. Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Small Town & Rural; Literary; Contemporary Women;
© 2025., Penguin Publishing Group,
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A history of my brief body : a memoir / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Billy-Ray Belcourt begins A History of My Brief Body with a letter to his nohkom, his grandmother. "In the world-to-come," he writes, "everyone is loved by an NDN woman like you whose soft voice reminds us that we can stop running now." What follows is a charting of the distance between the world he was born into and the world he wants--a book as beautiful as it is devastating. Reflecting on his personal history, Belcourt maps his "un-Canadian and otherworldly" desire to love at all costs. We're taken to his birthplace in Joussard, in northern Alberta, where he and his twin brother come to exemplify opposites: hard and soft, masculine and feminine. To his high school graduation, where a hug from his father teaches him how to hold and be held. To a hotel room in Edmonton, where destroying the photographic evidence of his adolescence is an act of self-abolition and of making himself anew. Blending memoir and essay, and with a poet's delight in language, A History of My Brief Body is both a grappling with a legacy of trauma and a record of the joy that flourishes in spite of it."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Essays.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray; Gay men; Sexual minorities; Indigenous peoples; Poets, Canadian (English);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The last days of Roger Federer : and other endings / by Dyer, Geoff,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who've mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner's paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane's cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg's defeats, and Beethoven's final quartets -and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer's book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty--and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities"--
Subjects: Artists; Athletes; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.); Gifted older people.; Gifted persons.; Older artists.; Older athletes.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The secret life of John le Carré / by Sisman, Adam,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy--cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. "Now that he is dead," Sisman writes, "we can know him better.""--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Le Carré, John, 1931-2020.; Novelists, English;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Girl Falling A Novel [electronic resource] : by Scrivenor, Hayley.aut; Loughran, Sophie.nrt; CloudLibrary;
The USA Today bestselling, Lambda Award–winning author of Dirt Creek is back with a woman’s story of the aftermath of the climbing incident that killed her girlfriend—and getting to the truth. This program features a bonus conversation between the author and Irish novelist Dervla McTiernan. Torn between her girlfriend, Magdu, and her best friend, Daphne, Finn is looking forward to a day of rock climbing and bonding for the three women on the soaring cliffs near their Australian town. But nothing goes as she planned, and in a horrific accident, Magdu falls to her death. Rocked by grief, Finn tries to pinpoint where it all went wrong. Did Magdu die because of Finn’s friendship with overbearing Daphne, who has never wanted Finn to change or leave her? Can Finn trace it all the way back to the tragic childhood loss of her sister? What about Magdu’s family, who would never have accepted their relationship? When the police suspect foul play in Magdu’s death, Finn begins to search for the shocking truth about her relationships and what has been in front of her all along. Beautifully written by the #1 internationally bestselling, Lammy Award–winning Hayley Scrivenor, Girl Falling is a beautiful love story, a tender meditation on grief, and a searing tale of just how much our lies can cost us. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Lesbian; Women Sleuths; Crime;
© 2025., Macmillan Audio,
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