He and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding.Īlthough he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje's work also encompasses memoir, poetry, and film. From 1971 to 1988 he taught English Literature at York University and Glendon College in Toronto.

Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. He moved to England with his mother in 1954. He was born to a Burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin.

Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905 Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more. Įach of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics. Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission.Ĭompiled by the editors of A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books.

Lost Classics by Michael Ondaatje