Howard A. Norman

Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women. (goodreads.com)

When tragedy strikes, fourteen-year-old Noah Kranik must move from his home in exotic Manitoba to a new life in bustling Toronto .

A young Cree Indian boy, Trout-with-Flattened-Nose, is not fond of his given name and seeks to earn a new one that is more flattering.

The inhabitants of a small northern Canadian village consider Jake a lazy old man but when their town is overrun with owls only Jake knows how to scatter the birds.

A collection of folktales of the native peoples, both Indian and Eskimo, of the Arctic, including Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland. Includes source notes, maps, drawings and bibliography.

A collection of folktales from around the world, all of which have a bird as a main character. This book is a collection of folktales from around the world, all of which have a bird as a main character.

A memoir details the haunting and redemptive events of the author's life, covering such topics as his con-man father's betrayal, the murder-suicide of a houseguest, and his decade spent in the Arctic as a translator of Inuit tales.

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges.

"After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me." Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate, leading quickly to a marriage that is dear, erotically charged, and brief. In Howard Norman's spellbinding and moving novel, the gleam of the marriage and the circumstances of Elizabeth's murder are revealed in heart stopping increments. Sam's life afterward is complicated. For one thing, in a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat and mouse game between the two men. For another, Sam has begun "seeing" Elizabeth, not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and watching her line up books on a small beach. What at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

Six tales featuring the mythical giant who roamed the coast to New England and Canada, created the Indian peoples to keep him company, and fought battles to protect them ever after.

Howard Norman shares a unique look at the place that shaped his fiction - a raw landscape brimming with eccentric characters and bizarre situations.

"It is 1927. Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist Vienna Linn in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter's life is about to change in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Across Canada, Vienna Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur - theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence.". "After a strenuous journey, Peter arrives in Churchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Several months later, the uneasy menage a trois moves to Peter's native Halifax. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit-pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear - and as he sees more and more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom."--BOOK JACKET.

"Jacob Rigolet, soon to be fired from his position as assistant to a wealthy art collector, looks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, Nora Ives Rigolet, until that day head librarian at Halifax Free Library, walk almost casually up the aisle and fling an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa's "Death on a Leipzig Balcony." Jacob's fiancee, the erotically accomplished Detective Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the interrogation. In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond and witty homage to noir, as Jacob's understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Emil Smith, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti semitism in 1945, the year Jacob was born. The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery--it's the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library in a span of three decades--is Howard Norman at his "provocative ... haunting" and uncannily moving best. (Janet Maslin, New York Times)"--

A collection of seven Cree and Chippewa trickster tales.

This is an amazing and beautifully written novel about two museum guards, one an eccentric uncle, the other his orphaned nephew, DeFoe. By day they spend their time curating an art collection, breaking the silence of the museum with heated conversation; by night we learn about their loves and past histories. DeFoe is in love with Imogen, the young caretaker of the sole small Jewish cemetery in Halifax Nova Scotia, where the novel begins in 1938. She becomes obssessed with a Dutch painting called Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam and abandons her life to look for nobility in the intensity of life in Amsterdam for Jews in the late 30s. The book is an examination of the desire to step out of the everyday and into action, with a startling conclusion. With echoes of the holocaust and of a world lost but not forgotten, this is a poignant and perfect novel of great power.

Contains translations of 31 tales of confrontation with Windingos or spirit-beings of the Cree world. Tales were gathered during the author's travels through Cree Indian regions of Canada, west of Hudson's Bay. Also includes accounts of conversations with Cree elders about the 'natural history' of the Windigo, a discussion of its importance in Cree culture and a description of the manner in which Cree storytellers perform the tales.