A Complicated Kindness

A Complicated Kindness PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582438897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This “darkly funny and provocative” coming-of-age novel balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty teenage girl whose Canadian family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity (O, The Oprah Magazine). From the author of Women Talking—now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley “Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.

A Complicated Kindness

A Complicated Kindness PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582438897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This “darkly funny and provocative” coming-of-age novel balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty teenage girl whose Canadian family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity (O, The Oprah Magazine). From the author of Women Talking—now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley “Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.

All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635574986
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly). Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one who truly wants to die? All My Puny Sorrows is a deeply personal story that is as much comedy as it is tragedy, a goodbye grin from the friend who taught you how to live.

Women Talking

Women Talking PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635572592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale.” -Margaret Atwood, on Twitter "Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women-all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in-have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape? Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

The Flying Troutmans

The Flying Troutmans PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640091718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
"This saga of bad luck and good company is a wry, scary, heartfelt ode to the traverses we have to make in life when we're at the end of our rope and there's no net below us." —ELLE From the author of Women Talking—now an Academy Award-winning film starring Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and Jessie Buckley When Hattie's moody boyfriend dumps her in Paris, she returns home to find that her sister Min is in the psych ward again. Freaked out by the prospect of becoming a surrogate mother to Min's kids, Logan and Thebes, Hattie decides to take them in the family van to find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art gallery in South Dakota. What ensues is a remarkable journey across America, as aunt and kids—through chaos as diverse as their personalities—discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.

Summer of My Amazing Luck

Summer of My Amazing Luck PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307375595
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A Novel by the Governor General’s Literary Award—winning author of A Complicated Kindness Lucy Van Alstyne always thought she’d grow up to become a forest ranger. Instead, at the age of eighteen, she’s found herself with quite a different job title: Single Mother on the Dole. As for the father of her nine-month-old son, Dillinger, well…it could be any of number of guys. At the Have-a-Life housing project–aptly nicknamed Half-a-Life by those who call it home–Lucy meets Lish, a zany and exuberant woman whose idea of fashion is a black beret with a big silver spider brooch stuck on it. Lish is the mother of four daughters, two by a man on welfare himself and twins from a one-week stand with a fire-eating busker who stole her heart–and her wallet. Living on the dole isn’t a walk in the park for Lucy and Lish. Dinner almost always consists of noodles. Transportation means pushing a crappy stroller through the rain. Then there are the condescending welfare agents with their dreaded surprise inspections. And just across the street is Serenity Place, another housing project with which Half-a-Life is engaged in a full-on feud. When the women aren’t busy snitching on each other, they’re spreading rumours–or plotting elaborate acts of revenge. In the middle of a mosquito-infested rainy season, Lish and Lucy decide to escape the craziness of Half-A-Life by taking to the road. In a van held together with coat-hangers and electrical tape and crammed to the hilt with kids and toys, they set off to Colorado in search Lish’s lost love and the father of her twins. Whether they’ll find him is questionable, but the down-and-out adventure helps Lucy realize that this just may be the summer of her amazing luck. Miriam Toews’s debut novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck opens our eyes to a social class rarely captured in fiction. At once hilarious and heartbreaking, it is inhabited by an unforgettable and poignant group of characters. Shortlisted for both the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, it also earned Miriam the John Hirsch Award for the Most Promising Manitoba Writer.

Fight Night

Fight Night PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635578183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
"Move over, Scout Finch! There's a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." -USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." -New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. “You're a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv's Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting-painfully, ferociously- for a way to live on their own terms.

Swing Low

Swing Low PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559705875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular school teacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. Now his daughter Miriam, an award-winning writer, has given her father a voice for his whole story. In Swing Low, Miriam recounts Mel's life as she imagines he would have told it, right up to the day he took his final walk. Toews takes us deep inside the experience of depression, but she also gives us winsome and hilarious tales of country life: growing up on a farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a strong, happy family in the midst of private torment." --

A Boy of Good Breeding

A Boy of Good Breeding PDF Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640091874
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
A single mom returns to her hometown in Manitoba and gets tangled up in the mayor’s scheme to meet the Canadian Prime Minister . . . A big-hearted, hilarious novel of small-town Canada and its larger-than-life characters—including one stubborn, stray dog—from the author of Women Talking Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute McCloud and her daughter. She’s moved back to Algren to help her mom look after her dad after his heart attack, and gets a job working for the longtime mayor and her dad’s best friend, Hosea Funk. Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister, who Hosea believes is his long-lost father after a secret deathbed confession from his mother. In order to be designated Canada’s smallest town and get an official visit from that very same Prime Minister, they have to keep the town’s population to 1,500—no more, no less. Problem is, people keep coming and going, having triplets, or getting married, or dying. Hosea’s longtime girlfriend wants to move in, and then Knute’s ex shows up—it’s causing no end of trouble. A delightfully quirky novel about the eccentricities of small-town life, and finally finding out where you truly belong.

More Random Acts of Kindness

More Random Acts of Kindness PDF Author: The Editors of Conari Press
Publisher: Conari Press
ISBN: 9780943233826
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A tribute to small individual expressions of kindness that motivate and inspire others includes quotes, anecdotes, and suggestions to promote compassionate living and a gentler world

On Kindness

On Kindness PDF Author: Adam Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429957573
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
In this brilliant, epigrammatic book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the social historian Barbara Taylor examine the terrors of kindness and return to the reader the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion. Kindness is the foundation of the world's great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it? Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind's "greatest delight": the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.