The Silver Tongue's Diary: A Memoir of Poems By: Jennifer J. Prescott The Silver Tongue’s Diary unravels the many emotions that sometimes become entwined with one and other. Dark and desperate at times, and light and hopeful at others, Jennifer J. Prescott’s memoir of poems speaks to everyone who’s struggled to endure the dark, treacherous moments we all must face—and attests that we can survive.

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. In The Stone Diaries, one of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, Carol Shields weaves the strands of Daisy’s life together in a rich, sensuous, and poignant work that delivers lasting insights into the nature of life—and fiction.

The Al-Batin Diaries are the intimate record of a year spent by William Bryant in a remote military base in Saudi Arabia where he was assigned to produce basic medical texts for Saudi students. King Khaled Military City is a world without women populated by young Third World construction workers whose lives and desperate sexual practices are described in detail, along with those of Saudis and other Arabs. The journals are full of notes for the comic erotic novel that Bryant is writing at the same time, the text of which is included in the second part of the book.

When he turned sixty-five, playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary in which he reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Bringing together the four parts of The Smoking Diaries (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer, The Last Cigarette, and Coda) this beautiful volume is filled with comedy and serious reflection, sharp observation and painful self-disclosure. A brilliant and moving account of life's unsteady progress, it takes the reader to the heart of one man's brilliant struggle towards some kind of personal truth.

When he turned sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries was the result, in which one of Britain's most beloved and original writers reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.

Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern (1777-1836), as a younger son of the landed gentry in Estonia, had no prospects of being given an estate, i.e. a means of livelihood in his homeland. Therefore, at the age of 15 he entered Russian naval service. In 1797 while in England, he began keeping detailed diaries during the English sailors’ revolt and continued them until leaving the Russian navy in 1815 to marry and take over estates in Estonia. From England in 1799, he sailed to Gibraltar, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, and the Crimea. He describes how the Russians saved Turkish sailors in Palermo and suggests that the Russians might have caught Napoleon fleeing Egypt if the Russian admiral had acted. In 1801, he traveled overland from the Crimea to St. Petersburg to obtain the Tsar’s permission to leave Russian service and try to enter French service. Since he was no sycophant like others he met in Napoleonic Paris, he gave up trying to enter French service and spent his time visiting the sights of Paris, including Napoleon inspecting his troops, and had a love affair with his innkeeper. He then returned to Estonia by way of Berlin, where he learned of the coming Russian voyage around the world. (A translation of his diary from this voyage has been published by the University of Alaska Press). Therefore, this translation is of his diaries from before and after the voyage around the world. His diaries were never submitted to Russian censorship so they contain his personal feelings and impressions of events around him. He wrote freely without censoring himself and seems often to have used his diaries as a relief value for his frustrations and anger with his government, superiors, fellow officers, and the citizens of the various ports where he served.