By Love Possessed: Stories - Softcover

Goodison, Lorna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771035748 ISBN 13: 9780771035746

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2012

Synopsis

These beautifully crafted stories will introduce readers to the fiction of one of our literary bright lights – Lorna Goodison, the internationally renowned poet and award-winning author of the memoir From Harvey River. In sensuous language textured with the cadences of Creole speech, these stories vividly evoke a world where pride, injustice, love, and unexpected changes of fortune leave their mark but cannot extinguish the human spirit.

When her past lover returns to Jamaica with his Irish bride, a successful businesswoman must contend with her old flame’s renewed courtship. A well-known chanteuse with humble beginnings tells a young female reporter the tale of her life’s great turnaround. In the Pushcart Prize-winning story “By Love Possessed,” Goodison reveals the melancholy and resilience of a woman whose illusions about her dream man come to a disturbing and abrupt end.

With warm humour, empathy, and an unsentimental and perceptive eye for the foibles of human relationships, Goodison immerses us into the lives of an unforgettable community of people as they face challenges both intensely private and universally recognizable.

From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

With this highly praised collection of short fiction, Lorna Goodison demonstrates why she may be one of literature's best-kept secrets. In the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, humble Dottie thinks her luck has turned when she meets Frenchie, the best-looking, if not most reliable, man in the whole of Jamaica. In "The Helpweight," an accomplished woman must bear the burden of an old flame's renewed affections when he returns from a life abroad with his Irish bride in tow. And in "Henry," a young boy turned out of his house to make way for his mother's lover sells roses on the street to survive. On a whim, he bites off a bloom, which he can feel burning inside his mouth like a red pepper light, hoping it will take root and beautify his own life. Poetically rendered, these and over a dozen other evocative stories create a world in which pride can nourish a soul or be its ruin and where people are in turn uplifted and undone by love.

About the Author:

Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Trillium Award, and won the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Goodison has received much international recognition for her fiction and poetry, including the Musgrave Gold Medal. Born in Jamaica, she now divides her time between Ann Arbor, Toronto, and Halfmoon Bay, B.C.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0771035748
• ISBN 13: 9780771035746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272