Drawing on author John Cullen’s years of experience as both a stand-up comic and an elite curler, Curling Rocks! offers a lighthearted, expertly detailed look at a unique sport and its history, from the most absurd curling fashions to the most sublime matches ever played.The sport of curling continues to expand its global reach, attracting new players and fans far beyond traditional strongholds. Yet, even in Canada—a country with a long curling history and...

LONGLISTED FOR THE PRIX GONCOURT AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA 'I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost . . .' It's a Sunday in early September and a woman leaves muggy Paris to visit her sister in the western suburbs of the city. Ville-d'Avray is less than an hour away, but it seems like another world with its secluded streets and set-back houses. The sisters' relationship is ambiguous....

Two young princesses navigate the court intrigues of 18th-century France and Spain in this stunning historical fiction novel based on a true story.“Vivid, engrossing . . . one of the most fascinating historical narratives I’ve ever read.” —Diana Gabaldon, author of OutlanderPhilippe d’Orléans, the regent of France, has a gangrenous heart—the result of a life of debauchery, alcohol, power, and flattery. One morning in 1721, he decid...

In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the Ebola epidemic: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent, protected from the virus only by a plastic suit; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed, helping the teams overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned young boy cast out of his village for fear of infection. And watching...

In this companion volume to Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.The book highligh...

Dissecting a midlife affair, this perceptive, slyly comical debut explores how the spaces that limit our movements can be more exciting than the person we think we want.Ema and Paul are lovers. Like so many others before them, they met through work. Both are married with children, and they arrange hurried meetings away from prying eyes. Paul’s car, a corner of Ema’s house, a hotel room…But their relationship soon suffers from this too-restricted sphere, and Ema dec...

A striking debut novel about the power of a father’s love for his son and the heart-wrenching choices he has to make in the face of death.Yanis’s world is Pierre, the son he raised as a single parent. For nearly twenty years, Yanis spent his nights as a cabdriver with Pierre always at his side, so as not to miss a moment in each other’s company. Yanis and Pierre also share a love of diving—in pursuit of that magical moment when they lose themselves in the deep sea....

Emerging from an era of changing mental health and addiction services, Different Diagnoses, Similar Experiences is the first work in its field to gather narratives of mental health, addiction and dual diagnoses into one publication, as well as to critically examine the differences and similarities of these experiences.Documenting their own personal narratives, contributors share their unique journey to recovery, while Michael John Norton and Oliver John Cullen construct a ...

Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churc...

Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?"John Gruesser uses the conce...

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work.JoAnn P...

On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories.In this intelligent and deeply moving book, G�ran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father's story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the opti...