Matt Cohen

"Elizabeth and After tells the story of Carl McKelvey, who in midlife returns to the small town of West Gull, Ontario, to mend his family's legacy of alcohol and violence, to reconnect with his young daughter, and to reconcile himself with the spirit of his beautiful mother, killed several years earlier in a tragic accident. Carl's only problem is that West Gull won't have him. Hesitant to forgive his family's tragic legacy, the community still remembers his mother's radiant warmth, her popularity, and the suspicious circumstances of her passing. What Carl will soon realize is that the difficult truths of who he was and is will one day be met in full, and it is up to his own heart, and the hearts of those in West Gull, to finally allow him a measure of forgiveness.". "Elizabeth and After wraps us up in the lives of Carl and his family, and the other 683 residents of this snowy Canadian hamlet, as they all struggle to recognize the vagaries of the past and their own power to correct the present."--BOOK JACKET.

At the heart of Emotional Arithmetic is a memorable woman: Melanie Winters, mother and lover, middle-aged, eccentric, courageous, quirkily unpredictable - and deeply marked by her past. For behind Melanie's present life lies the terrible story of how, as a girl, she was interned at Drancy in Paris - the way-camp to Auschwitz, where she realized that her parents would never return. For two years, the friendship of an English boy, Christopher Lewis, and the protection of an older man, Jakob Bronski, helped her survive. Years later, Melanie is able to offer Bronski, now an elderly heroic Russian dissident and a veteran of a Soviet gulag, a home with her family. Christopher, meanwhile, has become a novelist, and he too reenters her life. As the two men converge, the past swiftly upsets Melanie's precarious mental balance. She must confront again the demons of her past, and the difficult balancing of guilt and love, good and evil, duty and desire.

Un homme rencontre dans un bar un inconnu en qui il croit reconnaître son frère, pourtant mort indubitablement. A la faveur de quoi le passé revient qui s'ingénie à décoiffer le paysage trop bien peigné du présent.

"In colonial North and South America, print was only one way of communicating. Information in various forms flowed across the boundaries between indigenous groups and early imperial settlements. Natives and newcomers made speeches, exchanged gifts, invented gestures, and inscribed their intentions on paper, bark, skins, and many other kinds of surfaces. No one method of conveying meaning was privileged, and written texts often relied on nonwritten modes of communication. Colonial Mediascapes examines how textual and nontextual literatures interacted in colonial North and South America. Extending the textual foundations of early American literary history, the editors bring a wide range of media to the attention of scholars and show how struggles over modes of communication intersected with conflicts over religion, politics, race, and gender. This collection of essays by major historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars demonstrates that the European settlement of the Americas and European interaction with Native peoples were shaped just as much by communication challenges as by traditional concerns such as religion, economics, and resources."--