Enlarge Image
To embed a link to this book on your own website, please copy the script below.
In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding's life experience?from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings ... Read more
In these fifteen searingly honest personal essays, debut author Susan Olding takes us on an unforgettable journey into the complex heart of being human. Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding's life experience?from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. In a suite of essays forming the emotional climax of the book, Olding bravely recounts the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and tells us the story of Maia's difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved.
Written with as much lyricism, detail, and artfulness as the best short stories, the essays in Pathologies provide all the pleasures of fiction combined with the enrichment derived from the careful presentation of fact. Susan Olding is indisputably one of Canada's finest new writers, one who has taken the challenging, much-underused form of the literary essay and made it her own.
Susan Olding's first book, Pathologies: A Life in Essays, was longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, won the Creative Nonfiction Collective's Readers' Choice Award, and was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. A long-time resident of Kingston, Olding currently lives in Victoria.
"Susan Olding's work combines the visceral force of lived experience with the nuance and narrative drive of the best fiction. These essays are much more than essays, tracing the path from our pathologies to our deepest mysteries and fears and our most cherished hopes. "--Nino Ricci
"Susan Olding's work combines the visceral force of lived experience with the nuance and narrative drive of the best fiction. These essays are much more than essays, tracing the path from our pathologies to our deepest mysteries and fears and our most cherished hopes. "?Nino Ricci
Sign Up or Sign In to add your review or comment.
In June, Indigenous-led publisher Kegedonce Press celebrated the 15th anniversary of Daniel Heath Justice's The Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy, an Indigenous fantasy series likened to the scale of Le Guin and Tolkien that follows an epic conflict between humans and ... Read more
ALU Summer Book Club is on! We virtually chatted with Peter McCambridge, translator and fiction editor at QC Fiction, an imprint of Baraka Books, about bringing to Eric Dupont's novel Life in the Court of Matane to English readers. Read on for a preview from the book and our ... Read more
Our annual Gift Guide Week is here, featuring hand-picked selections by authors we admire for all the readers on your holiday gift list.
Our first gift guide recommender is poet and culture writer Natasha Ramoutar who shares five choice titles for everyone from "the one getting ... Read more
For Mother's Day this year we've rounded up three books that appreciate moms of all kinds—read on for excerpts from an uproariously funny novel, a moving memoir, and a powerful poetry collection.
Kicking off our second week of ALU DiscoverVerse is prose poet A.B. Dillon whose collection Matronalia (Thistledown Press) looks at the underbelly of mothering and what often remains unsaid from mother to daughter. A.B. joins us to chat about her collection, writing inspiration, ... Read more
Canada 150 has been a chance to reflect on our country's great achievements, sure, but with it comes a sobering look at its history of settlers mistreating the Indigenous peoples who were here first. In comes Indigenizing: a process of (re)introducing Indigenous customs, languages, ... Read more
In my book series, The Dead Kid Detective Agency, our valiant narrator October Schwartz experiences not only great personal humiliation (after all, her nickname is “Zombie Tramp”), but any number of other more real dangers, like bayonet-wielding history teachers, phone-booth ... Read more
My new book, Detachment: An Adoption Memoir, deals with the most intimate aspects of family life. As you’d expect from the title, that includes the adoption of our sons, and their new lives with me and my wife Betsy. But it also includes the most difficult and personal ... Read more
Stories are an integral part of who we are as peoples. For First Nations people, traditional storytelling was mostly based on the spoken word. For generations, children learned about their culture and their history through stories their elders told them. It was also used as ... Read more
Copyright © 2021 All Lit Up. All Rights Reserved.
All Lit Up is produced by the Literary Press Group and LitDistCo. LPG and LitDistCo acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.
All views expressed by bloggers and contributors to the All Lit Up blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of All Lit Up or the Literary Press Group.
All Lit Up acknowledges we are hosted on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat. We also recognize the enduring presence of all First Nations, Métis and the Inuit people, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to meet and work on this territory.
