Here are 100 books that The Beggar's Garden fans have personally recommended if you like
The Beggar's Garden.
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Most of my public success has been as a novelist. My MFA, from the Iowa Writers Workshop, is in poetry. When I grow up, I want to be a short story writer. The dirty truth is, though, I’ve been making trouble with stories since I was a kid. During my first attempt in 10th grade, I wrote a story that got me suspended for two weeks. No explanation. No guidance. Just a conference between my parents, teachers, and principal (I wasn’t present), and they came out and banished me. I dropped out of school shortly after. I reckon that experience, both shameful and delicious, shaped my life and love of narrative.
Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen!I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.
The instant New York Times bestseller 'An unbelievable debut' New York Times
Racism, but "managed" through virtual reality
Black Friday, except you die in a bargain-crazed throng
Happiness, but pharmacological
Love, despite everything
A Publisher's Weekly Most Anticipated Book for Fall 2018
Friday Black tackles urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explores the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In the first, unforgettable story of this collection, The Finkelstein Five, Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unstinting reckoning of the brutal prejudice of the US justice system. In Zimmer Land we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I’m a short story reader, reviewer, and writer. Short stories are a powerful form, combining the distilled intensity of poetry with the depth of character development. They allow enough space to get to know a character, feel the pain of their disappointments, to root for their ultimate success. Such moments reflect broader realities of a culture, a society, a people. A single-author collection gives great insight into a writer’s abilities and style. My own debut collection was a finalist for the Alistair MacLeod short fiction prize and is critically acclaimed, so hopefully, that means my careful reading of these collections has taught me a thing or two.
Kerry Lee Powell writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever read. A lot of her opening lines (“Today's the day Mitchell Burnhope gets the royal shit kicked out of him” ... “I took my kung fu instructor off speed-dial today” ... “A dozen of us were dressed up as low-budget ghosts outside Earl’s Court tube station”) are arresting, instantly grabbing my attention, while hinting at something more, posing a question and inviting me to read on.
What was happening was usually much deeper than first expected. She's economic with her words, but in a few pages I came to care about the characters and I miss them now, feel like they're still out there somewhere wheeling and dealing to keep their head above water.
Ranging from an island holiday gone wrong to a dive bar on the upswing to a yuppie mother in a pricey subdivision seeing her worst fears come true, these acclaimed, deftly written stories are populated by barkeeps, good men down on their luck, rebellious teens, lonely immigrants, dreamers and realists, fools and quiet heroes. In Kerry Lee Powell’s skillful hands, each character, no matter what his or her choices, is deeply human in their search for connection. Powell holds us in her grasp, exploring with a black humour themes of belonging, the simmering potential for violence, and the meaning of…
I’m a short story reader, reviewer, and writer. Short stories are a powerful form, combining the distilled intensity of poetry with the depth of character development. They allow enough space to get to know a character, feel the pain of their disappointments, to root for their ultimate success. Such moments reflect broader realities of a culture, a society, a people. A single-author collection gives great insight into a writer’s abilities and style. My own debut collection was a finalist for the Alistair MacLeod short fiction prize and is critically acclaimed, so hopefully, that means my careful reading of these collections has taught me a thing or two.
The long titular story from Peninsula Sinking is about three phases in a young man’s life, and his maturation from a guy who does crazy stunts to get attention from the cool kids to someone who, full of regrets and hopes, grapples with highly evolved intellectual and ethical conundrums and finds safety only in love.Its final third opens with this enticement: “Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs.” Throughout the book, Huebert proves himself a wizard with figurative, sensual writing, layering bizarre images with tricky turns of phrase. We are reminded that “there were palm trees on Antarctica once.” Anything can happen.
This collection is filled with great energy, stunning images, and overall great stories—all of them prominently featuring non-human animals, and their interactions with humans, in some cases tackling complex ethical dilemmas with considerable insight.
In his debut collection of short stories, David Huebert brings us an assortment of wounded wanderers who remind us that we are all marooned on the shores of being, watching oceans rise. Veterinarians, prison guards, and prosthetic phallus designers develop various schemes to navigate the ruins of their capsizing lives and to confront the beauty of their bruised worlds.
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
As a writer who can never seem to tell a simple chronological, beginning/middle/end story in the books I write, I want to make a case for fictional works that fall somewhere between novels and traditional short story collections: shape-shifting novels. A shape-shifting novel allows for an expansiveness of time—for exploring the lives of generations within a single family, or occupying a single place, without having to account for every person, every moment, every year. Big, long Victorian novels, remember, were typically serialized and so written, and read, in smaller installments. The shape-shifting novel allows for that range between the covers of a single, and often shorter, book.
I reread this book recently and was fascinated to see how accurate (if perhaps overly optimistic) Egan was about the rise of social media and its role in our lives.
Egan resisted calling this book either a novel or a short story collection; in a June 2010 interview in Salon, she said, “You might say that discontinuity is the book’s organizing principle.” One of the book’s most commented-on chapters, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” is presented as slides in a PowerPoint presentation.
Though Alison Blake’s mother, Sasha, and her record company executive boss Bennie Salazar appear at various points in the book, the chapters, or stories, stand alone, moving back and forth in time from the 1970s to a near future.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2010
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
Historic photos and maps weave a rich tale of the settlement of the
southwest corner of British Columbia, complementing Bruce MacDonald's
work with an extraordinary range of images, including of the
oft-overlooked suburbs and farming communities on Vancouver's doorstep.
Compared with MacDonald's maps, many of the images here are art—birds-eye views by artists from an era before people could fly and others that dream of a great, huge city when, in reality, it was a
collection of little cabins.
Map researcher and collector Derek Hayes here presents the sixth in a series of critically acclaimed, award-winning historical atlases. Gathered together in a single volume for the first time, here are the maps that shaped Vancouver and the surrounding Lower Fraser Valley. More than 370 original maps chart the region’s development beginning with the years of discovery and exploration. They depict its days as a fledgling colonial outpost, its appearance on the world scene after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, through to its emergence as a postwar Pacific metropolis. These maps evoke such historic events and developments as…
I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.
These connected stories give us a picture of Rose’s life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.
**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK**
Previously published as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Munro's wonderful collection of stories reads like a novel, following Rose's life as she moves away from her impoverished roots and forges her own path in the world.
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd stepmother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
Crime is intrinsically interesting. From an early age, we’re taught behavioral norms. Hearing of transgressions, we ask, “How’d this happen?... Is it true?... What’s the deeper meaning?” Audiobooks also have a unique ability to engage us. With my reporting background plus a historical novel under my belt, I began researching the real-life case behind Takers Mad, aiming to bring it to life with the intimacy, suspense, and power of an audio drama. Then I was gobsmacked to find fresh evidence in this Gilded Age murder. Now, with Khristine Hvam’s ultra-talented narration, I hope our work entertains and also leads listeners to ponder vital questions—just like the best crime audiobooks.
Unspooled as an episodic series, Danielle Elliot traces the true story of one woman’s long-running nightmare in Vancouver. Police received hundreds of complaints about a stalker and then repeatedly arrived at shocking scenes. But authorities began to doubt the victim’s claims—until she was found dead. I’ve long admired the hard-boiled writing of Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar, and I don’t think it is only the Canadian setting that makes Death by Unknown Event remind me of their work, but rather the psychological intrigue. Except the twisting plot of these 12 episodes is no work of fiction—sometimes life just can be that strange.
For seven years, Vancouver nurse Cindy James reported more than 100 separate incidents of harassment, ranging from threatening phone calls to home invasions to ritualistic assaults, including strangulations and stabbings. Canada’s Royal Mounted Police spent over a million dollars investigating her claims and found zero evidence of foul play, leading them to suspect she was making it all up. Then, in 1989, Cindy was found dead, bound and naked, half a mile from where her car was parked in a shopping mall. What happened to Cindy James remains one of the most bizarre and perplexing true crime stories in recent…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
Purvey and Belshaw are a husband-and-wife team of academics who know how to spin a great story for a general audience. Their book is an account of the “noir era” in the city, roughly 1930 to 1960. It is inspired by the black and white photographs of crime scenes and shadowy streetscapes that appeared in the daily press of the period. Reading it is like revelling in an old gangster movie. Amply illustrated.
Literary Nonfiction. Photography. Vancouver Sun books list: "30 best reads from B.C. and beyond". It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. VANCOUVER NOIR provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, noir-style.
These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become or conversely cease to be. The photographs—most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough…
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
A unique work of visual storytelling using maps created by the author that trace the evolution of this place defined by a major river, a natural harbour, and a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, decade by decade from Indigenous times through the 1980s.
Each map has detailed notes focusing on changes and developments and a two-page spread of the key players of each period.
Absolutely unique in its presentational style, Vancouver: A Visual History is a delightful and important book. This stunning, full-colour historical atlas brings to life Vancouver’s first fourteen decades, beginning with a map of the 1850s depicting the land use, economy and settlement patterns of its first peoples, and ending with a map of the 1980s.
Using a repeating grid format, in which each ten-year period of the city’s history is examined through the application of the same criteria, each decade is introduced by a full-colour map that illustrates land use patterns. A column of text to the left of this…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
The secret of the title refers to the fact that Vancouver’s most famous landmark, Stanley Park, was home to many Indigenous people before they were dispossessed and removed from the park following the creation of the city. Jean Barman is one of British Columbia’s leading historians and she combines her skill as a researcher with many hours of conversation with descendants of the original families to write a path-breaking book. Reading it was a watershed moment in my own understanding of the city.
Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing
Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife just steps from the sidewalks and skyscrapers of Vancouver. But few visitors stop to contemplate the secret past of British Columbia's most popular tourist destination.
Officially opened in 1888, Stanley Park was born alongside the city of Vancouver, so it is easy to assume that the…
