This is the third volume of essays from Canada’s Man of Letters, following the critically acclaimed Raise You Five and Raise You Ten. Novelist and poet Barry Callaghan is one of Canada’s great journalists. He has received every major award in North America – more than a dozen National Magazine awards, seven of them gold, and in the U.S., the Lowell Thomas Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His journalism covers an astonishing range, from serious political reporting to autobiography, sports writing, and travel writing. In the late sixties at the Toronto Telegram, he began his career as a books editor and weekly columnist, setting a standard that has rarely been met since. He became a war correspondent in theMiddle East and Africa, and a translator of, and commentator on, the culture and politics of European countries from Spain to Russia. Masterfully written, this third volume of essays and encounters is “literary criticism and cultural history of a high order, in turn joyous, acerbic, celebratory.” Globe & Mail
There is an extraordinary figure on the landscape. His name is Hogg, known to be ambling through history and cities without apparent purpose by secretly in search of passionate adventure, telling his story in poems and continuing to create himself. This time, he has gone straight into the inferno of the past century, Leningrad, to make love under the murderous eye of all the Cops in the sky. As the great American poet, Hayden Carruth says about the poems collected here: “The centred line contains the murderous image, all the more grim for its sardonic elegance. I know nothing like these poems. They are brilliant extrapolations from an appalled imagination at the end of a dreadful millennium, unquestionably first-rate.”
Fourteen tales about people–the sensual, ambiguous relationship of people to each other and the world they live in; resonant tales about men and women reaching out to each other in their loneliness.
As a man of letters, as a poet, novelist, and personal journalist, Barry Callaghan is a singular presence in Canada. Always a storyteller, a flaneur “secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure,” he is also a public scholar in the tradition of Edmund Wilson (his extraordinary portrait of Wilson concludes this volume).Unflinching before the harsh complexities of our time, RAISE YOU TEN, like RAISE YOU FIVE (2005), is, as trumpeted by the Globe and Mail – “Literary criticism and cultural history of a high order, in turn joyous, acerbic, celebratory.”
RAISE YOU FIVE is periodic writing about the most complex ideas, rendered in prose of utter ease and clarity–prose from a man who believes all writing, at its best, whether it is a book review or meditation on evil, is a kind of storytelling, and that storytelling is what keeps it alive.
In the 1950s and 1960s, boxers John Caldwell and Freddie Gilroy reached the very pinnacle of their sport and brought immense pride to Belfast and Ireland. This is their story of friendship and rivalry, of glory and pain, of riches and poverty. Belfast is world-renowned for her glovemen. Best of Enemies explores the careers of two of the city's finest exponents of the noble art of boxing. As friends, they won Olympic medals for Ireland. As professionals, they quickly became bitter adversaries. Their rivalry peaked when Caldwell claimed a share of the world bantamweight crown in a fight that had been promised to Gilroy. Thereafter, the Belfast fighters were on a collision course. The two finally met in a bloody battle in Belfast's King's Hall on Saturday, 20 October 1962. However, that brutal night did not resolve the question of who was the better boxer, which lingers to this day.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.