New Releases by Rosemary Sullivan

There is no doubt Rosemary Sullivan is a biographer of extraordinary talent. Her first biography, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart: A Life was a bestseller and nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Her third biography, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out, was also a highly acclaimed national bestseller. And her second, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Non-Fiction, the City of Toronto Book Award and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. Now part of the PerennialCanada library, Shadow Maker reveals the many faces of Gwendolyn MacEwen, the magical and mesmerizing Canadian poet who died suddenly at the age of 46.

Tom Tom is an engaging contemporary story that traces a day in the life of a small boy living in a typical Aboriginal community in the Top End of the Northern Territory. It follows the adventures of Tom Tom as he goes to preschool, eats lunch with Granny Annie in the bottom camp, swims in the Lemonade Springs in the afternoon and spends the night with Granny May and grandfather Jo in the top camp. Rosemary Sullivan''s simple text and Dee Huxley''s vivid illustrations captures the warmth and security of Tom Tom''s world as he moves freely within his community from relative to another. As a pre-school teacher working in remote Aboriginal communities for more than 17 years, Rosemary Sullivan says- ''Tom Tom was inspired by the lives of many indigenous children in the Top End and the importance of family and interconnectedness in Aboriginal life.''

The Franco-German armistice, signed in June 1940 following the German invasion of France, called on the Vichy government to surrender on demand all refugees considered enemies of the Third Reich. Suddenly, thousands of artists, scientists and other intellectuals feared for their lives. The Emergency Rescue Committee, based in New York, compiled a list of two hundred people it considered the most endangered, including artists and writers André Breton, Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret. The committee sent Varian Fry to set up its headquarters in Marseilles, with the aim of helping these artists to escape. A number of them were sheltered at the Villa Air-Bel. Amidst the chaos and terror of wartime France, the villa became an oasis of calm, and a centre of creativity. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs and letters of the individuals involved as she uncovers their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Central to her task is to understand what it must feel like to move from freedom to occupation: to feel threatened, administered, restrained. Villa Air-Bel brilliantly dramatizes the slow, relentless process by which ordinary lives were turned into lives lived in terror. In the end every artist in the house, as well as two thousand others, found asylum outside of France through the courageous intervention of Fry and his committee.

Think of Torch Songs and the Tango. Think of films such as Casablanca and The English Patient, of novels such as Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Think of romantic, obsessive love, the hot bed of passion we fall into, the emotion we, mistakenly, think of as true love. This is the subject of Rosemary Sullivan''s provocative and fascinating new book Labyrinth of Desire.

Éste podría ser un ensayo acerca del Amor, pero termina siendo mucho más que eso; porque está escrito a partir de vivencias personales y sensaciones internas; porque ese sentimiento está reflejándose acá desde el particularísimo punto de vista femenino. El libro es provocativo y fascinante. Está estructurado a partir de una ficticia historia de amor que servirá como hilo conductor para que la escritora desarrolle su tesis sobre la materia, argumentando sus puntos de vista con la meditación filosófica y el análisis conceptual. Aquí cualquier referencia es válida: literatura, mitología, cine, anécdota personal ... Al explorarse profundamente la pasión y el romance se encontrarán respuestas biológicas y terrenales; elevadas y sublimes. Un ejercicio de razonamiento que se agradece, por mostrarse auténtico y desprejuiciado.

Rosemary Sullivan is the preeminent literary biographer in Canada, having won several major awards, including the Governor General''s Award, for her work. She has written about Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Smart, Theodore Roethke and Gwendolyn MacEwan. But in addition to the books she has written, she has penned hundreds of essays, memoirs and travel pieces. This collection brings together the best of these pieces. In these 17 essays, Rosemary Sullivan focuses on Atwood''s childhood, meeting the eccentric and enigmatic Elizabeth Smart and hooking up with the boisterous Canadian poet Al Purdy. She also writes about the life of a literary biographer, what it takes to put together an anthology, like in Cuba, human rights and feminist issues. The writing is held together by Rosemary Sullivan''s own personal stamp and personality. At times, the work is lyrical, which reflects the author''s poetic background. Other times, Sullivan plays the scholar, but she is never pedantic. The work is lively, insightful and illuminating.

Rosemary Sullivan is better known in Canada as a biographer, but her first love is poetry. In 1996 her first book of poetry won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book. In 1991 she published yet another book of poetry. But since then she has devoted herself to the biographies of Elizabeth Smart, Gwendolyn MacEwen and most recently that of Margaret Atwood. And for these works was nominated for one Governor General''s Award, and won another. After eight years, however, she has returned to poetry. In this new collection, "The Bone Ladder," she introduces a new, experimental sequence, "Granada Notebook." It is written like a novel with an adulterous plot and characters, the sequence is set in the exotic city of the Alhambra. The poems explore what happens when love fractures and how it is recovered only after a long, exhaustive battle within the self. The title of this collection, The Bone Ladder, refers to the mysteries of ancestral inheritance, how the family anticipates us generations before we are born. This book is also a retrospective collection, and contains work from her first two books of poetry. Her books have been published in England, Spain, and Sweden. She is also editor of numerous anthologies of poetry and fiction by women, most recently "The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women" (1999).

"The price of life is pain, since the price of comfort is damnation." Sensuously beautiful, intensely passionate, generous to a fault -- and one of the century''s most brilliant writers of poetic prose -- Elizabeth Smart carved her own destiny through sheer determination, strength and perserverance. In By Heart, the first biography of Smart, Rosemary Sullivan recounts the author''s childhood in Ottawa as the second daughter of an affluent and well-connected family. Inspired by romantic notions of rebellion, Smart rejected what she perceived to be a colonistic literary community and entered a long period of self-imposed exile, desperate to escape family and country, and willing to sacrifice both wealth and propriety in favour of freedom. During her frequent trips to Europe, New York, California and Mexico, Smart came to know many of the important writers of the day, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Lawrence Durrell. While browsing in a London bookstore, she discovered the poetry of George Barker and instantly fell in love with the married poet. They met. Thus began one of the most intense, extraordinary and scandalous love affairs of our time. Their passionate and troubled relationship inspired Smart''s By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept, which critic Brigid Bronphy has called one of the world''s half dozen masterpieces of poetic prose. Partly because of the difficulties in single-handedly raising the four children she had with George Barker, and partly because of her own lack of confidence, it would be thirty-two years before Smart published a second novel. By Heart explores the career of a woman writer in the 1940s: the struggle to speak when silence is seductive, the battle against a profound sense of inadequacy, the release and elation that comes out of the pain of writing. The life of Elizabeth Smart is a story of extremes, of life as the supreme fiction. As Smart asks in her final journals, "Can I be contented with my lot? Well, I danced."

Following a year long visit to the West Coast Moran moved his family, in 1901, to Leominster, Massachusetts, where he pursued a career in carpentry and cabinetwork. In the beginning he apprenticed himself in an established shop but later set up his own business.

A study of Roethke''s collected works stresses the unity of his poetry and illustrates the influence of such figures as Eliot, Stevens, and Yeats upon his writings

Papers consist of research notes, manuscript drafts, final manuscripts, galleys, correspondence for her published works: The Space a Name Makes; Blue Panic; By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life; Shadow Maker: Gwendolyn MacEwen; The Red Shoes; Margaret Atwood Starting Out; The Home Ladder; published writings in journals and anthologies; research material relating to her two biographies, Gwen MacEwen and Elizabeth Smart. 7 VHS and 30 cassette tapes; 34 photos.