Brother Of Sleep

“A highly unusual tale about an unrecognized musical genius,” this acclaimed debut novel “touches the grand questions about God, love, art and history” (Publishers Weekly). Set against the backdrop of a nineteenth century Alpine village, Brother of Sleep tells the story of Johannes Elias Alder, a musical genius with an uncanny ear who develops his talent in secret midnight sessions at the church organ. Though he plays transcendently, his unrequited love and his struggle to break free from his circumstance threaten to destroy him. Translated into twenty-four languages and adapted into a film, a ballet, an opera, and several plays, Brother of Sleep moves inexorably toward tragedy in a tale reminiscent of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume. In this beguiling novel, Robert Schneider has created “a strange, rich story suffused with the poignancy of genius that is not allowed to flourish” (Los Angeles Book Review).

Brother Sleep is a collection of grievances through which a speaker mourns the loss of a brother, grandfather, and a sense of self as they navigate a landscape of desire marred by violence against queer and Mexican people. Set in the border cities of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence. As the poems grieve the loss of family, the violence perpetrated against queerness, the bodies lost border-side, and the cruelty against tenderness, Amparan's words bloom in evocation. Reflecting on lovers, friends, family, classmates, and others of impact, they navigate personal reconciliation in response to imposed definitions of their personhood. These poems evoke an equal sense of sorrow and tenderness amidst a complex landscape of the self.

Sleep, Death's Brother is an instruction manual on dreaming for children or incarcerated persons, teaching such individuals to lucid dream and thus use their dreams to somewhat escape their situations. While it is often the case that dream life is passively experienced, acclaimed novelist Jesse Ball (born 1978) reminds us that dreaming life is also a place where a sense of agency can grow. Even in the midst of physical or emotional environments that do not support such development in waking life, dreams are a place where one can take control. Ball calls for bravery in the exploration of this practice, and provides the dreamer with useful habits and techniques. Full of affirmation and wisdom, Sleep, Death's Brother is a guidebook "for all oneironauts young and old."

The long-awaited second novel from David Chariandy, whose debut, Soucouyant, was nominated for nearly every major literary prize in Canada and published internationally. An intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, tightly constructed novel, Brother explores questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991. With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home. Coming of age in The Park, a cluster of town houses and leaning concrete towers in the disparaged outskirts of a sprawling city, Michael and Francis battle against the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry -- teachers stream them into general classes; shopkeepers see them only as thieves; and strangers quicken their pace when the brothers are behind them. Always Michael and Francis escape into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness that cuts through their neighbourhood, where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the pulsing beats and styles of hip hop, Francis, the older of the two brothers, dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. With devastating emotional force David Chariandy, a unique and exciting voice in Canadian literature, crafts a heartbreaking and timely story about the profound love that exists between brothers and the senseless loss of lives cut short with the shot of a gun.

There's nothing better than a sleeping child -- and nothing harder than keeping an exuberant sibling quiet for that precious naptime. "Shh! My brother's napping. He really needs his sleep," admonishes our adorable narrator at the outset of this story. But there are pots to bang, books to read, towers to build, pictures to paint, and all sorts of fun to be had. It's just so hard not to make any noise! After a tower of books and blocks comes crashing down, little brother is wide awake and it's finally time to bring out the rest of the toys and have some fun! But who's that yawning now? This time, it's little brother's turn to tell us, "Shh, my brother's napping." Ruth Ohi's expressive art captures a scene familiar to every young family in this charming book that will delight children and parents alike.

A brilliant, genre-defying work—both memoir and epic poem—about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss “A bruised and brave love letter from a brother right here to a brother now gone . . . a soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself.”—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf my father said david has taken his own life Adam is in the middle of his own busy life, and approaching a career high in the form of a #1 New York Times bestselling book—when these words from his father open a chasm beneath his feet. I Had a Brother Once is the story of everything that comes after. In the shadow of David’s inexplicable death, Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp. This is an expansive and deeply thoughtful poetic meditation on loss and a raw, darkly funny, human story of trying to create a ritual—of remembrance, mourning, forgiveness, and acceptance—where once there was a life.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller: “A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go to sleep” (NPR). “Hell no, you can’t go to the bathroom. You know where you can go? The f**k to sleep.” Go the Fuck to Sleep is a book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, it captures the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. Read by a host of celebrities, from Samuel L. Jackson to Jennifer Garner, this subversively funny bestselling storybook will not actually put your kids to sleep, but it will leave you laughing so hard you won’t care.

A man who sleeps for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains wakes to a much-changed world.