Books by Michael Hurley

DO YOU BELIEVE IN EVERLASTING LOVE?Jay Danforth Fitzgerald, known as ';Fitz' to his few remaining friends, has learned from long and painful experience that there is no such thing as love that lasts. A failed an aging stockbroker full of angst and self-loathing, he fritters away his nights in Tiddly's Bar and his days aboard a derelict sailboat stuck in the mud of Charleston Harbor. But when he meets a much younger woman named Gemma, his world changes forever.Award-winning author Michael Hurley has crafted a tale for the ages about the love we leave behind and the longing that fills our hearts for what might have been. When Fitz resolves to make a reckless solo passage to Ireland in a last-ditch grab for salvation, Gemma secretly stows aboard. The story of Gemma and Fitz plays out on the dramatic stage of the North Atlantic, on a boat bound toward the past Fitz cannot forget and a future he cannot imagine.

A modern classic of wilderness literature, Hurley's Journal was written and published quarterly by Michael Hurley from 1995 to 2003. It began as a kitchen-table gazette that Hurley produced for a few family and friends as an excuse to go canoe-camping all over North America with his children, but it quickly grew into a literary gem cherished by more than 10,000 paying subscribers in 48 states and overseas. The journal provided not only practical advice but celebrated the romance, lore, and wisdom of life in the wilderness in award-winning prose. The original issues are now collectors' items among the canoeing faithful. This 20th anniversary edition brings to a new generation of voyageurs, in one hardcover volume spanning nearly 800 pages, Hurley's essays, detailed trip reports, and intricate, hand-drawn maps for fifty-two canoe trips in thirteen states and Canada, ranging from weekend getaways to far-flung wilderness adventures. Beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred pages of stunning black-and-white photographs of the author's adventures, Hurley's Journal is certain to be a treasured reference and beloved companion to explorers and family campers alike for years to come.

John Richardson was Canada''s first native-born poet-novelist and ''The Father of Canadian Literature.'' Michael Hurley offers the first detailed account of Richardson''s fiction rather than of his life or sociological importance. Hurley makes a convincing case for Richardson as an important early cartographer of the Canadian imagination and the originator of ''Southern Ontario Gothic.'' He explores Richardson''s influence on James Reaney, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Christopher Dewdney, Frank Davey, and Marian Engel. Arguing that Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers hold central places in our literature, Hurley shows how these two works established a set of boundaries that our national literary discourse has largely kept hidden. Focusing on the protean concept of the border in the fiction of this man from the periphery, The Borders of Nightmare underlines the importance of boundaries, margins, shifting edges, and the coincidence of equally matched opposites in necessary balance to both Richardson and subsequent writers. In an age of postmodernism these novels - riddled as they are with discontinuities, paradoxes, ambiguity, and unresolved dualities that problematize the whole notion of a stable, coherent national or personal identity - anticipate and define a number of concerns that preoccupy us today.