I was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada. French is my first language, but I learned to master English in my teens. My mother taught me to read early and I became a bookworm in primary school. I began writing personal stories at ten and decided to study literature in the hope of perfecting my craft. Unfortunately, so many of the program’s books felt dull and irrelevant to me. But once in a while, an inspiring work of universal quality would come up, and I began building my collection. The books I recommend here are dear to my heart and motivated me to keep reading and writing.
I was raised Protestant in Québec, a province with a post-Catholic culture. There were few novels I could relate to growing up there. I was in my early teens when my sister-in-law lent me Emily of New Moon from her personal collection. Possibly because it’s about a nascent author, but also because it describes a Presbyterian lifestyle that felt familiar to us both. Emily Starr is a passionate girl who’s sent to live with her aunts and cousin on a farm on Prince Edward Island following her father’s death. Writing to her father “On the Road to Heaven,” she offers hilarious criticism of her culture’s religious legalism and takes her first steps as a poetess. Considered Montgomery’s most autobiographical work, it is a story full of laughter, excitement, and beauty.
Following her father's death, the newly orphaned Emily Starr is quickly uprooted and sent to live with her aunts and cousins on Prince Edward Island. After an initial culture shock, Emily reevaluates the situation and attempts to make the most of her new surroundings.
When Emily Starr's father dies from tuberculosis, she moves to New Moon Farm to stay with relatives. It's a jarring change of pace and scenery that pits Emily against her strict aunt Elizabeth and new classmates. Despite the circumstance, she forges friendships with local children: Teddy Kent, Ilse Burnley and Perry Miller. They each have distinct…
I am an author fortunate to be alive because of emergency medical treatments I received as an infant, treatments not available to one of my older sisters who died as a result. That I grew up in Rochester Minnesota—home to the world-famous Mayo Clinic where my father worked as a pediatric endocrinologist—also may have increased my awareness of how illness and its medical treatments can affect a young person’s life.
This nonfiction book on tuberculosis, published the same year as my book, begins with the discovery of a skull marked by the scars of tuberculosis. Turns out it belonged to a young man who died over 500,000 years ago from the disease. The authors trace the devastating effects of tuberculosis to modern day when our drugs can no longer fully guarantee treatment. This book tells a fascinating, yet worrisome, story about a most dreaded disease.
"Who knew the biography of a germ could be so fascinating?”—Kirkus (starred review)
This is the story of a killer that has been striking people down for thousands of years: tuberculosis. After centuries of ineffective treatments, the microorganism that causes TB was identified and the cure was thought to be within reach—but drug-resistant varieties continue to plague and panic the human race.
The "biography" of this deadly germ and the social history of an illness that could strike anywhere are woven together in an engrossing, carefully researched narrative. Includes a bibliography, source notes, and index.
This was a lovely slice of life read with the captivating setting of rural Japan at the start of World War II along with a coming of age plot. It was a very poignant reminder that life is filled with goodbyes and how we acknowledge and accept that can make all the difference.
On the eve of the Second World War, a young Chinese man is sent to his family's summer home in Japan to recover from tuberculosis. There he meets four local residents, and what ensues is a classical yet wonderfully unique adventure that seizes the imagination with its clean, simple yet dazzling storytelling.
A powerful true story of the courageous Black nurses who worked at a sanatorium in New York City in the 1920s and 30s, doing the job nobody else wanted to do: caring for victims of tuberculosis, long before there was a cure. These remarkable women came to the city, lured by promises of good pay, a career, and a life away from the injustices of Jim Crow, only to find themselves isolated in a dreary hospital where patients were sent to die an often gruesome and slow death. Erased from history until now, these nurses played a vital role in the eradication of tuberculosis in America. Smilios tells their story with candor, hope and heartbreaking detail. A must-read.
Black Angels tells the true story of 300 black nurses who changed the course of history, beginning in 1929 when white nurses staged a walk out at Staten Island's 2000-bed TB sanatorium, threatening New York with a public health catastrophe. City health officials made a radical decision to sanction a national call for 'colored nurses'. Lured by the promise of good pay, education, housing and most of all, a rare opportunity to work in a hospital free of quotas and segregated wards, 'Black Angels' from all over the country boarded trains and buses to enter wards that held both hope…
As an author for both adults (Eli) and children (McGee and Me), I’ve sold over 8 million books and videos. My passion is to strip away the religious varnish we’ve coated God in and reveal him as the loving friend and father he longs to be. My first agenda is to entertain, and I never want to get caught preaching. Instead, I use humor and page-turning stories to present his love in ways without ever getting caught.
I read poetry to constantly improve my writing craft—so many profound thoughts in so few words. In my estimation, George Herbert is the best. I return to his poetry repeatedly (often to the same poems) for further insights into my ever-deepening relationship with God.
George Herbert's prose and poetry is united in this combined volume, illustrating in detail the inner conflict the author felt regarding the principles of his faith and belief in God.
Coming of age during the early 17th century, Herbert demonstrated a great appetite for intellectual endeavors while still a boy. While still in his twenties, he mastered Greek and Latin and was elected to the post of Public Orator at Trinity College, Cambridge. His theological knowledge and scholarly ability distinguished him from many of his peers.
Throughout his life, Herbert suffered with physical infirmity and was never blessed with a…
I’m a Canadian psychotherapist who worked as a social worker for nearly a decade before going into private practice for the next two decades. I dabble in history and literature and when I find a Canadian book that combines elements of social justice, historical wrongs, heart-wrenching human experience, feminism, and Canadian wilderness I want to share it with everyone. As a bonus, if one of the characters happens to be a young person who is coming of age, the book will earn a very top position on my bookshelf. I hope you enjoy this small list of what I consider hidden gems by Canadian authors.
Xatsu’ll chief Bev Sellars spent much of her childhood in a Canadian Indian residential school called St. Joseph’s Mission and in a hospital to treat the tuberculosis she contracted while at the school. This is her first-person account of how the trauma of being taken from her family and community impacted not only her, but every member of her family for three generations. It also discusses her path to healing. The title refers to the fact that in an attempt to strip the children from all sense of their culture and identity, they were referred to by a number rather than their names. I studied the impact of the Canadian Indian Residential School system as part of my social work degree and read many books on the subject but this personal account resonated most profoundly for me.
Xat’sull Chief Bev Sellars spent her childhood in a church-run residential school whose aim it was to “civilize” Native children through Christian teachings, forced separation from family and culture, and discipline. In addition, beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Turberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours’ drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life.
The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph’s Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal…
I grew up exploring the worlds of the Brontës, Dickens, Braddon, Hardy, and more. So, for my Master’s in literature from the University of Oxford, it was the 1800-1914 period I focused on. When I started writing fiction, I chose the nineteenth century as my setting and a scandal that rocked the lives of the Bronte siblings as my topic. I hold myself to a high standard of historical accuracy when writing about real people (e.g. I cut moonlight from a scene in Brontë’sMistress when I realized it would have been a new moon that night!). And I love discovering and sharing other novelists who take the same approach.
Stephen Crane is most famous for his 1893 novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but it is his lost companion novel, about a male sex worker in late nineteenth-century New York, which is the focus of Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream. White moves between a frame story about Crane’s last days with his “wife” Cora and the story of Elliott, the supposed inspiration for the manuscript. I’m a New Yorker by choice so love reading books set in the city and I very much enjoyed this gritty portrayal of love and sex between men in the past. Crane isn’t the only writer who makes an appearance here—there’s a cameo from Henry James too!
Stephen Crane is writing a new story, and it may be his last. The year is 1900. The famous author of The Red Badge of Courage is travelling to a Black Forest clinic in search of a cure for the tuberculosis that threatens his life. He dictates to his wife, Cora, the story of 'The Painted Boy', inspired by a real-life encounter with a fifteen-year-old newsboy, Elliott, one wintry day in the Bowery. In the story Elliott is both impressionable and elusive. He finds himself the object of the hopeless affections of Theodore, the staid middle-aged banker who sets him…
Nothing about the art of writing is more interesting to me—as both reader and writer—than the power of language to open, or to enhance, or to teach, our perceptions about life and about living in the richest emotional and thoughtful ways possible. My own Sweetbitter is my major effort at imagining in language or with language as a kind of perception. Our intuitions are immensely valuable, when we can catch hold of them; for the writer, the process of imagining and articulating is a kind of method of deepening our perceptiveness and our intuitions. My books of poems, also, are a necessary—for me—practice of the art of writing.
I *adore* Katherine Mansfield’s work. She wrote short stories, not novels.
She was still rather young when she died of tuberculosis. Her portrayals of love, family, and especially of children, are for me gloriously wonderful with insight and perceptiveness about relationships. From the New Zealand settings of many of her stories (where she was born and grew up), she emigrated to London, then to France (where she received medical treatment for TB), and Switzerland (also for treatment for TB—unsuccessful).
She seems to me a lonely genius—perceiving deeply not only other persons (of many sorts) on whom she modeled her short stories but also herself. Her seemingly idyllic childhood in NZ is perhaps the core source of her accomplishment—especially the novellas At the Bay and Prelude. But her adult life was difficult and she seems to have been uncertain about her writing, even though to me she seems a genius…
With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University.
Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923.
This is a fictional account mainly of the war-time life of the poet Charles Causley one of my favourite poets. Mr Gale certainly had a novel approach even if he dropped some clangers about the Navy for example on ship toilets are called 'heads' but it did not affect my enjoyment.
'A characteristically tender novel about a young man growing up in the shadow of one war and the whispers of the next' Observer
'A wonderful novel about relationships, particularly between a mother and son. A compelling read, beautifully crafted and sensitively written' Irish Examiner _______
Laura, a laundress, meets her young husband when they are both placed in service in Teignmouth in 1914. They have a baby, Charles, but his father returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this story. It’s set in Yalta, a resort town located on the Crimean Peninsula—territory that has been caught up in the Russian/Ukrainian war. Chekhov, who suffered from tuberculosis, had a home there, where he wrote much of his last and best work, including this—his most famous—story. It’s a simple tale about normal people—lovers who are married to others—and thus bucked the Russian trend of big societal themes. Chekhov’s political leanings changed so often, he said, that the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” became the first of his six principles for a good story. (The others: objectivity, truthfulness, brevity, originality, and compassion.) Still, lately I’ve been wondering what this story would be like if Chekhov were writing it today.
If any writer can be said to have invented the modern short story, it is Anton Chekhov. It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories. The abashed happiness of a woman in the presence of the husband who abandoned her years before. The obsequious terror of the official who accidentally sneezes on a general. The poignant astonishment of an aging Don Juan overtaken by love. Spanning the entirety of Chekhov's career and…
