Garner

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers. An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world. Living alone in an old house, he spends his time reading comic books, collecting birds’ eggs, and playing with marbles. When one day a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears on a horse and cart, offering a cure-all medicine, a mysterious friendship develops and the young boy is introduced to a world beyond his wildest imagination. Luminous, evocative, and sparely told, Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves.

In January 1856, Margaret Garner—an enslaved woman on a Kentucky plantation—ran with members of her family to the free state of Ohio. As slave catchers attempted to capture the fugitives in Cincinnati, Garner cut the throat of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to prevent her return to slavery. Toni Morrison first imaginatively treated Margaret Garner’s infanticide in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved (1987). In 2004, it became the subject of her libretto Margaret Garner: Opera in Two Acts, a lyrical text designed to be paired with music and sung operatically. Grammy Award–winning composer Richard Danielpour had tapped Morrison to write the libretto for his opera Margaret Garner: A New American Opera, which world premiered in Detroit in 2005. La Vinia Delois Jennings’s edited volume records key events, debates, and critical assessments of Morrison's success with Garner’s story as a libretto. It also includes essays by individuals who played central roles in bringing the opera to the stage and recovering Garner's story. The collection opens with a foreword by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, for whom Danielpour composed the title role. The other contributors range from literary and opera scholars to specialists in American slavery studies and scholars of Toni Morrison's oeuvre. Their essays position her libretto within the African American operatic and libretto tradition, a tradition not fully known to performance scholars and heretofore unexamined.

Paul "Mousie" Garner's career as a stooge (a "fall guy" or "assistant" to the head clown) began in vaudeville, when he and his partner were firing off jokes and one-liners, as well as leaping over oil-drums. Another part of the act, which could run as often as five times a day, involved Garner getting smashed over the head with plastic ukuleles. Garner's big break came when, across town, funnyman Ted Healy parted ways with his sidekicks, who went on to greater fame as The Three Stooges. Garner was then hired as a replacement stooge-and soon learned that Healy, unlike other slapstick comedians, actually slapped his partners in the face instead of just pretending. Thus was Garner given his first real lesson in the fine arts of stooging, which demanded quick reflexes and perfect timing. In fact, it was Healy who came up with the nickname "Mousie" because Garner was always so jumpy, nervous and quick. Needless to say the name stuck; and Mousie Garner would go on to form "The Rollicking Mousie Garner Trio," join the touring "New Stooges," and work steadily in radio, television, theater, clubs and movies.

Garner, North Carolina, located just south of Raleigh, was officially reinstated as a town in 1905; however, settlers lived here as early as the 1750s. Like many Southern towns, Garner's economy was originally supported by farming, especially cotton and, later, tobacco. In the mid-19th century the railroad and Holloman's Road, an old country road connecting Garner with Raleigh, brought much change to the community. Residents were able to travel between the state capital and their hometown, bringing back new ideas, merchandise, and settlers. This continues today; however, Garner has maintained the small-town charm of its past while adapting to the changing culture surrounding it.

What I love, what I need, first in Helen Garner’s writing is a particular kind of closeness to self – the good, greedy, mistaken, emotional, fierce, sceptical, changing and disrupting self … But I also love that she’s always fighting to come back, enough, as well: find enough of a law, a rule, a family, a home. In a brilliantly argued and very personal essay, Sean O’Beirne looks at the whole of Helen Garner’s writing life so far – from Monkey Grip to the recently published Diaries – while trying to come to terms with the demands, and the rewards, of Garner’s extraordinary, radical individualism and honesty. In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.

Hugh Garner’s Best Stories received the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1963. The collection consists of twenty-four stories composed between the late 1930s and the early 1960s and reflects the immense flux of the mid-century, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and second-wave feminism. Garner takes on issues ranging from anglophone–francophone conflict in Canada to racism in the American South, from the disenfranchisement of First Nations people to the mistreatment of the mentally disabled. Best Stories is not only notable for the devastating precision of its prose, but also for its contribution to the Spanish Civil War literary canon. This new edition brings short fiction by Garner into conversation with the wider canon of Canadian and transnational leftist and proletarian literature.

The revered actor and quintessential self-made man recalls "trying to decipher" William Wyler with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, breaking Doris Day's ribs, having a "heart-to-heart and eyeball-to-eyeball" with Steve McQueen, being "a card-carrying liberal--and proud of it," and much more.