Most Popular Books by Karen Connelly

Orange Prize–winner Karen Connelly’s compelling memoir about her journey to Burma, where she fell in love with a leader of the Burmese rebel army. When Karen Connelly goes to Burma in 1996 to gather information for a series of articles, she discovers a place of unexpected beauty and generosity. She also encounters a country ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that imposes a code of censorship and terror. Carefully seeking out the regime’s critics, she witnesses mass demonstrations, attends protests, interviews detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and flees from police. When it gets too risky for her to stay, Connelly flies back to Thailand, but she cannot leave Burma behind. Connelly’s interest in the political turns more personal on the Thai-Burmese border, where she falls in love with Maung, the handsome and charismatic leader of one of Burma’s many resistance groups. After visiting Maung’s military camp in the jungle, she faces an agonizing decision: Maung wants to marry Connelly and have a family with her, but if she marries this man she also weds his world and his lifelong cause. Struggling to weigh the idealism of her convictions against the harsh realities of life on the border, Connelly transports the reader into a world as dangerous as it is enchanting. In radiant prose layered with passion, regret, sensuality and wry humor, Burmese Lessons tells the captivating story of how one woman came to love a wounded, beautiful country and a gifted man who has given his life to the struggle for political change.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

In her first book of poetry since The Small Words in My Body, which won the Pat Lowther Prize for 1990, Karen Connelly writes, in the tradition of the writer-adventurer, of vivid encounters and reflections abroad and at home, continuing her pursuit of "living knowledge of the world." These poems enact journeys of the body and heart with candour and sensuous grace, catching the very texture of human experience in the lithe, muscular lines which have a cat-like metaphorical reach.

A Canadian poet describes her year-long sojourn in Denchai, a small farming community in northern Thailand, describing the jungles, the hedonistic high-life of Bangkok, the influence of Buddhism, and more. Original.

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."

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

From her native Canada, the author set out to explore and understand the obscure regions of Southern Europe over the course of two years spent travelling in Spain, France and Greece. This is an evocation of these countries and their people written in the form of letters, poems and short stories.

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.

A policy and procedures manual that outlines the seven core areas of job duties for an Activity Director.

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.