Michael Ondaatje Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Coming Through Slaughter (1976)
  2. Running in the Family (1982)
  3. In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
  4. The English Patient (1992)
  5. Anil’s Ghost (2000)
  6. Divisadero (2007)
  7. The Cat’s Table (2011)
  8. Warlight (2018)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Dainty Monsters (1967)
  2. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970)
  3. The Broken Ark (1971)
  4. There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979)
  5. Rat Jelly (1980)
  6. Tin Roof (1982)
  7. Secular Love (1985)
  8. The Cinnamon Peeler (1989)
  9. Previous Canoes (1994)
  10. Handwriting (1998)
  11. Vintage Ondaatje (2004)
  12. The Story (2005)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Brick Reader (1995)
  2. Brick: A Literary Journal, 67 (2001)
  3. The Conversations (2002)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Brushes With Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters With Greatness (1989)
  2. From Ink Lake (1990)
  3. The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories (1990)

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Michael Ondaatje Books Overview

Coming Through Slaughter

Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn of the twentieth century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time bomb which he was unable to stop.

Running in the Family

In Michael Ondaatje’s beloved family memoir, fact and fiction blur to create a dazzlingly original portrait of a lost time and place. Ondaatje left Ceylon now Sri Lanka at the age of eleven. Almost twenty five years later, he returned to sort out the recollected fragments of experience, legend, and family scandal, and to reconstruct the carefree, doomed life his parents and grandparents had led in a place where couples danced the tango in the moonlight, where drink, gambling, and romance were the main occupations of the upper class. Rich with eccentric characters and captivating stories, and set against the exotic landscape of a colonial empire in decline, Running in the Family is Ondaatje s unforgettable journey through memory and imagination to reclaim his past. From the Hardcover edition.

In the Skin of a Lion

‘A magical book. Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch’ Graham Swift. It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. He immerses himself in the lives of the people who surround him, learning, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love. ‘In the Skin of a Lion‘ is Michael Ondaatje’s sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize winning ‘The English Patient’. It is here that we encounter, for the first time, Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief, among a large cast of characters who are all lovingly and intimately portrayed. It is an exquisite and musical novel, a romance that challenges the boundary between history and myth. ‘Ondaatje writes in curves, in time lapses, a sort of verbal cinema whose narrative is unfaltering’ ‘The Times’. ‘A triumph…
a powerful and revelatory accomplishment’ ‘Times Literary Supplement’.

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize winning best seller lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war. Hana, the grieving nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the emotionally detached Indian sapper, Kip each is haunted in different ways by the riddle of the man they know only as The English Patient, a nameless burn victim who lies swathed in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this man s incandescent memories of the bleak North African desert, of explorers caves and Bedouin tribesmen,of forbidden love, and of annihilating anger that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.

Anil’s Ghost

Read by Alan CummingSix Cassettes, 8 hoursFrom the author of The English Patient and winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canada Governor General’s Award, comes a new novel of electric artistry and impact confirming Michael Ondaatje’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost writers. The time is our own time. The place Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition and forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a government divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed ‘Sailor.’ What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love, about family, about identity and the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past and all propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a compelling literary spellbinder and worthy successor to The English Patient, a novel admired and treasured by countless readers around the world.

Divisadero

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost comes a remarkable and intimate novel of lives that intersect across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Their makeshift family is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of southern France. As the narrative moves back and forth through time and place, we find each of the characters trying to find some foothold in a present shadowed by the past. Description in Spanish: En la mas intima y hermosa de sus historias, Michael Ondaatje narra la vida de Anna, quien tras un brutal suceso acontecido en su hogar, tendra que dejar atras la vida en la granja de California y empezar un nuevo camino en el sur de Francia. Lejos de su padre, de su gemela Claire y de Coop un misterioso muchacho acogido por la familia encontrara en la literatura y en la reconstruccion de la biografia de un importante escritor la manera de conciliarse con su pasado. Una novela de vidas cruzadas que se extiende por dos continentes y a lo largo de un siglo. Tras El paciente ingles, Ondaatje demuestra su extraordinaria capacidad para moverse en el dificil terreno de los sentimientos y para tratar las pasiones, las perdidas y la persistencia del pasado, asi como las exigencias de la familia, del amor y de los recuerdos. Un relato de inusual intensidad y belleza capaz de emocionarnos y dejarnos sin respiro.

The Cat’s Table

In the early 1950s, an eleven year old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at The Cat’s Table as far from the Captain s Table as can be with a ragtag group of insignificant adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator s elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself with a distant eye for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story by turns poignant and electrifying about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage. From the Hardcover edition.

The Dainty Monsters

Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. p. 20Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and clippings, astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then little known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General s Awards and brazenly challenged the world s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje s Billy the Kid aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim is not the clich d dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame or infamy for Billy s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje s Garrett is a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane p. 29 who has taught himself a language he ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history.I am here with the range for everythingcorpuscle muscle hairhands that need the rub of metalthose senses thatthat want to crash things with an axethat listen to deep buried veins in our palmsthose who move in dreams over your women nightnear you, every paw, the invisible hoovesthe mind s invisible blackout the intricate neverthe body s waiting rut.p. 72

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. p. 20Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and clippings, astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then little known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General s Awards and brazenly challenged the world s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje s Billy the Kid aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim is not the clich d dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame or infamy for Billy s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje s Garrett is a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane p. 29 who has taught himself a language he ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history.I am here with the range for everythingcorpuscle muscle hairhands that need the rub of metalthose senses thatthat want to crash things with an axethat listen to deep buried veins in our palmsthose who move in dreams over your women nightnear you, every paw, the invisible hoovesthe mind s invisible blackout the intricate neverthe body s waiting rut.p. 72

The Cinnamon Peeler

Michael Ondaatje’s new selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.

Handwriting

In his novels, poetry, and memoirs, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje moves from the blasted landscape of Billy the Kid in 1880s New Mexico to the New Orleans jazz world of the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century, from his native Sri Lanka to the African desert of World War II. Compassionate, lyrical, spellbinding, the work he has created unfolds with mystery and eloquence and enlarges our literature.

Included in Vintage Ondaatje are portions of the novels Anil’s Ghost, In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The English Patient; the memoir Running in the Family; sections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; and a selection of the poetry.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.

Vintage Ondaatje

In his novels, poetry, and memoirs, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje moves from the blasted landscape of Billy the Kid in 1880s New Mexico to the New Orleans jazz world of the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century, from his native Sri Lanka to the African desert of World War II. Compassionate, lyrical, spellbinding, the work he has created unfolds with mystery and eloquence and enlarges our literature.

Included in Vintage Ondaatje are portions of the novels Anil’s Ghost, In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The English Patient; the memoir Running in the Family; sections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; and a selection of the poetry.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.

The Story

Michael Ondaatje’s poems have been celebrated by readers and writers alike for containing some of the most memorable and moving verse written in the past half century. The Story combines Ondaatje’s sensual writing with watercolor illustrations by celebrated painter David Bolduc, making a unique item. Left hand pages contain Bolduc’s art while right hand pages contain Ondaatje’s poem both typeset and in the author’s own handwriting. This elegant housing is a fitting accompaniment to Ondaatje’s elegaic poem, which follows his larger themes love, memory, family, exile even as it unfolds into ‘our dismantled childhoods,’ and offers readers the opportunity to extend its narrative into their own lives.

Brick: A Literary Journal, 67

In its 25 year history, Brick has grown from a grassroots magazine to one of the most respected literary journals in the world. Focused on literary nonfiction of various genres and subjects the writing life, travel, film, memoir, interviews with authors, and excerpts from their works Brick is an ongoing conversation between readers and writers. This issue features original essays by Guy Davenport, Donald Richie, and Jim Harrison; an interview with Sharon Olds and new poems; new work by E. Annie Proulx, Caryl Phillips, Roo Borson, and Erin Moure; and a piece on Alfred Hitchcock and 20th century art.

The Conversations

The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through. It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I Ching, dreams, art and history. The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella from the creation of the independent, anti Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux. Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather all three, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient. Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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