This book details the immense impact that Jorge Luis Borges has had on the thinking and writing of the twentieth century and how many have misunderstood that impact. It highlights how his symbols, techniques, parody, irony, and artful ambiguity in his fiction, essays, and poems force us to question what we can know with certainty, what is real and what is dream, and who we are, and thus define what has become the core of the postmodern vision. The book explores Borges's distinctly Latin American postmodern pluralism. It details how this pluralism has informed the postmodern discussions of the self, love, history, feminism, and politics, and has influenced writers in the U.S. and Latin America. Throughout, it argues that the Argentine writer avoids the nihilism and chaos of a radical relativism that many have come to associate with postmodernism. Rather, his vision affirms values and a search for positive knowledge. Mark Frisch is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Duquesne University.

I'd always wanted to travel, except that I didn't know it. After graduating from college, getting a job, and setting out on my own, I made some sporadic attempts to see some of the world. It took a while to figure out how and it was only after I got married that the two of us came upon a strategy that worked for us. This book is a collection of stories about my mostly modest opportunities to travel. This is not a how-to book. There will be no listings of the best places to go. You will not find even a slightly comprehensive guide to locations, National Parks, interesting cities, countries, or anything else particularly useful. However, I hope you will find some interesting and amusing stories about surprises that we encountered along the way.

Invited to visit the People's Republic of China, the author and a group of American women were not prepared for what they saw and learned.

Rather than reading small-town representations in Canadian literature as portraits of a parochial past or a lost golden age, this book claims that they are best understood as sophisticated statements on the effects of modernity in an ever-more cosmopolitan world. In Ontario, as urbanization increased over the past century, small towns became a popular literary trope, and Ryan Porter argues that literary small towns are reflections, and even sublimated explorations, of contemporary life. Referencing the theories of heritage scholars, who view popularly understood pasts as constructions shaped by changing sensibilities, You Can’t Get There from Here argues that the literary small-town Ontario past is malleable, consisting of attempts to come to terms with the present in which the narrators find themselves. The book focuses on four key Ontario authors – Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart – as well as many secondary authors, and links the readings to much broader trends in actual Ontario towns and in popular culture.

Forward Dear Paul M y friend Paul LeBlanc and I have had many wonderful adventures together over the years. I knew we were going to be friends when we first met on a film called Silence of the North in 1981. We were shooting in northern Canada in40 degree temperatures. I had a scene where I had to run out of my cabin because a bear was on the roof, and shoot the bear. Paul and I were inside the cabin, just the two of us, waiting for my cue. When the bear went on the roof, the rafters of the cabin started sagging and the snow came pouring in. It looked like the roof was going to give way and the bear fall through and join us in the small cabin. We were terrified. At which point, Paul wailed, Oh, please, I just wanted to be a hairdresser! I laughed so hard I dropped my rifle. And what a hairdresser he is. Hes always been my favorite, not just for his amazing artistry, which he demonstrated on me over and over again in many films, but most particularly in Requiem for a Dream in 2000. Hes done my hair not only for films, but also for the Oscars, the Tonys, in Paris, in London, in limousines, in all temperatures and under every imaginable condition. But weve always had a great time together and hes always made me laugh, as Im sure readers of his book will. Ellen Burstyn (2006)

Her street name is Maybe She lives with a tribe of homeless teens -- runaways and throwaways, kids who have no place to go other than the cold city streets, and no family except for one another. Abused, abandoned, and forgotten, they struggle against the cold, hunger, and constant danger. With the frigid winds of January comes a new girl: Tears, a twelve-year-old whose mother doesn't believe her stepfather abuses her. As the other kids start to disappear -- victims of violence, addiction, and exposure -- Maybe tries to help Tears get off the streets...if it's not already too late. Todd Strasser, author of the powerful and disturbing Give a Boy a Gun, again focuses on an important social issue as he tells a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching story of young lives lost to the streets, and of a society that has forgotten how to care.