Casino & other stories
Bonnie Burnard
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0002242559
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the perfect time for a re-issue of Bonnie Burnard’s Casino & Other Stories in the striking new PerennialCanada format. A Good House, Burnard’s 1999 novel, won the Giller Prize and became the number-one fiction bestseller. The subject of numerous media profiles and reader attention since the award, Burnard is on her way to becoming a household literary name.
Casino & Other Stories is Burnard’s second collection of short stories, also nominated for a Giller Prize and the winner of the Saskatchewan Best Book of the Year Award.Pulling us beneath the surface of convention into uncharted and often unpredictable emotional territory, Burnard makes the unremarkable seem remarkable, and the unspoken seem significant. These are stories of the frailty of love, the tension of family life, the uncertain moments in a young woman’s life. Wry and intelligent, humane and touching, Bonnie Burnard’s stories seduce and then surprise us with a sense of the familiar finally understood, and of passion recognized.
The Snows of Yesteryear (New York Review Books Classics)
people will come from the camp on the north end, but there won’t be anything for them to do. Some people will leave, the very young, the very old, but most will stay. Although the air direcdy above the Casino will hold the yellow-red glow of the fire, the moon and the stars and the silvery sheen on the surface of the water will be eclipsed by smoke. Men will get flashlights from their glove boxes. They’ll aim them like searchlights up to the fire and over the surrounding dunes, out across the
middle age, when she knew her. When the work was completed, the figurines were given to her, either in payment or above payment, in gratitude. The figurines do not convey any particular sense of the aunt’s character. You would not imagine any connection between her and these elegant clay children unless you saw them, as Joan did, sitting on a gate-legged oak table in her aunt’s living room, just behind a cut-glass humbug dish. They had been a gift and she’d taken them and incorporated them into
Queen? About her new earrings, which pair she would allow her sister to borrow if she promised not to leave them somewhere, or trade with a friend? About the boy who could no longer talk to her, normally? The deer appeared in the corner of her eye. It had every chance. It was thirty yards ahead of them, in the other lane. All it had to do was freeze. Or dive straight ahead, or veer left. Lots of choices. She threw her arm hard across her daughter’s chest, forgetting that she was belted in, and
devout attention proffered like a gift certificate, a hand on a back, felt, and known to be felt. Married, not married, troubled, trustworthy, pitiful, wild, careless, smart, just about everyone had something to offer. Those who had performed together before were discreet, tolerant of new couplings, ignoring the signs they’d received or sent themselves another time. Insurance people did this, she thought, museum people. Plumbers? After she’d got her Glenlivet, Heather had turned a deaf ear to
saying that they only wanted her to be happy, that they were fine. I know that, she said, that’s the whole point, how very fine you are. And then she’d backed off and one of them cracked wise and it was over. In the dress, in the stockings, she stood at the mirror lifting her hair up and letting it down again. It should be up, she thought and I should be young, and there should be a saucy hat to match the dress, but there isn’t, so there you are. The cab ride to East Hastings was long, detoured
