San Antonio College Library

When Henry receives a letter from an elderly taxidermist, it poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled further into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey--named Beatrice and Virgil--and the epic journey they undertake together.

The story of Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a doctor practicing holistic healing. It chronicles his youth, including an incident in the Canadian bush where his life was saved by an Indian shaman, and describes his World War II years in the course of which he decided to practice holistic medicine. A look at the connection between spirit and body.

"Much of Canada's contemporary fiction displays an eerie fascination with the supernatural. In DisPossession, Marlene Goldman investigates the links between spectral motifs and the social and historical influences that have shaped Canada. Incorporating both psychoanalytic and non-traditional methods of literary analysis, Goldman explores the ways in which spectral fictions are an expression of definitive Canadian experiences such as the clashes between...

"Sally Chivers provides a fascinating look at and challenge to how North American popular culture has portrayed old age as a time of disease, decline, and death. Within contemporary Canadian literary and film production, a tradition of articulate central elderly female characters challenges what the aging body has come to signify in a broader cultural context. Rather than seek positive images of aging, which can do their own prescriptive damage the...

Arranged chronologically with forty stories in all, the book provides an excellent survey of Canada's leading writers, including a story by Atwood herself ("The Sin Eater"), as well as stories by Morley Callaghan ("Last Spring They Came Over"), Mordecai Richler ("The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed to Die"), and Stephen Leacock ("The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias"). The book features biographical notes and an index of authors.

"Brimming with sardonic humor, antic imagination and bravura storytelling skill, Richler's fifth novel (after Joshua Was Here ) is an interlocking account of the outrageously bold and daring eponymous protagonist, and of his would-be biographer, brilliant but alcoholic Moses Berger, obsessed with discovering the mysteries of Solomon's life and -- maybe -- his death. Perhaps inspired by Canada's Bronfman family, Richler creates the three Gursky brothers,...

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the...

This study attempts to make sense of a group of novels that deal in a symbolic way with contemporary forms of collective disaster (the prospect of nuclear war, the Holocaust, environmental destruction). It shows similarities among British, American, Canadian and other novels never before grouped together and argues that they constitute a distinct sub-genre of fiction: the trauma novel. In so doing, the book sets forth an original theory about how...

In Adventures of the Spirit, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis brings together eleven American and Canadian "literary gerontologists" to examine a new kind of adventure for the older woman in literature. This volume of critical essays analyzes recent works by contemporary women writers whose characters' midlife and later life changes are mapped in their narratives. Rather than focusing on the painful losses undergone by women of a certain age, recent narratives...