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A collection of Canadian short stories. The book includes works by Alastair Macleod, Gabrielle Roy, Wallace Stegner, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Ross, Alice French, Mordecai Richler, Audrey Thomas, Sean Virgo, Sandra Birdsell, Elizabeth Smart, Alice Munro and many others. ... Read more

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If Michael Ondaatje's novels have the compression and power of poetry, his poems read like narratives that have been pared down to their essence. The poems that have been brought together in this electrifying volume are stylish yet endlessly surprising explorations of friendship and passion, family history and personal mythology. Spanning twenty-seven years and representing the best poems from Ondaatje's hard-to-find earlier collections, The Cinnamon Peeler is a masterpiece of intelligence, wit and an exultant love of language. ... Read more

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An Anchor Books Original

Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission.

Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics.

Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more.
Amazon.com Review
Writers, it's often said, are readers first and writers second. Frequently, it is the indelible mark left by some book that inspires a person to commit to the writing life. Mining that vein, the editors of Brick, a Canadian literary journal, asked their contributors "to tell us the story of a book loved and lost." The "Lost Classics" issue has been expanded into a book, in which 73 authors--Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, John Irving, Philip Levine, Anchee Min, and Michael Ondaatje among them--write about the books they've loved and lost.

These are books worth stealing, books remembered in the twilight that precedes sleep, books that, for these authors, provided "that moment when a reader seems to have found the perfect mate." Though many of the books extolled here are acknowledged classics, many are not. Helen Garner cherishes a childhood book that "except for members of my immediate family, no Australian I've mentioned the book to ... has had any knowledge of it whatsoever." Sarah Sheard writes lovingly of Down and Out in the Woods: An Airman's Guide to Survival in the Bush, "a manual of food, shelter and first aid [that] was the companion text of my childhood summers." Michael Turner reminisces about a book he never actually read, and Erin Mouré describes a book about the history of fishes that "no one I knew was ever interested in reading." Anne Holzman laments her inability to find a copy of a book for lefty activists called Reweaving the Web of Life (hint to Holzman: check online--used copies are readily available). And Nancy Huston introduces Kressmann Taylor's Address Unknown, "a perfectly astonishing [and prescient] little book." A kind of Rand McNally for the literary explorer, each chapter a hand-forged map leading down bookish roads less traveled. --Jane Steinberg ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

superb!
As of my writing, there are 57 of these available in Amazon stores for a penny each.Usually when I see this it's a sign that a book was a major dud and should be avoided.

I don't know how this book did saleswise, but I love it.I read it from cover to cover.

I've lent out two and they weren't returned, so I've had to buy a third.

And I owe this book two debts of gratitude:

1.Turning me on to some amazing books that would never have crossed my radar before (e.g., "All About H. Hatterr").

2.Making me less embarrassed about those few volumes I treasure but nobody else has ever heard of (e.g., Alexander Key's "The Magic Meadow").

Great Conversation
The act of reading has been mistakenly called solitary.It is all about dialogue and this book has it in spades.Michael Ondaatje and fellow editors from Brick Magazine, a literary journal, invited over 70 past contributors to submit essays singing the praises of lost, long-ago, out-of-print or underrated books that mattered.In other words, it is a collection of love stories, all personable and short.It is a delight on several levels: not only does it suggests some good-sounding reads, it also introduces some interesting reader/writers, many of them Canadian who do not get enough recognition in America.

Books Remembered but Misplaced or Lost!
Reading allows us to learn things from others, to experience things we might not ever experience in our own lives, and to go places we wish we could but may never have the chance to.We can go back in time or travel to the future and experience worlds we haven't experienced before.After reading this book I thought of many books I too have lost and misplaced from my earlier years of reading, and wished I had kept, or perhaps not given away.It would be nice to be able to re-read them again, if only they were still in print.

This is a wonderful collection of almost 75 essays, by some of the world's best writers brought together by the editors of Brick: A Literary Journal, that are thoughtful, funny, interesting, witty, and heartwarming.There is such a diverse selection of writers here that there are bound to be several essays for everyone to enjoy.

Jim Moore's essay on "The Salt Ecstasies" by James White who died in 1981 was very inspiring.Jim's poetry is very familiar to me for this was one of the first gay books of poetry I read while coming out.Luckily I still have a first edition copy of this book.Reading this essay inspired me to re-read Jim's poetry once again, and experience the passion & love that he visualized in his poetry for so many of us.Colm Toibin's essay on "Forbidden Territory" by Juan Goytisolo, who was an acquaintance of Jean Genet in Paris in the 1950's, is a tribute to this wonderful Spanish writer.Colm is a fascinating Irish writer himself who has written two wonderful books, " The Heather Blazing" and "The Blackwater Lightship" (See my earlier reviews).

Please don't miss Javier Marias' Afterword.This is writing at its best; intelligent, informative, funny, and touching.The telling of his experience in a bookshop in England, and how the owner was such a fanatical collector that he had a hard time parting with & selling his books is unforgettable.If you love and cherish great books like I do, don't miss this collection of essays.There's something for everyone here.Only one inquiry from me, why isn't this book in hardcover for our collections.Highly recommended!!

Lost Classics
I have lot of respect for the writing of Ondaatje but this book is just not upto his standards. Enough labour has not been given to the research portion while writing this book. You can easily get better repository of lost book in the net and sometimes in the listmania of amazon.com. Most of the critical analysis are very poorly written and I found only two books which are really "lost classic" in the correct sense of the word - they are Doctor Glas and Codex Seraphinianus. I never knew "Classic Revisited" is a lost classic since it is still taught in some universities. Its better to search the net that buy this book

Let's talk books...
As a reader and librarian who enjoys books ABOUT books almost as much as books themselves, and is always on the lookout for out-of-the-way reads to pass along, this is just the sort of book I love.It reminds me of one of my other favorites, Noel Perrin's A Reader's Delight - another treasure trove of great titles. ... Read more

Product Description
Set in 1945, The English Patient explores the lives of four very disparate wartorn people, a young woman and three men, who take refuge in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move. His extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the war provide the focus around which the vivid tales of his companions revolve. His very presence will for ever change the destiny of those around him...This is a breathtaking story of love and passion that twists through London's Blitz and the intricacies of bomb disposal, through the mysterious, often dangerous world of desert exploration. Beautifully read by internationally acclaimed actor Ralph Fiennes who also starred in the multi Oscar winning film by Anthony Minghella. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Lost in Translation!
In my opinion, the screen adaptation did not do justice to this Booker prize winning novel although Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas were beautifully cast.Author Michael Ondaatie's tale of the rememberance of an adulterous romance juxtaposed with the horrors of WWII loses some of its magic in the transition to film.Sadly, the author's arcane knowledge about the Great Silk Road, the Florentine Madonnas, various desert winds and the great Django Reinhardt have been severely compressed or omitted.

Told from the P-O-V of a dying protagonist under the influence of morphine, the sweeping story is revealed in numerous flashbacks.The locations alternate between a ruined villa in war torn Italy, glamourous Cairo, Egypt at Christmastime, 1938 and archaeological ruins in the uncharted North African desert. The Oscar nominated screenplay actually begins three-quarters through the book with aristocratic Hungarian explorer Lazlo Almaszy falling aflame from a burning plane into the Saharan desert.His rescue by Beoudins who save his life is both haunting and original.

The tragically disfigured Almasy is dubbed the English Patient when he ends up in a British field hospital where he refuses to reveal his identity.A skilled linguist, they think he is one of them, however, Almasy has good reason to conceal his true identity.There the shell-shocked nurse Hana starts caring for him and they end up in a villa where they are slowly joined by a few other characters.

There the brilliant, anti-social Count recounts the story of his doomed love affair with Katharine Clifton, a collegue's charming wife.Poor Almasy is a man who "fasted until he found what he wanted" and when he finally finds her, he isobsessed.For the love of K, he ultimately betrays his friends, his country and is forever haunted by their tragic destiny.

The screenplay does do an excellent job of making coherent the duel plot lines and numerous flashbacks.It is all here-adultery, homosexuality, necrophilia, drug addiction, treason, torture and murder in a story so compelling and so tragic one actually pities these fictional characters.

Literature doesn't getbetter than this
I read Anthony Minghella's sublime, lyrical novel some time after seeing the Oscar-winning movie and I was struck by the seamless similarities in both genres. The novel has a dream-like quality as it shifts in time back and forth, sifting through the memories of the dying patient and the other inhabitants of the Villa San Girolamo. The cinematography of the movie has the same fluid continuity, no mean feat when one considers how difficult it is to keep a story flowing with constant flashbacks. The film of The English Patient was described by one reviewer as almost film noir. Well, the book is novel noir. This not a romp, it's intricately multi-layered and intended to be savoured.

The story is based in the abandoned villa on a hilltop in central Italy. It is 1944 and the Allies are advancing yet the scent of victory is overwhelmed by accumulated shell shock. The central characters in the villa: Hungarian Count Lazlo de Almasy, Canadian nurse Hana, the Indian sapper Kip and the thief Caravaggio are all burned out by war and in de Almasy's case, literally and mortally burned. Hana is nursing her mysterious dying patient who gradually details his life as an explorer in the desert of northern Africa and reveals his doomed, magnificant, obsessive, life-altering love affair with Katherine Clifton, an English rose with the tenaciousness of a lioness. Hana, who has lost everyone she dared to love, tries to insulate herself from the world but in the presence of Kip and the less noble Caravaggio, she reaches out once again. This is a story of love's expectations, and the shifting loyalties of friends, family and nations in times of war, of deadly betrayals and being rescued by strangers, of healing wounds and preparing for death. In short, all the stuff top class literature is made of and, strangely, pretty much what happens around us every day although the settings might not be as exotic.

Minghella has constructed a vast canvas of human experience, yet he does not waste a word. He peels away the exterior visage of his characters to reveal their joy and pain with an exquisitely bare, poetic use of language. The consequences of their lives remained with me long after I had put the book down. I pick up The English Patient from time to time and the magic is always there.

Brilliantly moving and dynamic
This is the first screeenplay i've read and i understood it clearly. In regards to the books content i was in tears by the end and it pushed me to buy the film after i read it. A must for any shelf. ... Read more

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From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil's Ghost comes a remarkable and intimate novel of lives that intersect across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Their makeshift family is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada's casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past.Description in Spanish:En la mas intima y hermosa de sus historias, Michael Ondaatje narra la vida de Anna, quien tras un brutal suceso acontecido en su hogar, tendra que dejar atras la vida en la granja de California y empezar un nuevo camino en el sur de Francia. Lejos de su padre, de su gemela Claire y de Coop un misterioso muchacho acogido por la familia encontrara en la literatura y en la reconstruccion de la biografia de un importante escritor la manera de conciliarse con su pasado. Una novela de vidas cruzadas que se extiende por dos continentes y a lo largo de un siglo. Tras El paciente ingles, Ondaatje demuestra su extraordinaria capacidad para moverse en el dificil terreno de los sentimientos y para tratar las pasiones, las perdidas y la persistencia del pasado, asi como las exigencias de la familia, del amor y de los recuerdos. Un relato de inusual intensidad y belleza capaz de emocionarnos y dejarnos sin respiro. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

not satisfying
His prose is truly lovely, but reading this book is like driving a car with a bad clutch.It runs in fits & starts, bucks, disconnects, then gives the promise of going smoothly.I just couldn't get into the "flow" (or lack of) of this book & failed to feel much empathy with the characters.There always seemed to be something just over the horizon that I was just not seeing. ... Read more

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'A magical book. Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch' - Graham Swift. It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. He immerses himself in the lives of the people who surround him, learning, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love. "In the Skin of a Lion" is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning "The English Patient". It is here that we encounter, for the first time, Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief, among a large cast of characters who are all lovingly and intimately portrayed. It is an exquisite and musical novel, a romance that challenges the boundary between history and myth. 'Ondaatje writes in curves, in time-lapses, a sort of verbal cinema whose narrative is unfaltering' - "The Times". 'A triumph ...a powerful and revelatory accomplishment' - "Times Literary Supplement". ... Read more

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Rare fiction that dictates its own challenging terms on the first page and by the last has readers convinced that their perceptions of life, love and history were sophisticated all along. With characters spun of dreams and the magic of words. 311 pages ... Read more

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Poetry. Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor. At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, "Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis." Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. "Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board") until a single couple remains. And now, the post-Meech Lake edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

BUY THIS BOOK, OR BORROW IT FROM A FRIEND AND DON'T GIVE IT
I ain't seen many gooder books than this one to often. I wish I had one

A delightful little book
I stumbled across this little gem (by the author of "The English Patient") while browsing the dual-language (French-English, in this case) section of a local bookstore.

The premise: A dance where individuals who match certain requirements must retire from the dance floor. For example: "Women who've had to give up the accordion because of pinched breasts." ... Read more

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Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20)

Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature.

Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid (aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim) is not the clichéd dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life’s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame (or infamy) for Billy’s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje’s Garrett is “a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane” (p. 29) who has taught himself a language he’ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti-hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy’s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy’s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje’s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history.

I am here with the range for everything
corpuscle muscle hair
hands that need the rub of metal
those senses that
that want to crash things with an axe
that listen to deep buried veins in our palms
those who move in dreams over your women night
near you, every paw, the invisible hooves
the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never
the body’s waiting rut.
(p. 72) ... Read more

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In his novel "In the Skin of a Lion", MichaelOndaatje masterly goes back through time and bringsback to life again the history of the vibrating andgrowing city of Toronto, Canada in the 1920s. Hefeelingy deals with the corners of history oftenforgotten, rewriting the story anew, giving a voiceto the immigrants experience, where Toronto becomesalive again as a stage for continually growing andchanging multicultural narratives. In "MichaelOndaatje's 'In the Skin of a Lion' andMulticulturalism", Ondaatjes's authorial toolsbringing to life the immigrant narrative are beingclosely and expresively analysed. Making use ofOndaatje's personal immigrant experience, Imbricdeals with the presentation of history also Canada'simmigration history, the concept of language andnarrative as such, post-colonialism andpostmodernism as features used to present the notionof multiculturalism in the novel, offering to thereader new facets of a world believed to be alreadyfully experienced. ... Read more

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The best-selling-novel-turned-movie that garnered 9 Oscars including Best Picture. Four people come together in a deserted Italian villa during the final moments of World War II. Caravaggio, the thief; the Indian sapper Kip; Hana, the nurse, who obsessively tends to her last surviving patient-the English patient-a nameless and burned man whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book.Description in Spanish:El final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial alcanza a cuatro personas en una villa italiana. Una joven enfermera que cuida a un enigmatico hombre completamente abrasado, un rastreador de explosivos de origen sij y un cinico superviviente de la guerra iran recomponiendo sus propias identidades. Algunos de sus recuerdos viajan hasta el ardiente y desolado desierto africano para desvelarnos una intensa historia de amor. La novela fue adaptada al cine en 1996 por Anthony Minghella, convirtiendose en una de las peliculas mas premiadas de la historia de los Oscar con nueve estatuillas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Poetico y sensual!
Si vio la pelicula El Paciente Ingles encontrara que el libro es diferente a su adaptacion cinematografica.Poetico y sensual, el libro profundiza mas sobre los personajes de Hana y Kip, definitivamente mas interesantesque la relacion de Katharine y Lazlo Almasy que explota la pelicula. Lospersonajes se conectan a travez de sus tristezas y pasiones, las historiasno contadas, los secretos que los unen. ... Read more