The Souvenir

'One of my favourite writers' Nick Hornby One of the most acclaimed writers of our day, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game-show villainess ushers in the New Year with her deadbeat half-brother. And on a trip to a water park with their son, two fathers each confront a deep-rooted personal fear. With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken shows how the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. 'McCracken has a gift for spotting the comic potential in situations many of us have endured... Her prose is stippled with just-so observations' Observer 'McCracken is a totally assured performer: even seemingly throwaway perceptions are often memorably poetic, and there is a hint of melancholy under the comedy' Sunday Times 'This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders... McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives' New Yorker

Louise Steinman's father never talked about his experiences in the Pacific during WWII-like many men of his generation. All she knew was that a whistling kettle unnerved him, that Asian food was banned from the house, and that she was never to cry in front of him. After her parents' deaths, Steinman discovered a box containing some four hundred letters her father had written to her mother during the war. Among the letters, she found a Japanese flag inscribed with elegant calligraphy. The flag said: "To Yoshio Shimizu given to him in the Great East Asian War to be fought to the end. If you believe in it, you win." Intrigued by her father's letters and compelled to know how this flag came to be in his possession, Steinman sets out on a quest to learn what happened to her father and the men of his Twenty-fifth Infantry Division. Over the course of her exploration, Steinman decides to return the flag to the family of Yoshio Shimizu, the fallen Japanese soldier. She travels to the snow country of Japan and visits the battlefield in the Philippines where her father's division fought-the place where Yoshio lost his life and his flag. In the end, Steinman discovers a side of her father she never knew, and, astonishingly, she develops a kinship with the surviving family of his enemy. Weaving together her father's letters with the story of her own personal journey, Steinman presents a powerful view of how war changed one generation and shaped another.

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant 'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Douglas Coupland's valentine to Canada looks at how it feels to be a Canadiannow and imagines what it might feel like to be a Canadian in the future.

Tourist art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is generally of high quality and great aesthetic interest. Yet scholars have largely ignored these objects because their incorporation of Euro-North American influences, in both forms and motifs, has led to their dismissal as commercial, acculturated, and inauthentic. This exclusive location of authenticity and value in an idealized past silences the creative responses of Aboriginal people to repressive official policies of directed acculturation and denies their full participation in historical modernity. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the production, sale, and consumption of tourist art constituted a system for the circulation of objects within which images of Indianness were negotiated. To produce marketable commodities, Aboriginal people constructed images of themselves that mediated European notions of the savage, the natural, and the primitive. By accepting this imagery, colonizers and settlers naturalized their own identities as the rightful successors to the -Indians. While stereotypes of Indianness were being transported into parlours and bed chambers, the objects made for sale were also influencing the things Aboriginal people made for their own use. The beaded purses, pincushions, and shopping baskets brought Euro-American styles and concepts into Aboriginal communities, together with associated ideas of gender roles and domestic organization. An innovative combination of fieldwork, art historical analysis, and historical contextualization, this study is the first rigorous comparison of Native souvenir production with a wide range of Euro-American decorative arts and home crafts to identify the sources of object types and styles and revealing the innovative difference displayed by Aboriginal trade wares. Images newly uncovered in archives and travel literature - including depictions of Native vendors and makers - illustrate the book, along with never before displayed or published objects from museum collections in Europe and North America.

This book examines the relationship between art and tourism through the study of the material culture of tourism: tourist art and souvenirs. It thoroughly examines how to categorise the material culture of tourism within the discourses of contemporary art and cultural anthropology, and demonstrates that tourist art is a unique expression of place and genuine artistic style. The first investigation to consider the activity of souvenirs from both indigenous and settler tourist sites, it brings a unique addition to the existing, dated, research in the area. Working initially from Graburn’s definition of tourist art, as the art of one culture made specifically for the consumption of another, Tourism Art and Souvenirs sheds light on important aspects of the souvenir that have not been widely discussed. The most recent research is used to consider how the souvenir is designed and consumed, consumer expectations and influence on the character of the souvenir, how the souvenir maker is consumed by the tradition of heritage and how products become successful as souvenirs. The title also investigates the language involved in the representation of place and the recording of experience through the souvenir, developing a method that expresses the descriptive data of individual souvenir artefacts graphically so the patterns of language may be analysed. Enhancing the understanding of material culture in tourism and therefore adding to future tourism development this volume will be of interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, culture, heritage and sustainability.

This guide provides Caribbean food processors and artisans with practical information on how to effectively position their products in the tourism market using design and packaging. The guide is written in a reader-friendly format with easy to follow instructions and contains basic information on packaging, labelling, materials and processes.

Emil and Julianna are trapped in a winter wonderland--inside a giant snow globe! Cover glows in the dark.