It's often said that the main export of the Maritimes is Maritimers, and the same is true of Newfoundland. "Going down the road" is a way of life, but so is coming home for Christmas. It is tradition marked by happiness, fun, and sometimes less comfortable emotions. Given the regional penchant for yarn spinning, this common experience yields an abundance of stories.
In An Orange from Portugal, editor Anne Simpson takes liberties with the concept of "story" to produce a book bursting with Christmas flavour. Many of her choices are fiction, others are memoirs, tall tales, poems, or essays, and still others defy classification. Some authors are nationally and even internationally famous, some are well known in the region, and others are published here for the first time. Spanning more than a century of seasonal writing, the collection includes a description of killing a pig aboard the sailing ship Argonauta for Christmas dinner; Hugh MacLennan"s Halifax waif who wants nothing more than for Santa to bring him a real orange, an orange from Portugal; a story by Alden Nowlan and another by Harry Bruce giving very different versions of what the animals in the barn do on Christmas Eve; a story about Jewish children hanging up their stockings; and very new work by young writers Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey. Beautiful poems by Lynn Davies, Milton Acorn and others leaven the collection for readers of all persuasions. Other authors include: Wayne Johnston, Mary Pratt, David Adams Richards, Carol Bruneau, Wilfred Grenfeld, L.M. Montgomery, Paul Bowdring, Grace Ladd, Herb Curtis, Joan Clark, Ernest Buckler, Rhoda Graser, Bert Batstone, Elisabeth Harvor, David Weale, Charles G.D. Roberts, Ronald F. Hawkins, Mark Jarman, Elsie Charles Basque, Richard Cumyn, Herménégilde Chiasson, Stan Dragland, Alistair MacLeod, and Bernice Morgan.
An Orange from Portugal is a Christmas feast, with the scent of turkey and the sound of laughter wafting from the kitchen, and a flurry of snow outside the window.

An Orange from Portugal: Christmas Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland

Literature & Fiction

MacLEOD, Alistair

Nowlan, Alden

Jarman, Mark Anthony

Richards, David

Chiasson, Herménégilde

Contemporary

Goose Lane Editions

And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada's finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane's publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection, or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here's what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet: ALDEN NOWLAN's "A Boy's Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan's first novel, The Wanton Troopers, written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988. The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" from DOUGLAS GLOVER's 1991 GG-nominated story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY's unforgettable Christmas story "The Three Marys," adapted from her award-winning debut novel, Strange Heaven, published in 1993. Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN's glittering story "Simran" from her 1996 debut collection, English Lessons and Other Stories. KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER's haunting "What Had Become of Us," from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, Way Up. The extraordinary "Knife Party" from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.

six@sixty

Glover, Douglas

Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn

Baldwin, Shauna Singh

Literary

Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction AwardOne of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is "extraordinary, his stories gripping," and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again. In Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer. A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses  of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease. He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman's stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.

Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

Touch Anywhere to Begin

Essays & Correspondence

Mark Anthony Jarman is one of Canada's most original and compelling writers of short fiction. "My White Planet" is his latest collection of fourteen new stories, many of which have previously won or been short-listed for literary magazine awards. Jarman's use of language and metaphor is unique in the Canadian literary pantheon. With extraordinary linguistic energy, he pushes the boundaries of fiction and story-telling. Every sentence reverberates with subtle meaning and every reading of a Jarman story brings out ever deeper layers of complexity and nuance. Here is a protean writer who bends form and enters into worlds and people with panache and a verve that is breath-taking. The range of his fiction is stunning: troops undertake a nightmarish march following Custer's last stand; a father's dogs tear apart his son and he is accused of cowardice and neglect; seven marooned men at a remote polar station save the life of a naked young woman.

My White Planet: Stories

Thomas Allen Pub

Ireland's Eye: Travels

Travel

Europe

Anansi Press

With characters ranging from the desperate to the obsessive and wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs dazzling linguistic verve and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. Jarman doesn't just write about people. He puts us in their skin so that we feel their frailty and courage. No other contemporary Canadian short story writer slices up the imaginative excitement, cultural hybridity, and Joycean play of language we see in 19 Knives. Including one story shortlisted for the U.S.'s prestigious O. Henry Prize, and several other prize-winners, this collection brings a major emerging fiction writer to the fore.

19 Knives

House of Anansi Pr

19 Knives: Stories

House of Anansi Press

On August 28, 1922, the martyred Irish patriot Michael Collins was buried. Businesses across Dublin closed as thousands came out to pay their respects. On the same day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory, drowned in Dublin's Royal Canal. This peculiar confluence is Mark Anthony Jarman's starting point for a meditation on the intertwined history of a nation and his family. Jarman's pursuit of the circumstances of his grandfather's drowning leads him through a modern Ireland that teems with ghosts from the past. Thwarted by family gossip, aunts who can't drive a stick shift, cousins more interested in pubs than lore, and his own fascination with the many Irelands that have been, Jarman finds what he's seeking despite, or perhaps because of, the antics and the unreliable histories. What he reconfigures is a revelation, and an enchanting and engrossing read.

With characters ranging from desperate to wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs virtuosic wordplay and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people; he enables readers to enter his characters' frailty and courage. His vivid wordplay evokes with equal verve the tragedy of "Burn Man," who refers to himself in the third person in order to inhabit his disfigured body; and the cutting comedy of a delusional narrator who sees Margaret Atwood in some hilariously unlikely guises.

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Books by Jarman, Mark Anthony