Affectionately combining both the idyllic and ironic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock’s most beloved book. Set in fictional Mariposa, an Ontario town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti, these sketches present a remarkable range of characters: some irritating, some exasperating, some foolhardy, but all endearing. Painted with the skilful brushstrokes of a great comic artist, the delightful inhabitants of Mariposa represent the people of small towns everywhere. As fresh, funny, and insightful today as when it was first published in 1912, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock at his best – colourful, imaginative, and thoroughly entertaining.

Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour A funny and heart-warming tribute to Canada’s most famous small town, and its most celebrated humourist, Stephen Leacock. Many Canadians grew up in small towns, or at least in neighbourhoods that acted like small towns. But what if you grew up in Canada’s most famous small town—Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa? This was the world that journalist Jamie Lamb was raised in, the actual place that inspired Leacock’s Canadian classic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,over a century ago. The Mariposa of Lamb’s time was slightly different, yet it still embodied the heart and soul, the eccentricities and the bizarre local customs of Leacock’s sketches. Christmas in Mariposa is a celebration of that town and its people. It tells of secret gardens, special rinks, oddball hotels, remarkable foods, fast boats and sunken aircraft, Christmas Eve fireworks, and the best Christmas office party in the country. It describes a place where Christmas could be celebrated in summer with a Baby Jesus look-alike contest, Canada’s only officially sanctioned reindeer races, and the Three Wise Men arriving with gifts by parachute. It transports readers to a world where where Gordie Howe once dropped by for a skate, and Glenn Gould regularly came to eat a well-done steak and six Parker House rolls slathered in butter at a Chinese restaurant. Jamie Lamb’s Mariposa is timeless and quintessentially Canadian.

Stephen Leacock's views on life provide a uniquely Canadian take on the world, an ironic perspective which continues to delight and instruct readers around the globe. An anthology of Leacock's wit and wisdom.

This collection of essays explores the many dimensions of the writings of Stephen Leacock, the well-loved Canadian author of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Published in English.

My financial career.-- Lord Oxhead's secret.-- Boarding-house geometry.-- The awful fate of Melpomenus Jones.-- A Christmas letter.-- How to make a million dollars.-- How to live to be 200.-- How to avoid getting married.-- How to be a doctor.-- The new food.-- A new pathology.-- The poet answered.-- The force of statistics.-- Men who have shaved me.-- Getting the thread of it.-- Telling his faults.-- Winter pastimes.-- Number fifty-six.--Aristocratic education.-- The conjurer's revenge.-- Hints to travellers.-- A manual of education.-- Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas.-- The life of John Smith.--On collecting things.-- Society chit-chat.-- Insurance up to-date.-- Borrowing a match.-- A lesson in fiction.-- Helping the Armenians.-- A study in still life, the country hotel.-- An experiment with Policeman Hogan.-- The passing of the poet.-- Self-made men.-- A model dialogue.-- Bach to the bush.--Reflections on riding.-- Saloonio.-- Half-hours with the poets: Mr. Wordsworth and the cottage girl; How Tennyson killed the May queen; Old Mr. Longfellow on board the Hesperus. --A, B, and C.

New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh welcomes you to a remote town on the edge of the world where even the blinding brightness of the sun can’t mask the darkness that lies deep within a killer.… On the rugged West Coast of New Zealand, Golden Cove is more than just a town where people live. The adults are more than neighbors; the children, more than schoolmates. That is until one fateful summer—and several vanished bodies—shatters the trust holding Golden Cove together. All that’s left are whispers behind closed doors, broken friendships, and a silent agreement to not look back. But they can’t run from the past forever. Eight years later, a beautiful young woman disappears without a trace, and the residents of Golden Cove wonder if their home shelters something far more dangerous than an unforgiving landscape. It’s not long before the dark past collides with the haunting present and deadly secrets come to light.

When an old friend returns to town, Meg plans a party to bring the old gang back together, but someone—or something—will do anything to keep it from happening in this chilling tale from Goosebumps author R.L. Stine. A year ago, Meg Dalton’s group of friends fractured. Evan died in the Fear Street woods. Ellen moved away. The ones that stayed behind changed. And Meg felt as if she’d lost her best friends. Lately, even her boyfriend Tony has been acting moody and strange. But things may finally be looking up. Ellen is coming to visit! And what better way to bring old friends together than with a surprise party for her arrival? That’s when the terror begins—the phone calls, the threats, the acts of violence. “Cancel the party—or else,” whispers the voice on the phone. Meg is terrified. Who would do so many terrible things to stop her party? To find out, she’ll have to venture into the dark Fear Street woods that took Evan’s life last year.

Rather than reading small-town representations in Canadian literature as portraits of a parochial past or a lost golden age, this book claims that they are best understood as sophisticated statements on the effects of modernity in an ever-more cosmopolitan world. In Ontario, as urbanization increased over the past century, small towns became a popular literary trope, and Ryan Porter argues that literary small towns are reflections, and even sublimated explorations, of contemporary life. Referencing the theories of heritage scholars, who view popularly understood pasts as constructions shaped by changing sensibilities, You Can't Get There from Here argues that the literary small-town Ontario past is malleable, consisting of attempts to come to terms with the present in which the narrators find themselves. The book focuses on four key Ontario authors - Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart - as well as many secondary authors, and links the readings to much broader trends in actual Ontario towns and in popular culture.