Audiobook mentions of Christmas : The Big Why by Michael Winter

A Christmas mention from a Rattling Books audiobook: The Big Why by Michael Winter

"That Christmas, Gerald Thayer had taken me to seven parties. We had drunk a lot and were vulnerable to awe. But the things we saw were all glitter and no substance. A store was shut and a sign said,

CLOSING SALE
UP TO

As though they hadnt decided what percentage to mark off. Then I saw: the percentage was there, but it had faded. it had been marked in red, the most fugitive of colours. The store, Gerald said, was closed. It's been closed a long time. This shocked me, this realization that what could have been a fresh thought (closing) had been an old act (closed long ago). I want, I said to Gerald, to avoid that predicament. I want a thickness to pour into me, like honey or cement.

You want, Gerald said, to slough off the baubles.

He said you can get that only if you move to a small place, to the periphery, to a community that is one organism and does not change. That loves itself.

So that is why we moved.

And Newfoundland? ..."

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The above excerpt is from The Big Why by Michael Winter.


The unabridged audiobook edition of The Big Why narrated by Robert Joy was recently published by Rattling Books. It is available from rattlingbooks.com as either an MP3 CD or Digital Download. Listening time 10.5 hours.

Michael Winter In The Running For Commonwealth Writers' Prize

Canadian writer Michael Winter's novel The Death of Donna Whalen has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and the Caribbean). Follow this link to read about Canada's domination of these awards this year.

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Listen to an excerpt from Rattling Books' audio edition of Michael Winter's The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy. The Big Why is available as an MP3 audio book CD or an MP3 download.

Kathleen Winter, Michael Winter's Novels Make "Globe" Best Of 2010

Brother and sister literary lights (and former Newfoundland residents) Michael Winter and Kathleen Winter's critically acclaimed novels The Death of Donna Whelan and Annabel have made The Globe and Mail's Best Canadian Books of 2010 list.

To read the Globe's review of Annabel, click here . To read its review of The Death of Donna Whelan, follow this link.

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Listen to excerpts from Kathleen Winter's short stories "The Destination," "His Brown Face Through the Flowers," and "Sleep, Little Baby." These stories are available from Rattling Books as individual MP3 downloads. They are also part of the fiction collection EarLit Shorts 1, available as an audio book MP3 CD or an audio book MP3 download.

Click here for an excerpt from The Big Why, written by Michael Winter and narrated by Robert Joy. The Big Why is available from Rattling Books as an unabridged audio book MP3 CD or an unabridged audio book MP3 download.

Canadian audiobooks produced by Rattling Books in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Michael Winter Edits His Manuscript

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Michael Winter's novel The Big Why is available as an unabridged audiobook from Rattling Books, in MP3 CD or digitally downloadable formats.

Michael Winter Talks About the Writing Process

Novelist and short story writer Michael Winter talks about his writing process on Tickle Scratch Productions' series Writers' Confessions.




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The Big Why, Michael Winter's novel about American artist Rockwell Kent, is available as an MP3 audio CD or digital download from Rattling Books.

Michael Winter in The Walrus

The incomparable Walrus (see how they run like pigs from a gun) has published a new piece by Michael Winter, illustrated by Seth. It's an excerpt from Winter's upcoming book, The Death of Donna Whalen.

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The Big Why, Michael Winter's fictional treatment of artist Rockwell Kent's turbulent sojourn in Newfoundland, is available as an unabridged audiobook from Rattling Books.

Michael Winter Reads in Toronto

What's on the go in T.O.? Michael Winter, that's what.

The acclaimed author of The Architects Are Here will be giving a free reading tonight, April 29th, 7PM, at Tinto on Roncesvalles Avenue. Other featured performers are playwright Claudia Dey, comedian Katie Crown and country musician Justin Rutledge.

So if you're in the area, come see what the fuss is all about. You won't be disappointed.

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Michael Winter is also the author of The Big Why, a fictionalized version of American artist Rockwell Kent's sojourn on the island of Newfoundland. The Big Why is available as an unabridged MP3 audiobook from Rattling Books, narrated by the incomparable Robert Joy.

Michael Winter Reads at UNB

Acclaimed author Michael Winter will be reading in Fredericton on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 8PM in the Alumni Memorial Lounge of the University of New Brunswick. The reading is sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, the University of New Brunswick English Department, and the UNB Bookstore.

Winter is the award-winning author of several novels and short story collections, including The Big Why, and most recently, The Architects Are Here.

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The unabridged audio edition of The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy, was recently published by Rattling Books. It is available from rattlingbooks.com as either an MP3 CD or Digital Download. Listening time 10.5 hours.

The Big Why Reviewed in The Ottawa Citizen

Canadian Actors Bring Audiobooks to Life
from The Ottawa Citizen
January 27, 2008
By Janice Kennedy

"Note-perfect" and "memorable" are adjectives you'll also want to use to describe the audio version of Michael Winter's The Big Why, from the little Newfoundland company that could, Rattling Books (10.5 hours unabridged/1 MP3 CD, $29.95). Winter's haunting 2004 novel, a faux-memoir of real-life American artist Rockwell Kent's brief sojourn in Brigus, Nfld., just before the First World War, is a thoughtful reflection on the nature of art and the role of artists. But, plunked down squarely into the bustle of Manhattan and then the hard beauty of coastal Newfoundland, it is also a narrative that thrums with vibrancy and provocative colour.

Another veteran Canadian actor, Robert Joy (you can catch him on CSI: New York) deftly handles Winter's words and his characters, whether world-weary New Yorker or Newfoundlander with a poet's soul and a pragmatist's impatience with nonsense. Joy was born in Montreal but lived and worked on The Rock for years, so he has the voices down exactly right.

It is worth noting that The Big Why is also available as a $19.95 digital download from rattlingbooks.com, which also offers a variety of single-story downloads for bargain prices of $2.95-$3.95. It's a fine way to sample some of the company's outstanding wares.

To read the rest of the article, please click here.

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The unabridged audio edition of The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy, was recently published by Rattling Books. It is available from rattlingbooks.com as either an MP3 CD or Digital Download. Listening time 10.5 hours.

The Big Why Appears on Community Radio Show

Just a little piece of news on a recent release: Rattling Books' unabridged audio version of Michael Winter's award-winning historical novel, The Big Why, appeared in a broadcast on Fredericton-based community radio program, Ashes, Paper & Beans. Check out producer Joe Blades' blogspot here.

Rattling Books' unabridged audiobook version of The Big Why by Michael Winter is narrated by Robert Joy.

Michael Winter Reviewed in The Vancouver Sun

Dickens of a story
Michael Winter's modern orphans are all in their 30s
M.A.C. Farrant, Special to the Vancouver SunPublished: Saturday, January 12, 2008

The Architects Are Here, the latest novel by Michael Winter, is a stunner. Forty-seven synoptic instalments appeared online last summer in what his publisher claimed was "the world's first-ever Facebook novel serialization."
Comparisons to Charles Dickens inevitably arise. Think of the reported thousands who lined the New York docks waiting for the latest newsprint instalment of David Copperfield. I wonder if Winter's novel received the same treatment on the blog site 157 years later or if the event was drowned in the equal-opportunity soup that is virtual reality.
It probably was, but fortunately this doesn't matter: Being unmoored in the virtual world is what the book is all about. Furthermore, the novel -- published in fall 2007 -- stands as a solid object of excellence, something reassuringly old-fashioned, hand-held, enduring...
To read the rest of this review, please click here.

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The unabridged audiobook edition of The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy, was recently published by Rattling Books. It is available from rattlingbooks.com as either an MP3 CD or Digital Download. Listening time 10.5 hours.

Now Magazine Reviews Michael Winter's Latest

Winter's Tale
Susan G. Cole
from Now Magazine

There’s a section of The Architects Are Here that really got to me. It describes hard-assed tech biz whiz David Twombly’s knack for getting rich, and uses the metaphor of stacking plates – a stand-in for stocks – until they’re just about to collapse and then selling out fast.
Reading it gave me that feeling I love – a thundering in my head that I don’t notice until I’ve finished the passage and my brain calms down. It’s the feeling I get when I’m being moved by fiction...

To read the rest of this review.

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Rattling Books has just released an unabridged audiobook version of Michael Winter's prize-winning novel The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy.

Michael Winter Reading in Toronto

Literary Event to Benefit Trans Canada Trail

from http://www.tctrail.ca/blog

Royal St. George’s College in Toronto is playing host to a trio of well-known Canadian writers tomorrow night - Tuesday, Dec. 11th - at 7:30 pm. The evening, billed as Great Canadian Roadtrips will feature three fascinating yet very different takes on the notion of journey.

Roy MacGregor, a passionate Canadian and gifted storyteller, will be on hand to share anecdotes and observations from his latest work, Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People. A journalist and author for over thirty years, MacGregor’s investigation of the Canadian psyche tackles our obsession with hockey, our attachment to the land, our “highly exportable” sense of humour, who we are at home and how we behave when we’re not. He has traveled the country extensively and has achieved that most elusive of successes, a fiction series popular with tween boys - the Screech Owls mysteries.

Ray Robertson’s new novel What Happened Later tells the parallel stories of Jack Kerouac’s mid-seventies road trip to Rivière-du-Loup in search of his Québecois roots and a young man’s quest to own a copy of Kerouac’s classic On the Road. His journey leads him to discover the world beyond his small-town, working-class environment and his own French-Canadian heritage. Mr. Robertson is the author of several novels and a non-fiction collection entitled Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing. His novel Moody Food won the 2007 Independent Publisher Regional Book Award for Eastern Canada.

In The Architects Are Here, acclaimed author Michael Winter sets his popular protagonist, Gabe English, on the road from Toronto to Corner Brook, Newfoundland with a childhood friend. The two friends, now grown men approaching middle age, head back home to investigate the disappearance of Gabe’s father. Along the way, they encounter their fair share of Canajun oddballs, and their own fears, failings, and hopes for the future. Mr. Winter is the author of two short-story collections and two novels and has served on the Giller Prize jury for 2006.

Tickets are still available so visit Royal St. George’s College to book. The event will be held in St. Alban’s Chapel, located on campus at 120 Howland Avenue. Please dial 416.533.9481 for more information.

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Rattling Books has just released an unabridged audio version of Michael Winter's prize-winning novel The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy. Follow this link to have a look and listen to a preview.

The Architect Is Here

Michael Winter Gives Two Readings in Newfoundland

Michael Winter will be giving two public readings here in Newfoundland this week to promote his latest novel, The Architects Are Here.

Today, Monday, November 26, Winter will read at the Holyrood Public Library at 7:30pm.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 27, he will read in Room A-1046 of the Arts & Administration Building Atrium at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 7:30pm.

The Holyrood reading is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Books will be available and there will be refreshments after the reading. The MUN reading is sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, The League of Canadian Poets, and the Office of the Dean of Arts. Everyone is welcome and free parking is available in Lot 15.

In other news, Rattling Books has just released an unabridged audio version of his prize-winning novel The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy. Follow this link to have a look and listen to a preview.

Michael Winter is in the top 10 hardcover fiction book Authors in Canada compiled by Maclean's magazine

Michael Winter is in the top 10 hardcover fiction book Authors in Canada compiled by Maclean's magazine. He's also the author of Rattling Books new title, the unabridged audio edition of The Big Why, narrated by Robert Joy. Now if there was only an audio list at Maclean's ....

FICTION
1 (1) Late Nights on Air - Elizabeth Hay
2 (7) Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje
3 (4) The Assassin's Song - M.J. Vassanji
4 (2) A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
5 (3) October - Richard B. Wright
6 (-) The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland
7 (-) The Architects are Here - Michael Winter8 (5) World Without End - Ken Follett
9 (6) Run - Ann Patchett
10 (8) Exit Ghost - Philip Roth

Michael Winter in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories

The Biz: Deals and Moves in Canadian Arts
from The Globe & Mail
October 15, 2007

Alice Munro (above) will make a rare public appearance this evening at the Capitol Theatre in Port Hope, Ont., in support of the launch of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, in which her work, The View from Castle Rock, appears as the first story. The anthology's editor, novelist Jane Urquhart, will also be present, along with author Michael Winter.

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The Big Why, Michael Winter's dazzling reinvention of the historical novel and witty faux memoir of the American artist Rockwell Kent, is being published in an unabridged audio edition by Rattling Books.
Click here to listen to a clip from The Big Why.

The Apostrophic Michael Winter

from Chronicles of a Doctoral Diva
http://doctoraldiva.blogspot.com

The Mystery Behind the Apostrophe
Michael Winter is a funny man. He had hilarious anecdotes to share and was full of energy. But beneath all that performance pizzazz, lingers a sharp mind.

His response to the question about his lack of apostrophes: it quickens the pace, gives the text more of a memoir style, it bridges gaps. “Don’t you find,” he said, “that an apostrophe is like a marker screaming: Dear Reader, we used to have two words, but we dropped some letters and replaced them with a squiggly sign – now, please read on.” He made a list of all the words with apostrophes that did not lose meaning with the removal of the squiggle – and removed it. Of course, this was a nightmare for the copyeditor, who got tons of letters and complaints. Thus at the back of the new novel, The Architects Are Here, there is a little blurb warning the reader NOT to write to the copyeditor about the poor punctuation.

To read the rest of this blog post, please click here.

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The Big Why, Michael Winter's dazzling reinvention of the historical novel and witty faux memoir of the American artist Rockwell Kent, is being published in an unabridged audio edition by Rattling Books.

Click here to listen to a clip from The Big Why.

Rave Review of Winter's Architects in the National Post

A Soaring Novel That Breaks Every Rule
Robert Wiersema
National Post
September 29, 2007

THE ARCHITECTS ARE HERE
By Michael Winter Viking Canada
384 pp., $34

With his new novel, The Architects Are Here, which has been long-listed for this year's Giller Prize, Michael Winter returns to the world of Gabriel English, the authorial proxy figure who will be familiar to readers of his short fiction and his novel This All Happened. (The relationship between the author and his textual counterpart will no doubt prove a fruitful field of inquiry for doctoral dissertations.) The new novel begins with an overview of Gabriel's childhood in Corner Brook, Nfld., and documents his friendship with David Twombly, who is either mercurial and irresistible, or just downright irritating, depending on your point of view. In the opening pages we learn that David is dead, and Gabriel, now in his 40s, is looking back, vowing to "tell as much of the truth as is important" about his dear departed friend, and about the woman who came between them, Nell Tarkington. These pages also set up the central narrative question of the book: How did David Twombly die?

To read the rest of this review, please click here.

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The Big Why, Michael Winter's dazzling reinvention of the historical novel and witty faux memoir of the American artist Rockwell Kent, is being published in an unabridged audio edition by Rattling Books.

Click here to listen to a clip from The Big Why.

Coming Soon: Michael Winter's The Big Why

Pre-purchase The Big Why and Save 30%

Prepay for your copy of the unabridged audio edition of The Big Why by Michael Winter, narrated by Robert Joy, and save 30% on the purchase price.

Order between now and September 30 and pay only $20.95 ($29.95 regular price); we will mail you your MP3 CD as soon as they are released (November 2007).

Click here to go to the Rattling Books website.

The Big Why

By Michael Winter; narrated by Robert Joy
Listening Time: approximately 11 hours

10-digit ISBN: 0-9737586-3-5
13-digit ISBN: 978-0-9737586-3-4

The Big Why is both Michael Winter's dazzling reinvention of the historical novel and a passionate and witty faux memoir of Rockwell Kent, the famous illustrator of Moby Dick.

Focusing on the year Kent and his family spent in Brigus, Newfoundland on the eve of the First World War, Winter offers up the private emotions of a man whose outer ambitions betray his inner feelings. Kent vows to be faithful to his wife, to live close to the sea, and document, through paintings and woodcuts, a picturesque land and society. But he also desires everything, including the young woman who cares for their children. His friend, the explorer Bob Bartlett, explains how the artist's beliefs and way of life run drastically against those of this small seafaring community.

Funny, surprising, and thoroughly honest about our desires and contradictions, The Big Why bares all: it is about a man who was not fully understood or accepted in the time and place in which he lived. And it is about how we all try to find our place in the world, to gain wisdom, but in the end must humbly accept the transcendent fallout of our actions.

Hynes, Walsh and Winter at Word Fest

Rattling Books Authors Infiltrate Word Fest

Three Rattling Books authors will form the Newfoundland contingent at this year's Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival. Joel Thomas Hynes, Agnes Walsh and Michael Winter will be appearing at the Word Fest 2007. For a listing of all featured authors, please follow this link. For a complete festival event listing, click here.

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from Rattling Books:

The unabridged audio edition of Down to the Dirt, Joel Thomas Hynes' award winning first novel, is narrated by Joel Thomas Hynes, Sherry White and Jonny Harris; Agnes Walsh's first poetry collection, In the Old Country of My Heart is narrated by the author and features ballads sung by Simone Savard-Walsh and pump organ music by George Morgan; Michael Winter's acclaimed novel, The Big Why, is currently available for pre-purchase at a 30% discount and is narrated by Robert Joy.