Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.

Sentimentalists

Literature & Fiction

Skibsrud, Johanna

Genre Fiction

WINDMILL

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

Windmill Books

Quartet for the End of Time

Literary

From Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, a "compassionate and beautiful" (Globe and Mail) story of families changed forever by the upheavals of history The year is 1932, and America is roiling with unrest. Arthur and Douglas Sinclair, a World War I veteran and his son, join a group of impoverished ex-soldiers marching on Washington. Alden and Sutton Kelly, the rebellious children of a powerful Washington judge, become involved with the veterans' struggle, causing an irreparable rift in the Kelly family. When the march explodes in a violent clash between government and veteran forces, Arthur is falsely accused of conspiracy and disappears. The lives of Douglas, Alden, and Sutton are forever changed--linked inextricably by the absence of Arthur Sinclair. Taking us on an unforgettable journey through individual experience and memory against the backdrop of seismic historical events, Quartet for the End of Time is both a profound meditation on human nature and an astonishing literary accomplishment from one of Canada's most original voices.

Penguin Canada

With this collection of wise, querying stories, Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud introduces an astonishing array of characters, showing us through their eyes what even they cannot see and uncorking minor epiphanies in the middle of ordinary days. These stories takes readers from South Dakota to Paris to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms, and beach hotels, and shows us the liberating bewilderment of characters who come face to face with what they didn’t know they didn’t know. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life—these are the tensions that weave through the everyday existence of Skibsrud’s characters. The often conflicting, sometimes overlapping desires for intimacy and for radical freedom come to life in the lyrical, probing language that gives this collection its shape. Insightful and masterfully crafted, these stories bear the mark of one of Canada’s most remarkable voices and linger in the mind long after the final page has been turned.

This Will Be Difficult To Explain and Other Stories

Your little arms and legs move just like you are a baby monkey climbing into the leafy branches of a tree. But you are not a monkey. 
 Your nose twitches and your mouth moves as though you are a bunny sniffing the garden air. But you are not a bunny. Moving from animal to animal, leading to a wonderful surprise at the end, this charming story engages young readers with both the text and the adorable art. A wonderful gift for both young children and their parents, especially every new parent who can’t stop marveling at their baby.

Sometimes We Think You Are a Monkey

Children's Books

Blacker, Sarah

Animals

Puffin Canada

This book aims to expand our sense of poetry's reach and potential impact. It is an effort at recouping the poetic imperative buried within the first taxonomic description of human being: "nosce te ipsum," or "know yourself." Johanna Skibsrud explores both poetry and human being not as fixed categories but as active processes of self-reflection and considers the way that human being is constantly activated within and through language and thinking. By examining a range of modern and contemporary poets including Wallace Stevens, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Anne Carson, all with an interest in playfully disrupting sense and logic and eliciting unexpected connections, The Poetic Imperative highlights the relationship between the practice of writing and reading and a broad tradition of speculative thought. It also seeks to demonstrate that the imperative "know yourself" functions not only as a command to speak and listen, but also as a call to action and feeling. The book argues that poetic modes of knowing - though central to poetry understood as a genre - are also at the root of any conscious effort to move beyond the subjective limits of language and selfhood in the hopes of touching upon the unknown. Engaging and erudite, The Poetic Imperative is an invitation to direct our attention simultaneously to the finite and embodied limits of selfhood, as well as to what those limits touch: the infinite, the Other, and truth itself.

The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics

History & Criticism

McGill-Queen's University Press

Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud spins a masterful tale about memory and war. Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then disappears. His absence will haunt his son, Douglas, as well as Alden and Sutton Kelly, the children of a powerful U.S. congressman, as they experience―each in different ways―the dynamic political social changes that took place leading up to and during World War II. From the New Deal projects through which Douglas, newly fatherless, makes his living to Sutton’s work as a journalist, to Alden’s life as a code breaker and a spy, each character is haunted by the past and is searching for love, hope, and redemption in a world torn apart by chaos and war. Through the lives of these characters, as well as those of their lovers, friends, and enemies, the novel transports us from the Siberian Expedition of World War I to the underground world of a Soviet spy in the 1920s and 1930s, to the occultist circle of P. D. Ouspensky and London during the Blitz, to the German prison camp where Messiaen originally composed and performed his famous Quartet for the End of Time.
At every turn, this rich and ambitious novel tells some of the less well-known stories of twentieth-century history with epic scope and astonishing power, revealing at every turn the ways in which history and memory tend to follow us, and in which absence has a palpable presence. 16 pages of illustrations

Quartet for the End of Time: A Novel

United States

W.W.Norton&Company

Nine loosely connected, hypnotic stories about memory and desire showcase one of fiction's bright new voices. In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life―these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

“The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family, and duty unfolds.” ―2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada. He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made lake. Under the water is the wreckage of what was once the town - and the home where Henry was raised. When Napoleon's daughter arrives, fleeing troubles of her own, she finds her father in the dark twilight of his life, and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about his life; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge. Lyrical and riveting, The Sentimentalists is a story of what lies beneath the surface of everyday life, and of the commanding power of the past. Johanna Skibsrud's first novel marks the debut of a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction.

The Sentimentalists: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Skibsrud, Johanna. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Skibsrud, Johanna

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Skibsrud, Johanna. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sentimentalists

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

Quartet for the End of Time

Quartet for the End of Time

This Will Be Difficult To Explain and Other Stories

Sometimes We Think You Are a Monkey

The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics

Quartet for the End of Time: A Novel

This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories

The Sentimentalists: A Novel