Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski , Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country's English literary history.

Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to the poets' ages at the time of writing, the poems in the book comprise a single lifeline. The reader follows an amalgam of the Poet from the passionate intensity of youth, through the regrets and satisfactions of adulthood and middle age, and into the reflective wisdom of old age.

All the writings are about love, but love in a dizzying array of colours, shapes, and sizes. Deep, enduring love, unrequited love, passionate love, violent love. Here are odes and lyric ecstasies, tirades and tantrums, pastoral comforts and abject horrors — all delivered with the vibrancy, wit, and erudition of our finest poets. Where the Nights Are Twice as Long is more than an anthology: it is an unforgettable journey into the long night of love.

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"The love letter is not dead, just different, a new book proves."

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"Part of the appeal of Eso's and Lynes's anthology is that the lover's discourse is revealed as tricky and duplicitous. At once mythic and collective, it is also intimate and particular, directed not to an imaginary world of readers and writers but to a certain somebody, an often unnamed but nevertheless profoundly known beloved."

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"[T]he new book proves that while some things change — using email to send letters rather than paper — the joy, and sometimes pain, of love is constant."

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" As the letters, poems, emails and texts in this collection are grouped according to the age of the poets at the time of writing, poets and their eras collide. And what grand collisions they are. The book is rich in loss and endings, longevity and, no matter what the age, erotic and sometimes erratic explorations in the realm of love."

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"At times beautiful, at times rueful, Where the Nights Are Twice as Long is a collection of letters written by Canadian poets to those they loved. The result is a diverse portrait of the life cycle of a romantic relationship, from the first infatuation to I-still-can't-forget-you melancholy."

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"Here is a wild map, from incandescent sparks to considered glow, of love's landscape in Canadian poetry. David Eso and Jeanette Lynes have put together something outside the ordinary."

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"an amayzing galaktik compilaysyun all brillyant poets all brillyant passyuns evree nuans evree change n trope uv all th loves ium sew happee a b in ths byond brillyant book."

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"With obvious diligence, the editors have solicited, collected, or dug up love letters by 129 English Canadian poets."

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"The editors of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long have organized the letters (and occasional love poems) according to the writer's age at the time of composition. The results reveal much about the evolution (and disintegration) of our passions as they are worn down or deepened over time.#&34;

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"This is a Canada we haven't seen before. Romantic, intimate, a valentine shaped like a maple leaf designed for lovers of Canadian literature and its oh-so-human practitioners."

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Este libro, una compilación de cartas escritas por Rilke a un aprendiz literario, expone con claridad y belleza especial, las opiniones de este gran autor sobre la creación artística, la soledad, el amor y lo sagrado. Un vínculo epistolar imperdible, que conmueve y llama a la reflexión.

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Steve Patterson's The Book of Letters I Didn't Know Where to Send is a collection of — wait for it — letters, written by award-winning stand-up comedian — you guessed it — Steve Patterson.

The host of CBC Radio's The Debaters since 2007, Steve Patterson has become a household name, with more than 700,000 listeners tuning in each week. He has performed at several of the Just for Laughs prestigious televised galas, including one hosted by Steve Martin. Considered to be the highlight of the show by the audience and critics alike, Patterson's performance prompted the legendary Martin to quip, "If I'd known he was going to be THAT good, I would have cancelled him."

Patterson's letters, long a staple of his stand-up comedy routine, address a number of recipients, from real people, to groups, to inanimate objects and concepts. He airs grievances, offers support or creates just plain confusion in unplainly humorous prose.

From the political to the personal, from the philosophical to the mundane, no subject — or target — is off limits. Patterson's letters may not change the world, but frankly, it's too early to tell. In these letters, he pleads, begs, cajoles, grovels, and always makes a compelling argument. He would like men to stop wearing Spandex bike shorts. He would like airlines to stop selling seats they don't have. He would like gluten to explain itself. He would like his nine-year-old self to know everything will be all right...

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"Steve Patterson is one of Canada's funniest talents. In this book, he proves that he can write as effortlessly as he can make us laugh on stage and radio. The Book of Letters I Didn’t Know Where to Send was a book of letters I didn’t know how to put down."

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"I'm glad Steve didn't know where to send these letters. Otherwise, we'd never get to split our sides laughing at them. They are hilarious, thought-provoking and, more often than not, written on the bedrock of truth. This guy is good."

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"This collection of letters is just like Steve Patterson: funny, smart, and just a tiny bit weird. This says all the things we wish we would’ve thought of — but Steve just says it better. This is a really fun read."

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"The same warm, funny, personable Steve Patterson we know and love from The Debaters comes through on every page. I loved it!"

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"There's something for everyone in this book. All humanoids — from heads of state to the lowly mermaid — can learn how to change their lives in letter form. Without this book how would I know that I'm an arsehole for reading the last page first? Thanks Steve, you changed the way I see the world."

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Soon after his death, Vincent van Gogh’s reputation grew and developed through the remarkably symbiotic relationship evident between his paintings and letters. However, the sheer bulk and complexity of Van Gogh’s complete surviving correspondence presents a formidable challenge to those who wish to read and analyze the whole text as a literary work.

Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to Van Gogh’s letters and a distillation of the key themes that reoccur throughout his collected letters—foremost among them the motifs of suffering, love, imagination, and the ineffable. In this indispensable, synoptic view of the letters, Patrick Grant makes the main lines of Vincent van Gogh’s thinking accessible and displays the arresting vividness of the well-known artist’s writing.

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The theme of the peasantry is central throughout most of Tolstoy’s long career. His obsession with this class is seen not just as a matter of social or humanitarian concern, but as a response to the questions of “how to live a good life” and “what is the meaning of life that an inevitable death will not destroy?” These questions plagued him his entire life.

The letters he exchanged with the four major peasant sectarian writers (Bondarev, Zheltov, Verigin, and Novikov) reveal that Tolstoy was matched as a profound thinker by his correspondents, as they converse on religious-moral questions, the meaning of life and how one should strive to find it, and on a wide array of burning social and personal problems. Reading through the analysis and the extensively annotated letters as a unified whole, elucidates the progressive development of the ideas they shared (and where these diverged) and which guided Tolstoy’s and his correspondents’ lives.

Juxtaposing Tolstoy’s letters with those of his four sectarian correspondents makes them even more significant as it shows them in their original context – a dialogue, or conversation. Also, with the aim to present the conversation in an even broader context, Andrew Donskov briefly discusses Tolstoy’s relationship with peasants in general as well as with each of the four individual writers in particular. In addition, he provides a background sketch of two major religious groups, namely the Doukhobors and the Molokans, both of which still claim sizeable populations of followers in North America today.

Originally

published in 2008 by the Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa under

the title Leo Tolstoy and Russian peasant

sectarian writers: Selected correspondence, the expanded University of

Ottawa Press edition includes 44 letters never published in English, out of

the total 155 letters. Correspondence

translated by John Woodsworth.

This book is published in English. 

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La paysannerie traverse la longue carrière de Tolstoï. Son obsession avec cette classe sociale doit être comprise non seulement comme une préoccupation sociale ou humanitaire, mais aussi comme une réponse aux questions « Comment mener une belle vie? » et « Quel est le sens de la vie que la mort inévitable ne saurait détruire? » qui l’ont hanté sa vie durant.

La correspondance qu’ont échangée Tolstoï et quatre écrivains sectaires et liés à la paysannerie (Bondarev, Zheltov, Verigin et Novikov) révèle de grands penseurs. Au fil des échanges, les questions de religion et de moralité, du sens de la vie et comment faire pour le découvrir, et d’une gamme de questions sociales et personnelles du jour sont abordées. La lecture et l’analyse de cet ensemble d’échanges épistolaires enrichis de notes détaillées témoigne du développement progressif des idées qu’ils partageaient (ainsi que leurs divergences), et qui ont guidé la vie de chacun d’entre eux.

La juxtaposition des lettres de Tolstoï et de ses quatre correspondants sectaires, qui sont présentées dans leur contexte original de dialogue – ou de conversation – permet d’en pleinement apprécier l’importance. Dans le but de situer cette conversation dans un contexte plus grand, Andrew Donskov aborde la question de la relation qu’entretient Tolstoï avec les paysans en général, d’une part, de même qu’avec chacun de ces quatre écrivains, d’autre part. Il offre par ailleurs un texte de présentation sur les Doukhobors et les Molokans, deux groupes confessionnaux qui comptent encore aujourd’hui un nombre appréciable d’adeptes en Amérique du Nord.

Ce livre est publié en anglais.

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In a deadly game of multinational terrorism, detective Helen Keremos searches for a long-lost 60s revolutionary who happens to be the daughter of a right-wing U.S. presidential candidate. The Keremos mysteries was one of the first lesbian detective series

Longtime friends Helen Levine and Oonagh Berry decided they missed the tradition of "real" letters. The obvious solution for them was to initiate a correspondence project. Their goal? To write each other a longhand letter every two weeks for a year, and see what, if anything, they were missing in their usual friendship rituals of lunches, visits and telephone chats. The result is a wealth of insights yielded from over 150 years of combined life experience. Week in and week out, Helen and Oonagh weave together tales of family, work, politics, motherhood, aging and creativity. Reading Between Friends is like sharing a warm pot of tea with two frank, articulate and experienced companions.

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Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence and a timid foot in two distinct cultures.

In these stories, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada, as a daughter questions her father's love at an IKEA grand opening; an aunt remembers a safari-gone-wrong in Kenya; an uncle's unrequited love is confronted at a Goan Association picnic; a boy tests his faith amidst a school-yard brawl; and a childhood love letter is exchanged during the building of a backyard deck. Singularly and collectively, these stories will move the reader with their engaging narratives and authentic voices.

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"This charming collection of stories resides between a suburban childhood in Canada and inherited, often mythic, tales from Goa that belong to the elders. Characters decide on love with rings lost at sea and soothe babies with stories of elephants in mountains. The voices in these stories are from people who seem far away and yet are inside us. Prepare to be delighted." —Kim Echlin, author of Under the Visible Life

"The stories in Derek Mascarenhas's Coconut Dreams remind one of the high stakes in a child's world, the way that danger looms just fractionally outside safety. Like all proper enchantments, these vignettes are dark, light, strange, and vivid such that they delight and charm in equal portions." —Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner.

"In this evocative collection, Derek Mascarenhas takes up the fictional Pinto family and turns it gently in his hands, revealing new truths—and new questions—with every shift in point of view. A moving, multifaceted debut." —Alissa York, author of The Naturalist

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„Und wie ich nun gerade mein Papier zurechtgelegt habe und nur noch meine Feder spitze, schaue ich plötzlich ganz unversehens auf – da: wirklich, mein Herz begann zu hüpfen!“

Ein trostloses Armenviertel in Petersburg. Er, der Kanzleibeamte Makar Djewuschkin. Sie, die so viel jüngere Warwara Dobrosseloff. Sie wohnen einander direkt gegenüber und wissen kaum etwas von sich. Doch in einem monatelangen, leidenschaftlichen Briefwechsel lernen sich die beiden kennen und lieben. Als Warwara überraschend beschließt, ihrer Armut zu entfliehen und einen reichen Gutsbesitzer zu heiraten, bricht für Djewuschkin eine Welt zusammen.

„Arme Leute“ ist der erste Roman des bedeutenden russischen Schriftstellers Fjodor Michailowitch Dostojewski (1821-1881) und der Grundstein seines Erfolges.

Der Australier Sam findet auf seiner Joggingrunde eine Flaschenpost. Die hat vor über zehn Jahren die junge Deutsche Lena am Ende ihres Work-and-Travel-Jahres ins Meer geworfen, darin ein Brief mit ihren Wünschen und Träumen für die Zukunft.

Er schreibt ihr, ohne mit einer Antwort zu rechnen. Doch Lena bedankt sich beim Finder, und es beginnt eine Freundschaft, die sich mit jedem Brief vertieft. Bis die Liebe ins Spiel kommt. Doch kann man sich in einen Menschen verlieben, den man noch nie gesehen oder gesprochen hat? Dem man sich nah fühlt, obwohl er so weit weg ist?

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"[Eine] wunderschöne Lovestory zum Abtauchen, die aber immer mal wieder auch kleine Gedankenanstöße gibt, was aus den eigenen Plänen und Wünschen geworden ist." Neue Presse, 03.02.2020