The Dreaming Of Aloysius

"Aloysius wants to sing with his grandmother in the church choir - but he can't carry a tune! When Ali asks her why he can't sing, she tells him that singing is a gift from God, so Ali decidees to search for God to ask for the "gift". In this search he meets unusual characters, among them: Virgil, an Indian taxi driver; a rollerblading girl with orange hair who tries to teach him to sing like Elvis; an Italian boatman; two eccentric sisters who run a homeless shelter; a penniless man who thinks he's Humphrey Bogart; and a weeping bride who wants to sing a song about a rattlesnake at her wedding. Ali's odyssey leads him to big truths about the world. Back at home, he wonders if one of those strange people could have been God in disguise. When he sings a song about a rabbit, he sings well - not as well as others - but not too badly. Satisfied at last, he thanks God and goes to sleep." -- Back cover

Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . . Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running — and forgetting — lurching through her unraveled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret. Hopeful, lyrical, comedic, and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.

Alfian Sa’at’s The Asian Boys Trilogy is a fascinating, insightful tour through the lives and loves of the gay community in Singapore. In the campy and carnivalesque Dreamplay, history is turned upside-down as a goddess travels through time to ‘save gay men from themselves’. In Landmarks, geography takes centrestage, as eight short plays explore the spaces that have been claimed, colonised, and trespassed by those at the margins of the mainstream. In Happy Endings, the playwright’s adaptation of the novel Peculiar Chris evolves into a meditation on the relationship between life and literature. With clear-eyed compassion and eloquent outrage, this collection of plays charts the coming-of-age of a community finding its voice.

A powerful magician returns to New York City and reluctantly finds himself in the middle of a war between the city’s two most powerful witches. “It would help if you did not think of it as magic. M certainly had long ceased to do so.” M is an ageless drifter with a sharp tongue, few scruples, and the ability to bend reality to his will, ever so slightly. He’s come back to New York City after a long absence, and though he’d much rather spend his days drinking artisanal beer in his favorite local bar, his old friends—and his enemies—have other plans for him. One night M might find himself squaring off against the pirates who cruise the Gowanus Canal; another night sees him at a fashionable uptown charity auction where the waitstaff are all zombies. A subway ride through the inner circles of hell? In M’s world, that’s practically a pleasant diversion. Before too long, M realizes he’s landed in the middle of a power struggle between Celise, the elegant White Queen of Manhattan, and Abilene, Brooklyn’s hip, free-spirited Red Queen, a rivalry that threatens to make New York go the way of Atlantis. To stop it, M will have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he’s ever acquired—he might even have to get out of bed before noon. Enter a world of Wall Street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steampunk universes, and demonic coffee shops. M’s New York, the infinite nexus of the universe, really is a city that never sleeps—but is always dreaming.

The first-ever US publication of this Caribbean classic upon which a feature film by the same title is based.