The Flying Troutmans

The Flying Troutmans
Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1640091718

"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 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.

The Flying Troutmans

The Flying Troutmans
Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781582435312

Follow the Troutmans as they learn about themselves and each other through chaos as diverse as their personalities, while embarking on a journey across the United States weathering sleazy motel rooms, car repairs, and bizarre people.

Lives Lived, Lives Imagined

Lives Lived, Lives Imagined
Author: Sabrina Reed
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2022-11-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1772840122

Perceptive, controversial, topical, and achingly funny, Miriam Toews’s books have earned her a place at the forefront of Canadian literature. In this first monograph on Toews’s work, Sabrina Reed examines the interplay of trauma and resilience in the author’s fiction. Reed skillfully demonstrates how Toews situates resilience across key themes, including: the home as both a source of trauma and an inspiration for resilient action; the road trip as a search for resolution and redemption; and the reframing of the Mennonite diaspora as an escape from patriarchal oppression. The deaths by suicide of Toews’s father and sister stand out as the most shocking and tragic of the author’s biographical details, and Reed explores Toews’s use of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of this trauma. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to both scholars and devotees of Toews’s work, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.

Living as Mapmakers

Living as Mapmakers
Author: Debbie Pushor
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-12-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463003614

While teacher knowledge is well-researched and conceptualized, parent knowledge remains largely unstudied. In response, this book details Pushor’s conceptualization of parent knowledge, the unique knowledge that arises from the lived experiences of being a parent, knowledge that is relational, bodied and embodied, intuitive, intimate, and uncertain. Drawing from her narrative inquiry into parent knowledge, Pushor shares and unpacks the stories of one participant as a way to provide a close up view of the parent knowledge a First Nations father held and used in living with and educating his children. Twelve teachers and parents then put forward their individual and contextual experiences immersed in explorations and use of parent knowledge, attending to the questions, How can what parents know enhance schooling experiences for children? How can parent knowledge, used alongside teacher knowledge, inform decisions made in schools and enhance curricular programming and outcomes for children? Using the metaphor of maps ... of mapmaking ... of living as mapmakers, this book is a storied account of the new practices in which parents and teachers engaged to enable parent knowledge to guide their work with children. It is an honest and vulnerable account of their journeys. The authors puzzle over the complexities and the successes of their work and the resulting impact on children, parents, and teachers. This book is an invitation to educators and parents to consider how to walk alongside one another, using both teacher and parent knowledge, for the benefit of children’s learning and wellbeing.

After Identity

After Identity
Author: Robert Zacharias
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-06-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271076585

For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity interrogates this prolonged preoccupation and explores the potential to move beyond it to a truly post-identity Mennonite literature. The twelve essays collected here view Mennonite writing as transitioning beyond a tradition concerned primarily with defining itself and its cultural milieu. What this means for the future of Mennonite literature and its attendant criticism is the question at the heart of this volume. Contributors explore the histories and contexts—as well as the gaps—that have informed and diverted the perennial focus on identity in Mennonite literature, even as that identity is reread, reframed, and expanded. After Identity is a timely reappraisal of the Mennonite literature of Canada and the United States at the very moment when that literature seems ready to progress into a new era. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Ervin Beck, Di Brandt, Daniel Shank Cruz, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Royden Loewen, Jesse Nathan, Magdalene Redekop, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Paul Tiessen.

Going Places

Going Places
Author: Robert Burgin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 837
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.

The Broadview Introduction to Literature

The Broadview Introduction to Literature
Author: Lisa Chalykoff
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 1578
Release: 2013-08-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1554810787

Designed for courses taught at the introductory level in Canadian universities and colleges, this new anthology provides a rich selection of literary texts. In each genre the anthology includes a vibrant mix of classic and contemporary works. Each work is accompanied by an author biography and by explanatory notes, and each genre is prefaced by a substantial introduction. Pedagogically current and uncommon in its breadth of representation, The Broadview Introduction to Literature invites students into the world of literary study in a truly distinctive way.

Queering Mennonite Literature

Queering Mennonite Literature
Author: Daniel Shank Cruz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271084405

Though the terms “queer” and “Mennonite” rarely come into theoretical or cultural contact, over the last several decades writers and scholars in the United States and Canada have built a body of queer Mennonite literature that shifts these identities into conversation. In this volume, Daniel Shank Cruz brings this growing genre into a critical focus, bridging the gaps between queer theory, literary criticism, and Mennonite literature. Cruz focuses his analysis on recent Mennonite-authored literary texts that espouse queer theoretical principles, including Christina Penner’s Widows of Hamilton House, Wes Funk’s Wes Side Story, and Sofia Samatar’s Tender. These works argue for the existence of a “queer Mennonite” identity on the basis of shared values: a commitment to social justice, a rejection of binaries, the importance of creative approaches to conflict resolution, and the practice of mutual aid, especially in resisting oppression. Through his analysis, Cruz encourages those engaging with both Mennonite and queer literary criticism to explore the opportunity for conversation and overlap between the two fields. By arguing for engagement between these two identities and highlighting the aspects of Mennonitism that are inherently “queer,” Cruz gives much-needed attention to an emerging subfield of Mennonite literature. This volume makes a new and important intervention into the fields of queer theory, literary studies, Mennonite studies, and religious studies.

A Complicated Kindness

A Complicated Kindness
Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1582438897

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award In this stunning coming-of-age novel, the award-winning author of Women Talking balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "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. “Brilliant.” —New York Times Book Review “A darkly funny and provocative novel.” —O, the Oprah Magazine