Bad Trips

Travel

Fraser, KEAth

Travel Writing

Vintage Canada

Years after a rare vocal disorder caused Keath Fraser to nearly lose his voice, another tragedy irrevocably altered the award-winning novelist and short story writer's life. As his wife lay unconscious beside him, he was unable to call for help. 
These events set him on a global quest in search of others whose lives, like his, had undergone a similar and mysterious collapse of voice. For twenty years, Fraser was told by the medical establishment that his voice difficulties were psychological; that was until he discovered relief in botulinum toxin, the drug favoured by Hollywood plastic surgeons in obliterating wrinkles, which miraculously - albeit temporary - smoothed out his choppy, strangulated speech. 
He finally had a diagnosis: Spasmodic Dysphonia, a misfiring of the vocal chords caused by faulty transmitters in the brain. Beginning on Canada's West Coast, the author then travels to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain, Ireland, the US, India, and Sri Lanka. 
The Voice Gallery is an account of Fraser's international journey through a diaspora of lost voices; a record of his trysts with fellow travellers, including some of the world's most astute voice teachers and specialists. It is a memoir about the wonders and frailties of the human voice.

The voice gallery: Travels with a glass throat

Biographies & Memoirs

Thomas Allen

Keath Fraser is without a doubt one of the most original voices in Canadian letters. He is a writer of truly wonderous imagination and a master of the art of narrative invention. 13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger is a selection of eighteen of his best stories from the past twenty-five years. Here is a collection of short fiction that showcases the sheer genius of this extraordinary writer, who has been far too under-recognized and who may be one of the best kept secrets in Canadian literature. On a gulf island, a woman with defective syntax prepares for an important speech. A baritone opera singer in San Francisco finds elegiac flight from an imprisoning tire farm and his present legacy of glory holes. A retired diplomat struggles undiplomatically to overcome crippling decline with the help of a teenage girl. Other stories from the West Coast tell of transgressing couples, kidnapped children, rooming-house men on welfare. Narrative journeys elsewhere also carry unexpected ends: a

13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger: The Best Stories of Keath Fraser

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Thomas Allen Pub

Fraser's formidable intellect, his grasp of culture, history, and the human spirit, infuse the book at every turn, and the result is a virtuoso performance.

Popular Anatomy: A Novel

United States

Porcupine's Quill

Offering an intimate portrait of the last years of Sinclair Ross's often beleaguered life, this elegant account of an artist in decline—crippled by Parkinson's Disease and a sense of failure, attracted to suicide and his own sexual revelations—leads readers to a new biographical reading of one of Canada's most acclaimed novels, As for Me and My House. As a homosexual, Sinclair Ross grew up behind his own false front on the prairies, developing after the war into a more cosmopolitan man than previously imagined.

As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross

History & Criticism

ECW Press

Denise's stepdaughter Greta is a med student who swims ocean marathons and runs off to Africa with a family friend four times her age--and also battles an eating disorder. When Judy, Greta's birth mother, returns from Japan (to which she ran off herself, with a Mexican tennis pro) and tries to ingratiate herself with the husband and daughter she left, Denise must navigate their complicated relationships with each other while attempting to bring Greta's addiction to light--and learning how to live more charitably.

Charity

Biblioasis

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Books by Fraser, KEAth