Best Selling Books by Karen Connelly

Burmese Lessons is a love story. Unlike conventional love stories, this one takes the reader into a world as dangerous and heartbreaking as it is enchanting. When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in hellish limbo in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggle for political change. Burmese Lessons is illuminated by the sensual language and flashes of humour that have won her fans around the world.

Experiences, landscapes, and intimacies have been rendered in exhilarating, sensuous movement with language so lush, voices so vibrant, and rhythms so resonant that the poems often seem to read, even perform, themselves ... Connelly has wrought searing poetry. --Canadian Literature.

Beautifully written and taking us into an exotic land, Karen Connelly’s debut novel The Lizard Cage is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit. Teza once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship. Arrested by the Burmese secret police in the days of mass protest, he is seven years into a twenty-year sentence in solitary confinement. Cut off from his family and contact with other prisoners, he applies his acute intelligence, Buddhist patience, and humor to find meaning in the interminable days, and searches for news in every being and object that is grudgingly allowed into his cell. Despite his isolation, Teza has a profound influence on the people around him. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the jailers, and his steadfast spirit inspires radical change. Even when Teza’s criminal server tries to compromise the singer for his own gain, Teza befriends him and risks falling into the trap of forbidden conversation, food, and the most dangerous contraband of all: paper and pen. Yet, it is through Teza’s relationship with Little Brother, a twelve-year-old orphan who’s grown up inside the walls, that we ultimately come to understand the importance of hope and human connection in the midst of injustice and violence. Teza and the boy are prisoners of different orders: only one of them dreams of escape and only one of them will achieve it—their extraordinary friendship frees both of them in utterly surprising ways.

This book highlights cyber racism as an ever growing contemporary phenomenon. Its scope and impact reveals how the internet has escaped national governments, while its expansion is fuelling the spread of non-state actors. In response, the authors address the central question of this topic: What is to be done? Cyber Racism and Community Resilience demonstrates how the social sciences can be marshalled to delineate, comprehend and address the issues raised by a global epidemic of hateful acts against race. Authored by an inter-disciplinary team of researchers based in Australia, this book presents original data that reflects upon the lived, complex and often painful reality of race relations on the internet. It engages with the various ways, from the regulatory to the role of social activist, which can be deployed to minimise the harm often felt. This book will be of particular interest to students and academics in the fields of cybercrime, media sociology and cyber racism.

One Room in a Castle is an adventurous and intimate portrait of the rural Mediterranean, its culture and its inhabitants. Connelly allows the reader private glimpses of her world, and the world at large with a new collection of letters and stories based on her travels in Spain, France and Greece. ''''.?.?.?beautifully written . . . mixes -autobiography, fiction, poetry and wide open spaces." -The Calgary Herald

In Karen Connelly''s first collection of poetry since The Border Surrounds Us, the poet offers up a searing, complex portrayal of her troubled family. Refracted, augmented, drawn through various cities, streets and fields, over mountain ranges and foreign landscapes, this portrayal grows into an authentic homage to people who are often invisibilized or silenced. Simultaneously, it becomes an indictment of her own country, Canada, its long history of racism and unconscionable violence against women, children, addicts, and poor people. Never didactic, insistently real, these poems make us wonder "how to enter again/that unlikely tenderness/the cracked ribcage of the world/ as if it were the last shelter."

Happily married, great career, mother of two. What more could a woman possibly want? Enter The Change Room, by award-winning writer Karen Connelly, and find out. Eliza Keenan is the mother of two young sons, the owner of a flower studio that caters to the city''s elite, and the loving wife of a deliciously rumpled math professor named Andrew. She''s on the move from dawn until her boys are in bed, and after they''re asleep she cleans her house. Her one complaint about her life is that the only time she has for herself is her twice-weekly swim in the local community centre pool, where sunlight shines in through a tall window and lights up the water in a way that reminds her of the year she spent as a footloose youth on an island in Greece. Then one morning into this life that is full of satisfactions of all kinds except sexual (because who has the time or the energy once the kids are asleep?) comes a tall, dark and lovely stranger, a young woman Eliza encounters at the pool and nicknames ''the Amazon.'' The sight of this woman, naked in the change room, completely undoes Eliza, and soon the two of them are entangled in an affair that breaks all the rules, and threatens to capsize not only Eliza and her happy family, but her lover''s world, too. And yet the sex is so all-encompassing, so intimate, so true...how can it be bad? Be ready to be shaken up, woken up, scandalized and deeply stirred.

Seks. Dat is het enige wat ontbreekt in het drukke maar gezegende leven van Eliza Keenan, moeder van twee zoontjes, gelukkig getrouwd met een hoogleraar in de wiskunde en mede-eigenaar van de chicste bloemenzaak van Toronto. Want wie heeft er tijd of energie voor seks tussen alle dagelijkse verplichtingen door? Tot Eliza op een dag een prachtige jonge vrouw in de meisjeskleedkamer van het zwembad bespiedt. De relatie die al snel tussen hen ontstaat doorbreekt veel taboes en brengt niet alleen Eliza’s eigen veilige bestaan in gevaar, maar ook dat van haar gezin en haar minnares. Maar de lichamelijkheid is zo alomvattend, zo intiem, zo eerlijk – die kan toch onmogelijk slecht zijn?

Not since Elizabeth Smart''s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has a poet explored so unforgivingly the territory of sexual passion and that passion''s decay. In The Disorder of Love, Karen Connelly travels beyond - into the sometimes wild, sometimes quietly vibrant realm of the body: the body of the self, of new lovers and old friends, of modern and ancient landscapes. Despair has a spirit here, as does the complicated architecture of everyday life. But what is most remarkable in this collection comes at the end, when the poet gives us the rare, sweet chaos of joy.

Canadian poet Karen Connelly was a young woman when she left home to live for one year in Denchai, a small farming community in northern Thailand. This lyrical portrait of her true-life adventures radiates wit and literary charm. The swampy jungles, the lure of hedonistic Bangkok, the austere, ambient Buddhism, and the torrential rains serve as backdrops for Connelly’s carefully crafted prose. Her account combines a keen sense of adventure with an affinity for Thai culture, chronicling the country’s intriguing underpinnings and exotic charms.

Winner of the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction“Painfully bored” with school, 17-year-old Karen Connelly set off for rural Thailand to spend one year as an exchange student. This is her intensely honest account of living in a beautiful but sometimes infuriating culture.“I already look forward to reading Touch the Dragon again—and again.”—Timothy Findley

Dans une prison de haute sécurité à Rangoon, Teza, jeune chanteur contestataire, purge une peine de vingt ans pour avoir chanté contre la dictature birmane. Jeté dans une geôle putride, interdit de contact avec les autres prisonniers, il est victime jour après jour des violences sadiques d’un gardien fou. Pour ne pas sombrer, il trouve refuge dans ses convictions bouddhistes mais c’est sa rencontre avec Nyi Lay, un orphelin de douze ans élevé dans l''enceinte de la prison qui va enfin faire naître une lueur d''espoir dans les ténèbres et lui donner la force de survivre.

Karen Connelly’s fourth collection of poetry is remarkable in its energy, courage, and resounding depth. Connelly is a poet rare in her ability to address the political from within the realm of personal experience. Moving among the haunted refugees and political dissidents on the Thai-Burmese border, retelling the stories of Greek peasants, negotiating the borders between home and exile, Connelly brings to all her poetry a passion for being fully alive, engaged with the world as both participant and witness. By turns richly metaphorical, sensual, and chilling, The Border Surrounds Us is Karen Connelly’s most accomplished and vibrant book to date.

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Als een jonge student en zanger in 1988 in een Birmese gevangenis belandt als politiek gevangene van de Birmese militaire dictatuur, ontmoet hij een 12-jarige weesjongen die hem verzorgt.