Author: Dan Needles
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307360849
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
Walt Wingfield, the character beloved by thousands in every part of the country, is back with a new and complete book, with a new introduction from the author. Walt Wingfield is a Bay Street stockbroker who quits his job and buys a hundred-acre farm in Persephone Township, Ontario. In a series of letters to the editor of the local newspaper, Walt chronicles his modest successes and spectacular defeats in an age when farming has become difficult for farmers old and new. Dan Needles' rich and charming rural neighbourhood may be difficult to find on a map but it is very close to the Canadian soul. Including a new introduction from Dan Needles, the writer who brought this marvellous world to life 27 years ago, and all your favourite mishaps, triumphs and eccentric neighbours Wingfield's World is the full story of one man's attempt to embrace a less complicated world and how he ends up with more complication and drama, and more love and richness than he could have imagined.
Author: Dan Needles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781550131574
Category : Canadian wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
Businessman Walt Wingfield yearns for a simpler life, so he buys a 100-acre farm and decides to use horse-drawn equipment. In these humorous letters to a local newspaper, Wingfield chronicles his first three years, including his battles with developers and barnyard disease, and his trials with a former racehorse that can only turn left.
Author: Dan Needles
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN: 1771621702
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
Author and playwright Dan Needles has long delighted readers and audiences alike with his insightful and laugh-out-loud perspective on small-town life, published in such bestselling books as Wingfield's World (Random House, 2011), Wingfield's Hope (Key Porter, 2005), With Axe and Flask (McFarlane, Walter and Ross, 2002) and Letters From Wingfield Farm (Key Porter, 1988). In 1988, Needles and his wife left the city to start a family in a country community located two hours north of Toronto. Together they stocked their farm with sheep, cattle, chickens, pigs and, eventually, four children. Needles' charming chronicle unfolds in essays dated from 1997 to 2016, offering homespun advice for successful country living--like whether to wave from the elbow or to merely raise one finger from the steering wheel when passing a neighbour in the car. He cautions on rural superstitions, such as when his neighbour hesitated before selling him weaner pigs because every time he does the wife of the farmer who's buying them becomes pregnant--which turned out to be true. Here too is the tale of an unlikely friendship between a "borderline" collie ("he's never bitten anything in his life and the sheep are catching on") and an odd duck named Ferdinand, as well as other hilarious stories involving an assortment of farm animals, including the weapon of choice to properly dispatch a rooster-gone-bad; the risks of giving a name to a potential Sunday dinner entrée; and how to outsmart a free-range pig. With his witty insight, Needles shares the art of neighbouring in the country--a place made for visits, and "where a figure walking across your field is more of a reason to put the kettle on than to call the police." True Confessions from the Ninth Concession is a sesquicentennial crop of antics and aphorisms by Canada's funniest farmer--one that presents a wonderful escape for world-weary city dwellers, and affirmative reading for anyone who is from, or has moved to, rural Canada.
Author: Dan Needles
Publisher: MacFarlane Walter & Ross
ISBN: 1551990881
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for 2003 The creator of the hugely popular Wingfield Farm plays lays bare a beguiling corner of rural Canada Just a few hours north of the city, you’ll find the familiar features of Persephone Township: the hardscrabble farms, the timeless small towns, the laconic local citizens. The fabled turf that is home to Wingfield Farm (immortalized by Dan Needles in five one-man stage productions), Persephone is hard to find on any map but very near the Canadian soul. In Persephone anything can happen and often does. Towering local figures dating back to the township’s murky colonial beginnings land-grabbing speculators, shady railway promoters, heedless despoilers of natural wonders, and spectacularly slippery politicians cross paths with the likes of Sir John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, not to mention the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie and the future King Edward VII. With Axe and Flask tells it all, sparing no Canadian sacred cow in uncovering the township’s checkered past, from the displacement of its original native inhabitants to the recent invasion of the weekenders. You are about to enter a world at once strange and recognizable, where past and present, fact and fiction combine in a potent mix of comedy, pathos and national identity.
Author: Alison Uttley
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137448X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The “superb” time travel adventure of one lonely young girl, a remarkable family, and an impossible task, set between modern and Elizabethan England (The Washington Post) "A beautiful book . . . a form of enchanting ghost story, with the ghosts drawn in with the grace of a painter on a fan." —The Observer Penelope Taberner Cameron is a solitary and a sickly child, a reader and a dreamer. Her mother, indeed, is of the opinion that the girl has grown all too attached to the products of her imagination and decides to send her away from London for a restorative dose of fresh country air. But staying at Thackers, in remote Derbyshire, Penelope is soon caught up in a new mystery, as she finds herself transported at unforeseeable intervals back and forth from modern to Elizabethan times. There she becomes part of a remarkable family that is, Penelope realizes, in terrible danger as they plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots, from the prison in which Queen Elizabeth has confined her. Penelope knows the tragic end that awaits the Scottish queen, but she can neither change the course of events nor persuade her new family of the hopelessness of their cause, which love, loyalty, and justice all compel them to embrace. Caught between present and past, Penelope is ever more torn by questions of freedom and fate. To travel in time, she discovers, is to be very much alone. And yet the slow recurrent rhythms of the natural world, beautifully captured by Alison Uttley, also speak of a greater ongoing life that transcends the passage of the years.
Author: Robert Reid
Publisher: The Porcupine's Quill
ISBN: 0889848688
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
‘Every time I leave the world of work, family and community to wade into a river with fly rod in hand, I enter a sacred space that sometimes finds expression in the written word.’ In Casting into Mystery, writer Robert Reid and wood engraver Wesley W. Bates—avid anglers, both—put ink to paper in homage to the venerable sport of fly fishing. Through text and image, they recall with fondness the ‘company of rivers’ each is grateful to know, providing a glimpse inside a sporting culture teeming with literature, art and music. Part memoir, part objet d’art and part field guide, Casting into Mystery will delight passionate fly fishing practitioners and armchair anglers alike.
Author: Howard White
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 9781550179248
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Howard White offers humour-laced sketches of small-town life on the BC Coast.
Author: JoAnne Culley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781990326011
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Claudette on the Keys is about a female pianist who follows fortune but instead finds fascism on the rise in this tale of intrigue in pre--war times. Inspired by true events, it's the story of Ida, whose stage name is Claudette, and her husband Harry, a Toronto--based duo--piano team, who are struggling to find employment in 1936 after being laid off from their radio show. Following a solo performance at Shea's Theatre, where Ida performs a stellar rendition of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," she is invited by a British talent agent to work overseas where she becomes embroiled in a scheme to get Jewish musicians out of Germany, passport problems and imprisonment. With a mixture of real and imagined characters, Culley provides a glimpse into the show business world of pre--war Europe through the eyes of a spunky heroine. A must--read for fans of Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham and The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff.
Author: Forrest Pritchard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762794380
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
"The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare is a gripping and intense drama that explores themes of revenge, betrayal, and the destructive consequences of violence. Set in ancient Rome, the play follows the tragic downfall of the noble general Titus Andronicus and his family as they become embroiled in a cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. At the heart of the story is the brutal conflict between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose sons are executed by Titus as retribution for their crimes. In retaliation, Tamora and her lover, Aaron the Moor, orchestrate a series of heinous acts of revenge against Titus and his family, plunging them into a spiral of madness and despair. As the body count rises and the atrocities escalate, Titus is consumed by grief and rage, leading to a climactic showdown that culminates in a shocking and tragic conclusion. Along the way, Shakespeare explores themes of honor, justice, and the nature of humanity, offering a searing indictment of the cycle of violence and the capacity for cruelty that lies within us all.
