Robert Kroetsch Knihy

A collection of short stories, featuring characters based on many famous literary and Canadian personages.

"Hazard Lepage, the last of the studhorse men, sets out to breed his rare blue stallion, Poseidon. A lusty trickster and a wayward chevalier, Hazard's outrageous adventures are narrated by Demeter Proudfoot, his secret rival, who writes this story while sitting naked in an empty bathtub." In his quest to save his stallion's bloodline from extinction, Hazard leaves a trail of anarchy and confusion. Everything he touches erupts into chaos necessitating frequent convalescences in the arms of a few good women - all except for those of Martha, his long-suffering intended.

What the Crow Said tells the exuberant ribald, elemental tale of the citizens of a town somewhere on the weather-beaten border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. After Vera Lang consorts with a swarm of bees, something changes in Big Indian. This prairie municipality-so remote from the rest of the world that its citizens aren't sure which province they live in-becomes somehow locked inside its own world of patience, yearning and willful struggle with nature. Along the way, Big Indian emerges as a place simultaneously in the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, where a game of cards might last forever and a defeated farmer can freeze on his snowbound plow in June. With his sun-sharpened imagery, unstoppable language play, and frank intimacy with the landscape, Robert Kroetsch creates in What the Crow Said a quintessentially prairie novel. A new edition of the classic Canadian novel, What the Crow Said, a major work by one of western Canada's best-known and best-respected authors.

Wie ein Lauffeuer verbreitet sich 1897 die Nachricht von den ungeheuren Goldfunden am Klondike River. Auch der vierzehnjährige Zack und seine Mutter Lou schlagen sich nach Alaska durch. Unterwegs tun sie sich mit Ben zusammen, der statt einer Goldgräberausrüstung genug Whiskey durch die Tundra schleppt, um halb Klondike aufzukaufen. Während sich zwischen der respektlosen, praktisch veranlagten Lou und dem ritterlichen Ben ein Verhältnis anbahnt, bleibt Zack sich selbst überlassen. Auf der Reise trotzen sie Schnee, Eis und wilden Flüssen, wüsten Schießereien, Menschen, die die Gier nach Gold in Bestien verwandelt hat. Doch erst in Dawson City begegnen sie der größten Gefahr von allen: Dangerous Dan, dem unangefochtenen König der Saloons.