I am a Western Canadian nerd, and when I got to university, I knew that I had “found my people,” and I spent half my adult life studying and then teaching on various campuses. Universities are often as large as small cities, and each has its own particular atmosphere. What some folks don’t realize is that campuses have such a wide variety of niches and specialties that you could write a whole series featuring new facets of post-secondary life in each book. And, of course, that is what I did with my first detective series, the Randy Craig Mysteries.
I am pretty sure every woman writer of a certain age in Canada is a writer because of this book. I know it’s what motivated me. Morag, the heroine, is so open and vulnerable and intelligent and naïve, but Laurence has her grow and become formidable in front of us.
If you want to really understand the ways in which power dynamics work in a relationship (and why professors shouldn’t date their students), you read it here first. In my mind, this is the great Canadian novel. Forever and always.
The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence's celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic.
This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process—putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right—relinquished only in her overwhelming need for love. Again and again, Morag is forced to test her strength…
Harriet Vane, a thinly disguised Sayers (who it seemed had fallen in love with her fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey), gets her own book where she goes back to Oxford to the women’s college she graduated from, to help uncover a mystery.
There is a delight in the fact that the female can be as deadly as the male, offering up a new sort of equality. This became a lovely television series starring Harriet Walter, but the book is rich and wonderful and sprinkled with untranslated Greek. You feel smarter, just holding it; it made me really wish I’d tried harder to qualify for a Rhodes scholarship back in the day.
The twelfth book in Dorothy L Sayers' classic Lord Peter Wimsey series, introduced by actress Dame Harriet Mary Walter, DBE - a must-read for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries.
'D. L. Sayers is one of the best detective story writers' Daily Telegraph
Harriet Vane has never dared to return to her old Oxford college. Now, despite her scandalous life, she has been summoned back . . .
At first she thinks her worst fears have been fulfilled, as she encounters obscene graffiti, poison pen letters and a disgusting effigy when she arrives at sedate Shrewsbury…
I haven’t read it in yonks, but I recall giving copies of this book to absolutely everyone because it is so hysterically funny. It plays on the anxiety and angst of not becoming tenured, and not publishing enough for your department to hold you in any sort of esteem, and becomes a rollercoaster of crazy incidents that go from bad to worse.
Lord knows why I worked as a sessional for more than fifteen years; after reading this book I ought to have known how tough and zany a world it was.
La más famosa novela de Tom Sharpe, en la que el autor no deja títere con cabeza. El protagonista, Henry Wilt, encadenado a un empleo demencial como profesor en un politécnico, acaba de ver postergado su ascenso una vez más. Mientras, las cosas no marchan mejor en casa, donde su maciza esposa, Eva, se entrega a imprevisibles arrebatos de entusiasmo por la meditación trascendental, el yoga o la última novedad recién olfateada. Wilt, que se siente impotente con respecto a su empleo, no vacila en entregarse a fantasías cada vez más asesinas y concretas acerca de su mujer, con la…
Ostensibly an academic dissertation, the footnotes begin to reveal a far wilder and manic story happening to the writer.
There are trilingual puns, verbal pratfalls, and all the wild humour that Nabokov is known for throughout this book. Of all the metafiction I have ever read, this book made me feel as if I’d been given something rather than just had a big literary joke played on me.
A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue—and "one of the great works of art of this century" (Mary McCarthy)—from one of the leading writers of the 20th century.
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
Almost everyone I know read this risque novel about the supposed sexual experiment of a school creating not just coed dorms, but coed roommates. I think any book one remembers vividly from having read it back in high school deserves some sort of kudos, even if it might be just that it was so wildly salacious that it just stuck there.
However, I think it had something going for it in its ability to convey adolescent lust along with clinical overlay. Whatever the case, the combination offers up a truer vision of the undergraduate experience than most novels of its time.
A new-age "experiment" takes place in the 1960s at Harrad College, a privately endowed and liberally run school that admits carefully selected students. This social experiment encourages premarital living arrangements and is totally committed - not mere lip-service or public-relations hype - to getting young men and women to think and act for themselves.
What do they think about? Everything that interests the author, Bob Rimmer: human relations, sex, history, philosophy, anatomy, existentialism, art, music, Zen, politics - and, once more, sex.
Four Harrad students record their thoughts regularly for four years. Their diaries include large chunks of college "action,"…
Someone has capitalized on a spate of poison pen letters sent to women in a coed dormitory at the University of Alberta, and a murder has taken place according to the tenets of the letter. The victim is one of Randy’s English 101 students, and she gets roped into helping a very attractive police detective with the case.
Randy (Miranda) Craig is a sessional lecturer who lands a variety of jobs in and around the university throughout the series while trying to maneuver her way into a full-time position at the northernmost major university in North America.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
