Memoir and Biography

Surveying his own conflicted, multi-cultural life from a Bombay boyhood, immigration to Canada, and his re-invention as a literary and theatre critic, poet, and editor who has learned to understand life's blessings and wounds, Keith Garebian's autobiography is an act of memory at the service of a changing self. Using vignettes, letters, historical surveys, meditations, and existential summations, Pieces of My Self shows Garebian's trauma, fury, condemnation, ardour, melancholy, satire, and self-understanding. Figures of Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, William Hutt, Irving Layton, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, Henry Beissel, V.S. Naipaul, and many others pass through this life of a restlessly critical and self-critical author.

High Friends in Low Places features in lurid detail Alan Lord's epic romp through the riotous avant-underground scene of Montreal, New York, and Europe in the 1980s. Along the way, he relates his encounters with the luminaries of cutting-edge literature, music and art including William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, John Giorno, Manu Chao, Blixa Bargeld, Chris Burden and pop artist James Rosenquist, as well as introducing us to brilliantly creative unknowns in all the arts. In the end, exhausted, he begins a downward spiral-only to be rescued by a woman who becomes his wife of 34 plus years.

Incest denial and sexual assaults disrupt a young woman's solo spiritual quest and her two romantic adventures in India in 1990-91. Two decades later, after profound healing, she's resilient at mid-life. Finding the love and intimacy she craves, she can, at last, forgive her dying father-and her mom, for her decades of silence. Unlike many stories of healing and spiritual discovery, No Letter in Your Pocket avoids predictable recovery rhetoric and insular victimhood. Instead, it is a testament to thriving empowerment.

The memoir My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words traces Adriana Davies's life in Canada from her arrival in Edmonton as a a child immigrant with her mother, older sister and younger brother in the early 1950s, to the present as she deals with the challenges of Covid. Successive chapters tell not only the family's immigration story including accounts of her school days, university in Canada and then the UK, but also the beginning of her life as a young married woman and mother in London, England. Destined for a job in academe, cutbacks in the university sector in the UK meant that she began work as a freelance researcher and writer in the area of museums and galleries. This set the tone for a rich and varied career in museums and as a historian.

Southwest of Italy is an ode to the deep value of the things that are out of our control-history, place, emotion, coincidence, the community of friendship. The title refers to one of the most apparent intents of the text, which is to trace the relationship between Sardinia and the American Southwest, particularly in the layering of time and culture. Though this relationship is subtly played, even understated, because the book also aims at tracing deeper themes, such as those of hope, illusion, and cultural mediation. It is densely composed in a hybrid style, merging lyrical prose and travel essay. Narrative, description, and reflection are found within a surprising structure, rich with sensory language