The Toronto Star has called George Fetherling, the poet, novelist and cultural commentator, a "legendary" figure in Canadian writing. The Montreal Gazette speaks of him as "a mercurial, liberal intelligence… the kind of which English in Canada has too short a supply. For nearly forty years he has been the professional outsider who is nevertheless at the centre of things, a cyclone of activity in the arts generally and a supportive presence for those who labour there alongside him. His more than fifty books, including Selected Poems and the influential memoir Travels by Night, form a persuasive argument for a distinct Canadian brand of humanism, rooted in our own time and place but honouring the past while acknowledging the cosmopolitan character of Canadian cities. In George Fetherling and His Work, Linda Rogers brings together a range of critics, academics and fellow poets from across the country to discuss various aspects of his life and ideas. Readers who know Fetherling’s writing in a variety of genres will gain fresh insight from this retrospective collection. Those coming to Fetherling for the first time will find the book a useful introduction.
The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place—often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs. In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of “communion-in-isolation.” He contrasts Fetherling’s contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider’s fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political. Fetherling’s afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches—“the desire to create new codes of hearing” and “writing-to-heal”—and how they are reflected in the collection.
The travel writing of celebrated writer George Fetherling is filled with vivid prose and bizarre characters. Includes: One Russia, Two Chinas A travel narrative written over the course of ten years, One Russia, Two Chinas is about change and resistance to change in the postmodern world. A valuable document that freezes some important world events for close inspection. Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter At a turning point in his life, George Fetherling embarked on an adventure to sail round the world on one of the last of the tramp freighters. The four-month voyage carried him 30,000 nautical miles from Europe via the Panama Canal to the South Pacific and back by way of Singapore, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, and Suez. Written with dash, colour, and droll humour, Fetherling’s narrative is peopled by a rich cast of characters, from the Foreign Legionnaires of French Polynesia to the raskol gangs of Papua New Guinea. Indochina Now and Then George Fetherling recounts multiple journeys through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, keeping an eye peeled and an ear cocked for whatever faint traces of French rule might remain. Indochina Now and Then is a travel narrative that leaves an indelible impression in the readers imagination.
At a turning point in his life, George Fetherling embarked on an adventure to sail round the world on one of the last of the tramp freighters. The four-month voyage carried him 30,000 nautical miles from Europe via the Panama Canal to the South Pacific and back by way of Singapore, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, and Suez. Written with dash, colour, and droll humour, Fetherling's narrative is peopled by a rich cast of characters, from the Foreign Legionnaires of French Polynesia to the raskol gangs of Papua New Guinea. The author captures the reality of life aboard a working cargo ship – the boredom, the seclusion, the differences of nationality and culture that isolation and cramped quarters seem to exaggerate. But the routine of loneliness or tranquility is punctuated by moments of near-panic – shipboard fires, furniture-smashing storms, even a brush with pirates in the Straits of Malacca.
A travel narrative written over the course of ten years, One Russia, Two Chinas is about change and resistance to change in the postmodern world. In 1991, when the Soviet Union was about to morph into the Russian Federation, George Fetherling found himself in Moscow. He both marched with the workers in the last-ever Communist May Day parade and observed, at ground level, the new Russia’s love of the marketplace. Fetherling then went overland to China. His entry point was Beijing, which at that moment was girding itself for the first anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Later that same year he journeyed to Taiwan, then in its final days as a dictatorship. He returned there mid-decade when the "Other China" had become a democracy, in order to note the differences – and similarities. This is old-fashioned travel writing, with vivid prose, bizarre characters, and crystallizing descriptions. But its also a valuable document that freezes some important world events for close inspection.
George Fetherling recounts multiple journeys through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, keeping an eye peeled and an ear cocked for whatever faint traces of French rule might remain. Indochina Now and Then is a travel narrative that leaves an indelible impression in the reader's imagination.
Drawn equally from recent, previously unpublished work and from earlier books now out of print, this brief selection of Doug Fetherling’s poetry deals with the dangers posed by a technocratic society. It grapples with the question of whether we can guard against a dystopian nightmare by observing ceremony and ritual and by remembering how history accumulates silently from daily experience. With its contemporary urban sensibility and its love of sometimes archaic languate, Variorum shows the essential consistency of Fetherling’s voice over the past two decades.
The compelling, tragic and often bizarre life stories of history's famous and infamous assassins, now collected in one comprehensive, easy-to-use volume. The names are well-known, but how much do you know about the inner lives of John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in a misguided attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster, or Mark David Chapman, who, after shooting John Lennon, sat down on the sidewalk to continue reading The Catcher in the Rye? And what about the world's not-so-famous assassins? Find out what happened when Carlito Dimahilig attacked Imelda Marcos with a bolo knife (and how one of her many famous pairs of shoes came into play!), or why Max Hödel could be considered one of the least successful assassins in history. With breadth of study and a keen eye for detail, George Fetherling has compiled a fascinating and very readable compendium -- the first of its kind -- of more than 200 biographies of assassins from all periods and countries, for the scholar and general reader alike. Fetherling also provides an overview of the history of assassination, outlines the five psychological types of assassins and gives a run-down of the most useful literature in the field. Ideal for students, historians, history buffs, psychologists and readers interested in biography and true crime, this book is a must have window into the lives of those who have drastically shaped the history of our world.
Vividly conjured out of the hustle and crime of Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, this poetic and picaresque novel stakes a new claim on the fictional territory of Don DeLillo and Chuck Palahniuk. Bishop isn’t a man most women would find attractive: a middle-aged marijuana dealer who owes his ponytail to hair transplants, and his twisted knowledge of books to the reading he’s done in rehab. But for one brief moment he catches the eye of Beth, an innocent from rural Alberta — who, at that same instant, excites the self-destructive lust of Theresa, a social worker and therapist wannabe. These strange comings-together in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside propel the three characters on a wild race through British Columbia’s mountainous interior, headed toward Bishop’s self-invented city on a hill. It turns out they are also on a journey through concepts of family, urban dislocation, gender identity and the disconnections of language itself.
As compelling and revelatory as Colm Toibin's The Master, Walt Whitman's Secret mines the life of the most influential poet in the American canon for insights about creativity, relations between the sexes and the dangers of excessive patriotism. In this wonderfully imagined novel, Walt Whitman's secret isn't his homosexuality but another one entirely. It's a political secret, one that the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century has pledged himself to keep until he is on his deathbed. Only in that way can Whitman protect the great love of his life - a Confederate deserter he met in Washington during the Civil War - from the calumnies and scandals that have muddied his own reputation ever since the first publication of Leaves of Grass. The person who finally hears his confession is Horace, his unpaid amanuensis and helper, a young man who will go on to fill nine fat volumes with a verbatim record of the great man's tabletalk and often deceptive reminiscences. Only after Whitman has gone does Horace realize that Whitman seems to be making him a bequest of not only the secret but of his own complex personality as well.
Selected from thousands of pages of the daily journals of George Fetherling - the inexhaustible novelist, poet, and cultural commentator - The Writing Life reveals an astute and candid observer of his contemporaries as well as himself. Hundreds of figures in the arts and public life crisscross the pages of Fetherling's journals, from Margaret Atwood and Marshall McLuhan, to Gwendolyn MacEwen and Conrad Black. The book begins in mid-1970s Toronto, a time of cultural ferment, and carries on to Vancouver and a new century. A captivating and intimate narrative, The Writing Life provides a compelling portrait of the last three decades of Canadian cultural life. From the book: Tuesday 4 February 1992 / Toronto Early this morning the latest in a series of strange phone calls from Edmund Carpenter in New York to discuss successive versions of his Canadian Notes & Queries piece on Marshall McLuhan. He falls to reminiscing and at one point says: "Marshall always reminded me of that passage in Boswell in which Boswell says that if you chanced to take shelter from a rain storm for a few minutes in Dr Johnson's company, you would come away convinced that you had just met the smartest man in the world. Marshall was like that too. Of course, if you spent an hour with Marshall, well, that was something quite different.
The Vietnam War was a regional conflict that turned into an epic confrontation between ideologies, leaving deep scars on the psyches of nations that fought and long-lasting physical damage to Vietnam itself. The three books in this bundle cover different aspects of the war and the region, from Michael Maclear’s personal memories as an embedded journalist in North Vietnam to George Fetherling’s observations of the state of Southeast Asia today to military historian Fred Gaffen’s analysis of the experiences of soldiers travelling to faraway lands to fight in their countries’ wars. Includes Cross-Border Warriors Guerrilla Nation Indochina Now and Then
Among the hordes of starry-eyed 'argonauts' who flocked to the California gold rush of 1849 was an Australian named Edward Hargraves. He left America empty-handed, only to find gold in his own backyard. The result was the great Australian rush of the 1850s, which also attracted participants from around the world. A South African named P.J. Marais was one of them. Marais too returned home in defeat - only to set in motion the diamond and gold rushes that transformed southern Africa. And so it went. Most previous historians of the gold rushes have tended to view them as acts of spontaneous nationalism. Each country likes to see its own gold rush as the one that either shaped those that followed or epitomized all the rest. In The Gold Crusades: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849-1929, Douglas Fetherling takes a different approach. Fetherling argues that the gold rushes in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa shared the same causes and results, the same characters and characteristics. He posits that they were in fact a single discontinuous event, an expression of the British imperial experience and nineteenth-century liberalism. He does so with dash and style and with a sharp eye for the telling anecdote, the out-of-the-way document, and the bold connection between seemingly unrelated disciplines. Originally published by Macmillan of Canada, 1988.
Most western critics of the junta that has ruled Burma since 1962-suppressing the democracy movement and squashing human rights while dominating the international opium trade-have hesitated to visit the country lest the cost of their trip help to prop up the regime. George Fetherling shared these concerns. But motivated by a desire to see the situation firsthand, he resolved to go anyway-as cheaply as possible.
His recreation of 1929 makes the stock market crash come all too alive. It's a dramatic reminder of how vulnerable we were and might be again." Peter Newman Even 75 years later, the Crash of 1929 throws a shadow over the financial world whenever stock markets take a tumble. Yet much of what we believe we know about it is mistaken. Brokers didn't jump out of windows-and Bay Street wasn't in lock-step with Wall Street. The truth is that Canada's crash and subsequent Depression were worse than the American ones, striking at a vulnerable time, when society was in transition between agricultural and industrial economics and between the British and American styles of power. But though the period was different here than across the border, it was no less thickly populated with outrageous scoundrels, speculators, suckers, soothsayers-and victims. Many people burned by the collapse of prices in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg or Vancouver were still alive to tell their stories when Gold Diggers of 1929 was first published a quarter century ago. The book records their voices as it looks at politics and institutions blown apart by events set in motion in that long-ago October. In this classic account rich in anecdote and alive with the heady flavour of the times, George Fetherling looks back at the brokers and bankers, the shrewd millionaires and blue-collar wildcatters-all of them caught up in the rush to cash in. Who were the heroes? Who were the villains? Who went to jail, who went broke, who carried on business as usual?
Until now, there has been no single source for the life stories of assassins in various eras and cultures: the infamous ones and the surprisingly forgotten, the ideologues and the zealots, the sociopaths and the mercenary killers. A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins fills this gap for the benefit of the true-crime fans, the historian, the student and the general reader alike. We all know the names Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth. But who assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, igniting the First World War? What wealthy aristocrat killed Rasputin and lived on until 1967? How many different people attempted to assassinate Hitler - or Queen Victoria? Which modern world leader holds the record for escaping assassins' plots - and, more to the point, who were the plotters? How have assassins in Japan, say, differed from those in the United States? What assassins have been produced by such famously peace-loving societies as Canada and Australia? to browse or to read from cover to cover, whether as a refreshingly new take on history and politics or as a psychological portrait of the assassin personality. It is much more than a ready-reference, and has no political subtext. Rather, it is a collection of biographical stories, a few well-known but most obscure, dealing with individual assassins from the ancient world to the present day. Researched with care and told with style and insight, A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins is a complete chronicle of some of the most influential crimes in history.
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