Билл Гастон — новинки

From Giller-nominated, award-winning Bill Gaston, a tender, wry, and unforgettable memoir about alcohol, fishing, and all the things fathers and sons won't say to each other

Sons clash with fathers, sons find reasons to rebel. And, fairly or unfairly, sons judge fathers when they take to drinking.

But Bill Gaston and his father could always fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in rapt fascination with the world under their hull, they had what all fathers and sons wish for. Even if it was temporary, even if much of it would be forgotten along with the empties.

Returning to the past in his old fishing boat, revisiting the remote marina where they lived on board and learned to mooch for salmon, Bill unravels his father's relationship with his father, it too a story marked by heavy drinking, though one that took a much darker turn.

Learning family secrets his father took to the grave, Gaston comes to understand his own story anew, realizing that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact someone both nobler and more vulnerable than he had guessed.

Warm, insightful, and often funny, Just Let Me Look at You captures every father's inexpressible tenderness, and the ways in which the words for love often come too late for all of us.

A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage is populated by the lonely and alienated, holders of secrets, members (or would-be members) of shadowy organizations, screw-ups, joyriders and runaways.

Architects of their own destruction, Gaston's characters provoke an almost mythic response of simultaneous disbelief and recognition, as they painfully, deliberately, stubbornly carve a path for themselves, questioning every turn. Yet somehow, in spite of themselves, they sometimes manage to stumble into peace and even wisdom.

This set of ten cautionary tales showcases Gaston's range and narrative versatility, moving seamlessly from the funny to the poignant to the surprising and absurd. The stories revel in the ironic and contrary, from a vegan working at a fish farm to a man getting his boat fixed the same day he plans to sink it to a man exchanging the keys to his Lincoln for a goat.

Gaston has a gift for making ordinary moments feel transcendent, capturing the everyday to such a precise degree that it becomes universal. A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage shows how the sublime sometimes reveals itself in the moments most people would rather put behind them.

Weaving together five heartbreaking stories, Bill Gaston transforms the cruelty of life into something not only beautiful but heartwarming. A recently divorced, early retiree accidentally burns down his house on the day he pays off the mortgage, only to discover that for the first time in his life he’s forgotten to pay a bill: his insurance premium. An old friend of his, a middle-aged musician, prepares for her suicide to end the pain of esophageal cancer. Her father, who left his family to study Buddhism in Nepal, ends his days in a Toronto facility for Alzheimer’s patients. The three are tied together not only by their bonds of affection, but by a book called The World, written by the old man in his youth. The book, possibly biographical, tells the story of a historian who unearths a cache of letters, written in Chinese, in an abandoned leper colony off the coast of Victoria. He and the young Chinese translator fall in love, only to betray each other in the cruellest way possible, each violating what the other reveres most.

In this remarkable collection, Bill Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle — the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions. This marvelous, riotous, Rabelaisian world contains gargoyles that are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which human beings subject themselves. Each of the collection's 12 stories has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent presence informs the characters and their actions. A boy struggles with self-image and the need to fit in. A grieving parent tries to prevent others from making his mistake; tragedy ensues. A vengeful son settles a score with mom and her new lover. Other stories focus on familial delight, as well as discord in the lives of an over-the-top artist, a drunken uncle, and a bitter writer. All show one of Canada’s finest writers at the top of his form.

В сборник вошли пять романов известных английских писателей, признанных мастеров детективного жанра, Б. Гастона, К. Райлонда, А. Даймена, Л. Мейнела и М. Рассела. Эти классические английские детективы имеют одну общую отличительную черту - они полны особенной, тонкой и несколько отстраненной иронии. Британский автор лишь сочувственно улыбается своим героям там, где читатель смеется или плачет.