Kirjahaku

When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty- first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it's the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband's whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle's eyes, nothing is dull. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." A life's work, One Long River of Song invites readers to experience joy and wonder in ordinary moments that become, under Doyle's rapturous and exuberant gaze, extraordinary.

When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to be in short supply, Your One Wild and Precious Life, Doyle and Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.

First published in 2002. This volume is part of the New Accent series looking at English and popular culture, language, policy, fiction and democracy. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

First published in 2002. This volume is part of the New Accent series looking at English and popular culture, language, policy, fiction and democracy. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Words with Teeth presents a dual argument, of which the first part is composed of establishing metaphor as the primary reading strategy for approaching Biblical Hebrew Poetry, and the second part of applying the said strategy to a heterogeneous group of psalms known, in rather Victorian English, as the Psalms of Imprecation. This volume first introduces the reader to the phenomenon of metaphor and how it interfaces with the Hebrew poetic text. It then offers an historical/exegetical review of the reception of the Psalms of Imprecation, ranging from their exclusion on theological grounds to their acceptance on psychological grounds and the various shades of curiosity and revulsion in between. The main body of the book represents a close individual reading of the Psalms of imprecation, using metaphor as a reading strategy. It will conclude, in agreement with Adele Berlin, that metaphor in Biblical Hebrew Poetry is the flip-side to parallelism, that parallelism frequently provides the structuring basis upon which non-structuring metaphor is grounded, and that metaphorical speech provided the psalmist(s) with a way of speaking the unspeakable about God and her relationship with human persons.

Prose poems, chants, litanies, simple songs, cadenced prayers, brief bursts of rhythmic observation, elegies to little moments that are not little at all in the least whatsoever—welcome to the melodic world of Brian Doyle’s “proems,” swirling with voices unreeling tales, souls telling stories, moments photographed with ink. Accessible, easy to read, blunt, brief, and sometimes unforgettable, “these are not poems,” says the author, “but life set to the music of poetry.” In A Shimmer of Something, Brian Doyle’s characteristic humor and sincerity combine to make this collection a delight to read. From his conviction that miracles breed ripples that do not cease, to his lack of faith about the life of an elderberry bush, to the amusing story of a friend’s experience of driving the Dalai Lama to Seattle, to the humorous experience of his second Confession, to an intimate story of love and loss, Doyle’s lean stories of spiritual substance inspire, entertain, and captivate.

Proems, taut tales, small stories with rhythm and blues and grace and bruise and laughter between the lines. Brian Doyle’s The Kind of Brave You Wanted to Be is a book of cadenced notes on the swirl of miracle and the holy of attentiveness; a book about children and birds, love and grief and everything alive, which is to say all prayers.

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?" “‘Why don’t you write one?’ said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase."And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?" “‘Why don’t you write one?’ said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase."And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.

A self-described wine doofus spends a year in a small Oregon vineyard, chronicling the creative and chaotic labor as the winemakers chase after the perfect pinot noir.

Like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle’s stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people.In a small town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There’s a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there’s an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it’s thinking…It’s the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

In this poignant and startlingly original book, Brian Doyle examines the heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn’t—and as a metaphor: the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. In a series of profoundly moving ruminations, Doyle considers the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart—from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to botany and Jesus. Weaving these strands together is the torment of Doyle’s own infant son’s heart surgery and the inspiring story of the young heart doctor who saved Liam’s life.First published in 2005, The Wet Engineis a book that will change how you feel and think about the mysterious, fragile human heart. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.

In Children and Other Wild Animals, bestselling novelist Brian Doyle (Mink River, The Plover) describes encounters with astounding beings of every sort and shape. These true tales of animals and human mammals (generally the smaller sizes, but here and there elders and jumbos) delightfully blur the line between the two.In these short vignettes, Doyle explores the seethe of life on this startling planet, the astonishing variety of our riveting companions, and the joys available to us when we pause, see, savor, and celebrate the small things that are not small in the least.Doyle’s trademark quirky prose is at once lyrical, daring, and refreshing; his essays are poignant but not pap, sharp but not sermons, and revelatory at every turn. Throughout there is humor and humility and a palpable sense of wonder, with passages of reflection so true and hard earned they make you stop and reread a line, a paragraph, a page.Children and Other Wild Animals gathers previously unpublished work with selections that have appeared in Orion, The Sun, Utne Reader, High Country News, and The American Scholar, as well as Best American Essays (“The Greatest Nature Essay Ever”) and Best American Nature and Science Writing (“Fishering”). “The Creature Beyond the Mountain,” Doyle’s paean to the mighty and mysterious sturgeon of the Pacific Northwest, won the John Burroughs Award for Outstanding Nature Essay. As he notes in that tribute to all things “sturgeonness”:“Sometimes you want to see the forest and not the trees. Sometimes you find yourself starving for what’s true, and not about a person but about all people. This is how religion and fascism were born, but it’s also why music is the greatest of arts, and why stories matter, and why we all cannot help staring at fires and great waters.”

In this award-winning paean to country life we find Hubbo O'Driscoll, whom we first met in Easy Avenue, now living in the lower Gatineau with his guardian aunt and uncle. When the local covered bridge -- home to a wayward ghost and her lovelorn postman -- is threatened by development, Hubbo must devise a strategy to save it.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award In his first year in high school, Hubbo O'Driscoll is torn between his poor but fun friends and the shallow but rich kids. In this novel based on Great Expectations, Brian Doyle does a brilliant job of dealing with the issue of class and all its implications. Poverty, social climbing and the connotations of each are presented through the classic Doyle blend of humor and gravity.

A Phoenix Honor Award Book Young Tommy is seeing Angel Square through new eyes since his best friend's father was beaten up just because he's Jewish. Brian Doyle brings his award-winning blend of humor and wisdom to bear in this mystery that confronts the issue of racial hatred.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award Young Tommy and Baby Bridget, the girl with the trillium-shaped eyes, discover that living, healing and dying are not always what they seem. And they make that discovery with the help of a wonderful cast of characters, including Crazy Mickey, Frank and the Hummer. Award-winning author Brian Doyle spent the summers of his boyhood in the Gatineau Hills, the setting for Up to Low.

Winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year, the Geoffrey Bilson Award, the Ruth Schwartz Award, and an ALA Notable Books List selection Martin O'Boy's life is not easy. His beloved Granny has just died, his pregnant mother and father fight all the time and his twin, Phil, is completely incapacitated. Martin is the one his mother counts on. But life in Ottawa's Lowertown is not all bad. He has his best friend, Billy Batson (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), the movies, his cat Cheap and there's the glamorous Buz from next door, who is off at the war.As the war comes to an end with the bombing of Hiroshima -- on Martin's birthday -- Ottawa is in a state of turmoil. Returning soldiers, parties, fights and drunks fill the streets. It would all be very exciting, except for one thing. In their endless pursuit of more funds Martin and Billy have joined the church choir -- as summer boys. And the organist, Mr. T.D.S. George, is awfully fond of Martin. But Martin, despite his hardships, has a pure soul and his Granny's love, Billy's friendship, Buz's imminent return, and even his mother's reliance on him, which help him to deliver a kind of justice to Mr. George, and to heal himself and others.