Showing results by narrator "Michael David Kirby" in All Categories

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.  

 The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young Canadian soldier and china painter and the beautiful model who becomes Austin's mistress.  

A multicultural nexus, Toronto hosts Indian, Portuguese, African, Italian, and Chinese communities that provide fertile backdrops for Toronto Noir's corrosive exposés. Features brand-new stories by RM Vaughan, Nathan Sellyn, Ibi Kaslik, Peter Robinson, Heather Birrell, Sean Dixon, Raywat Deonandad, Christine Murray, Gail Bowen, Emily Schultz, Andrew Pyper, Kim Moritsugu, Mark Sinnet, George Elliott Clarke, Pasha Malla, and Michael Redhill.

In this deeply felt, compulsive and edgy work, Sarah Meehan Sirk shines a distinctive light on love and death in their many incarnations. In "The Dead Husband Project", an artist who has planned to make an installation out of her terminally ill husband’s dead body has to recalibrate when his diagnosis changes. In "The Date", an online dating match takes an unusual turn when the man who shows up to the restaurant has no face. In "Ozk", a young girl longs to connect with her socially isolated mother, a professor of mathematics who makes a radical discovery.

A 25,000-copy best seller in Quebec, Arvida, with its stories of innocent young girls and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips heading nowhere, is unforgettable. Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald's portrait of his hometown, a model town designed by American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, does for Quebec's North what William Faulkner did for the South and heralds an important new voice in world literature.

Author Michael Quetting shares the hilarious and moving true story of how he became a father to seven rambunctious goslings - and the surprising things he learned along the way. Starting right at the beginning, with the eggs, his journey takes him from the incubator all the way to the airstrip, where he must attempt to teach the geese to fly as part of an ambitious scientific research initiative for the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, which tracks animal migrations around the world. 

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema, and everyone has a secret of some kind.