No Relation

In his fourth novel, winner of the 2011 Canada Reads competition and "CanLit's crowned king of chuckles" (Telegraph-Journal) Terry Fallis's sharp, funny wit takes readers into the world of identity, inheritance, and belonging, begging the question: What's in a name? This is the story of a young copywriter in New York City. He's worked at the same agency for fifteen years, and with a recent promotion under his belt, life is good. Then, one morning this copywriter finds himself unceremoniously fired from his job, and after he catches his live-in girlfriend moving out of their apartment a couple hours later, he's also single. Believe it or not, these aren't the biggest problems in this copywriter's life. There's something bigger, something that has been haunting him his whole life, something that he'll never be able to shake. Meet Earnest Hemmingway. What's in a name? Well, if you share your moniker with the likes of some of the most revered, infamous, and sometimes dreaded names in history, plenty. This is Earnest's lifelong plight, but something more recent is on his plate: His father is pressuring him to come home and play an active role in running the family clothing business. And as a complex familial battle plays out, Earnest's inherited name leads him in unexpected directions. Wry, clever, and utterly engaging, No Relation is Terry Fallis at the top of his form.

This book is a collective statement about a new approach to education - the pedagogy of relation. After revisiting a number of existing conversations, the authors bring together several theoretical traditions under the umbrella of the pedagogy of relation. This book is an appeal to develop a common frame of reference for educational approaches based on the primacy of relations in education. The authors try to understand human relations rather than educational processes, behaviors, methods, curriculum, etc. The authors also examine the dangers that a pedagogy of relations may present, and the implications such a pedagogy may have for curriculum and educational policy. The promise of the pedagogy of relation is to offer a viable alternative to dominating trends in educational thinking - trends that emphasize control over teacher and student behavior as the main way of achieving excellence.

This first biography of a Palestinian writer also provides a moving account of the ways “ordinary” individuals are swept up by the floodtides of both war and peace Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged.Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today.”As it places Muhammad Ali’s life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as “among the five ‘must read’ books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy.” In an era when talk of the “Clash of Civilizations” dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human.

Literary Nonfiction. When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. NO RELATION is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss. "In finely-wrought scenes as charged with meaning as images in haiku, Paula Carter tells the story of finding and then losing a lover and his two young sons. In retrospect, her separation from the boys appears to be the greater loss. For as the years tick by, she realizes that these stepchildren, although never fully her own, may be the only children she will ever have. Bittersweet, captivating, NO RELATION carries the burden of memory in elegant and seemingly effortless prose."--Scott Russell Sanders "Paula Carter is a dream of a writer, poetic and profound. Each of the seemingly quick essays that make up NO RELATION is its own little lightning bolt; I kept putting the book down to interrogate what had happened to my heart. She asks the big questions: what does it mean to be a woman, a mother? What makes up a family, an independent life? It gave me a part of myself I didn't know was missing."--Megan Stielstra "These small gems speak of love and heartbreak with penetrating wisdom. Each piece is a clue to a larger puzzle about how love works, how to discover its power even in moments of loss. Paula Carter's finely carved images are saturated with insight that's rare and refreshing."--Samrat Upadhyay

Considers (52) S. 892.