A SELECTION OF BARRY CALLAGHAN’S WORKS ARE NOW AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL FORMATS
BARRELHOUSE KINGS is the unique story of two Canadian writers, each well-known in his own right: Morley Callaghan and his son, Barry. It is a stunningly written recollection of the world in which Barry Callaghan grew up – the world that was Morley’s milieu as a writer and became Barry’s as their lives dovetailed. Along the road toward that dovetailing, Barry encounters an incredible cast of characters: Becket, Muhamad Ali, Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, Golda Meir, Pierre Trudeau, mobsters and several song-and-dance men. Unforgettable, this is an autobiography that will stand the test of time.
RAISE YOU FIVE is periodic writing about the most complex ideas, rendered in prose of utter ease and clarity – prose from a man who believes all writing, at its best, whether it is a book review or meditation on evil, is a kind of storytelling, and that storytelling is what keeps it alive.
RAISE YOU TEN As a man of letters, as a poet, novelist, and personal journalist, Barry Callaghan is a singular presence in Canada. Always a storyteller, a flaneur “secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure,” he is also a public scholar in the tradition of Edmund Wilson (his extraordinary portrait of Wilson concludes this volume). Unflinching before the harsh complexities of our time, Raise You Ten, like Raise You Five, is, as trumpeted by the Globe and Mail: “Literary criticism and cultural history of a high order, in turn joyous, acerbic, celebratory.”
RAISE YOU ON THE RIVER is a masterfully written volume of essays and encounters that includes extended pieces on widely varied subjects such as Margaret Atwood, Hip Hop music and Emily Dickinson, Joyce Carol Oates and Céline and Saul Bellow, the cities of Calgary and Munich, basketball star Vince Carter, blues performers Otis Spann, Sunnyland Slim and Muddy Waters, painters John Meredith and William Ronald, Apartheid and the secret police in South Africa, Robert Graves, boxing and literary buffoonery, and more – all concluding with an extrodinary letter/report from inside a brutal battle, the 1970 Black September civil war in Amman, Jordan.
BESIDE STILL WATERS is a passionate love story, with its roots in Toronto and its resolution in the dark heart of contemporary Africa. Adam Waters’ search for the woman he loves, who has mysteriously disappeared from their hotel room, takes him from the casinos of Puerto Rico to war-torn Gabon and a leper colony deep in the African bush. Counterpointing Adam’s quest are his memories from boyhood, and of his father, wandering jazzman Sweet Web Waters; his experiences as a war correspondent; and the girl who becomes his lover, dancer Gabrielle. Callaghan confronts the pure joy that can be in sexuality and the evil that is inherent in the nature of growth itself, by combining the excitement of an adventure story with the exuberant love of language.
HOGGWASH Barry Callaghan and Joe Rosenblatt, poets of perspicacity, pizzazz, and probity, have been combative, ecstatic compadres for over forty years, with Callaghan donning an array of chapeaus, the man of belles lettres and Hogg flaneur-on-the-hoof from Smooth City, while Rosenblatt decades ago declared his unconditional allegiance to the buzzzers, chirpers, and purrers of the natural world, and to remain at peace by his pond, aloof from the human horde. This most unlikely pair are conjoined by their shared dedication to the Word, drawn from their nether surreal and noumenal worlds. Hoggwash is a convergence by epistle in a tribute not just to their enduring friendship but to the life of the imagination itself
Table of Contents
COVER
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
FULL DISCLOSURE
I
BECAUSE Y IS A CROOKED LETTER
II
THE BLACK QUEEN
WITHOUT SHAME
PIANO PLAY
OUR THIRTEENTH SUMMER
T-BONE AND ELISE
INTRUSIONS 1
2
3
BETWEEN TRAINS
DREAMBOOK FOR A SNIPER
DÉJÀ VU
CROW JANE’S BLUES
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE 1
2
3
DOG DAYS OF LOVE
DREI ALTER KOCKERS 1
2
THIRD PEW TO THE LEFT
THE HARDER THEY COME
BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES
AND SO TO BED
ANYBODY HOME?
POODLES JOHN
DARK LAUGHTER
A TERRIBLE DISCONTENT
THE COHEN IN COWAN
PROWLERS
MELLOW YELLOW
THE MUSCLE
A DRAWN BLIND
MERMAID
EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN
WILLARD AND KATE
A KISS IS STILL A KISS
THE STATE OF THE UNION
SILENT MUSIC
COMMUNION
UP UP AND AWAY WITH ELMER SADINE 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
PAUL VALÉRY’S SHOE A SELECTION OF BARRY CALLAGHAN’S WORKS ARE NOW AVAILABLE IN DIGITAL FORMATS
Guide
Cover
Contents
All the Lonely People Page 43
