Non-Fiction
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Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in MarseilleHarperCollins US, 2006; HarperCollins Canada,
2006; John Murray UK, 2006. 476pp.
France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence, could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive. Financed by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, unlikely heroes—feisty graduate student Miriam Davenport, Harvard-educated classical scholar Varian Fry, beautiful and compelling heiress Mary Jayne Gold, and brilliant young Socialist and survivor of the Battle of Dunkerque Danny Bénédite and his British wife, Theo—cajole, outwit, and use every means possible to stave off the Nazis and newly installed Vichy government officials circling closer with each passing day. The château was a vibrant artistic salon, home to lively debates and clandestine affairs, to Sunday art auctions and subversive surrealist games. Relationships within the house were tense and arguments were common, but the will to survive kept the covert operation under wraps. Beyond the château's luscious façade war raged, yet hope reverberated within its halls. With the aid of their young rescuers, this diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. Villa Air-Bel is a powerfully told, meticulously researched true story. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved while uncovering their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Filled with suspense, drama, and intrigue, Villa Air-Bel is an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history. Read an essay by Rosemary Sullivan on how the book came about Watch The Road Out, a documentary short on Villa Air-Bel featuring Rosemary Sullivan Watch the original television ad for the book Critical Praise for Villa Air-Bel"Her scene-by-scene evocation of life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror." "Sullivan goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell the fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. She intelligently spreads the fractured narrative, with its huge cast of characters…over 60 brief chapters. What is palpable is the welter of shock, fear, world-weariness…a moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times.' "A complex tale showing how hope and courage flourish, even in the toxic soil of totalitarianism." "As a piece of narrative Villa Air-Bel is considerable. It tells a number of individual stories-about 40-brilliantly and it places them in context…. It also illuminates a little known but important aspect of the history of the second World War…. the style is beautifully clear and concise….Sullivan's book should be mandatory reading." "Sullivan brilliantly interweaves personal histories with terrifying tales" "The great virtue of Sullivan's account of these dark times is the meticulous research that informs it, the uncovering of memoirs, photos, and other documents in numerous Canadian and American libraries as well as archives in France and private collections….Villa Air-Bel is a most welcome book, a triumph of the human spirit" "A moving and richly detailed account" "Sullivan's book covers a little-known chapter of the Second World War….Villa Air-Bel is a remarkable achievement" "[Sullivan] manages to combine solid scholarship with a snappy writing style...a history book that is completely riveting" "Sullivan has written a book of great detail and complexity, though one that is full of darkness." "With tremendous suspense and emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry" "[In Villa Air-Bel] stories are told with passion." "It's history, it's intrigue. It's nonfiction. It's a real page-turner." "This is a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly, and complacency...a beautifully narrated book." "Deft handling of a twisted plot with a large number of characters" Awards
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Cuba: Grace Under Pressurewith photographer Malcolm David Batty. McArthur Publishers, 2003.
Critical Praise for CUBA: Grace Under Pressure "As a poet and writer, [Sullivan] knows that life is not lived as theory but as practice, that we exist on earth not as ideas but as living creatures, and that you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories. She has concerned herself with intense particulars." In Cuba: Grace Under Pressure, a work combining transcendent black-and-white photographs with luminous affecting prose, Cuba is a country where resistance against oppression—of all sorts—is conducted via elegant dreams, sinuous art, and insistent sumptuous humanity…[The book] is a glimpse of a nation—the oldest, landed culture in the Americas—where dreams of freedom are fleshed out in music, art, and in enviable community. This book is a gallery of life. "[Sullivan] asks all the right questions and is as honest with us as [Cubans] are with her. She gives us much of herself and, by sharing her own observations, questions and moments of surprise, she makes these stories accessible…. what a privilege to travel with them." "This is not a political book. It is written as though the nation of Cuba sat down for a portrait ...." |
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Memory-Making: Selected Essays of Rosemary SullivanBlack Moss Press, 2001.
Sullivan has penned hundreds of essays, memoirs, and travel pieces. This collection brings together the best of these. Contents
"Sullivan is celebrated as a literary biographer… [her] biographical skill is… displayed in pieces on Atwood… Laurence…and her own ancestors….I find these essays and those on painters, romantic obsession, the nasty politics at a human rights conference, and travel experiences in Czechoslovakia, France, Chile, Cuba, and Mexico…give a strong impression of her personality as she strikes out for territory without undue concern about scoring intellectual points. [The essays] show her as a woman of life, not just ideas, and as such admit the reader to intimacies of various subjects." Keith Garebain, The Globe and Mail |
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Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic ObsessionHarperCollins, Toronto, 2001; Counterpoint Pess, New York, 2002; Perseus Books, London, 2002; translated into Spanish by Ana Becciu, Norma Publishers, Mexico, 2002.
Think of torch songs and the tango. Think of films such as Casablanca and The English Patient, of novels such as Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Think of romantic, obsessive love, the hot bed of passion we fall into, the emotion we call true love. This is the subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s provocative and fascinating book Labyrinth of Desire. Critical Praise for Labyrinth of DesireCheck out the lively readers' response to this book on Amazon.com "Eloquent. . . . Exhilirating. . . . Women letting men turn them into wounds is an old, depressing story, but Sullivan chases it to a new and adventurous place." "A beautifully woven tapestry of insightful corollaries and personal stories, offering fresh conjectures into the psyches of women and men in love." "Original and engrossing. I couldn’t stop reading." "I can’t say it surprised me that Rosemary Sullivan, a woman with a way-killer mind and industrial-strength balls, has written a fascinating page-turner on the old, irresistible question: Why do we love the way we do? There isn’t a sentence in the intellectually sexy Labyrinth of Desire where the reader doesn’t learn something very big about romantic, obsessive love." "Provocative and penetrating, Rosemary Sullivan’s look at obsessive passion is a pitch-perfect reading of the emotional arithmetic that accompanies romantic love. It is an elusive subject, but one Sullivan manages to pin down with deft dexterity." "She’s got style.... Like her country’s greatest literary critic, the late Northrop Frye, Sullivan is also a fine anatomist." "This Canadian bestseller is an obsessive read not academic, but not self-help, either." "Sullivan's introduction of real love stories and her conversational style, which creates intimacy between reader and writer, set this apart from other popular works on the subject." "In this eye-opening book, Sullivan eradicates the bell jar effect of infatuation and conducts an honest tour of female entanglement with obsessive love…it is certainly a special book that…is bound to be shared and reread by women of all ages." "Sullivan’s tone is intimate, her touch light.... This is a clever, intriguing book." "Sullivan understands how seductive the call to romance is to women. She unmasks the myths with wonderful delicacy, yet never plays the hectoring schoolmarm, never wags her finger at the ditzy, martini-addled Carrie Bradshaw in all of us." "Sullivan does a masterly job." "This thoughtful examination of romantic love is a series of timeless, cautionary clues for the young women who have not succumbed to it, a consoling touchstone for women who find themselves in the heart-scorching heat of it, and a knowing nod, a regard for those quiet women among us who carry in their hearts that thing we call, so mistakenly, a past." "Labyrinth of Desire reads like a dream—it is slippery and easy pleasure.... Passion’s chemistry and effect is redrawn over and over again, until we come away from our encounter with Sullivan’s nimble and fearless mind, thoroughly entertained, but more importantly challenged and unafraid." "Labyrinth of Desire is a cleverly crafted and beautifully written distillation of Sullivan’s reflections, life experience and ongoing discussions with friends, as well as her analyses of literary and historical relationships. I enjoyed it even more on second reading, having by then thought through the material, comparing it to my own related reservoirs of personal and literary knowledge. Like me, readers will identify themselves in its pages." "Romantic obsession is one of those wickedly tricky subjects that easily leads to a badly written swamp of pitiful sentiment ... but not in the discerning hands of veteran biographer Rosemary Sullivan ... who here takes an unwieldy, wild subject and not only describes wonderfully its excruciating emotions, but unravels them with marvelous dignity." |
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The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting OutHarper Collins, 1998. Paperback, 1999; translated into Swedish by Ulla Danielsson, Bokförlaget Prisma Press, Stockholm, 2000.
In the 1940s film The Red Shoes, a beautiful ballerina commits suicide when her life forces her to choose between art and love. Margaret Atwood remembers being devastated by this movie as a young girl, but unlike many of her contemporaries, she came to reject its underlying message. How did Atwood, in those pre-feminist days, find courage and confidence to believe in herself? In The Red Shoes, award-winning biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan explores the unfolding of a remarkable writer’s career. She focuses on Atwood’s formative years through to the late 1970s when the major elements of Atwood’s life—the publication of Surfacing, Power Politics, and The Edible Woman, the relationship with writer Graeme Gibson, the birth of a daughter, the focus on Canadian culture—are set in place. A stunning blend of narrative and meditation, of discovery and insight, The Red Shoes is a major portrait of one of Canada’s most provocative writers. The Red Shoes has been a national best seller. Critical Praise for The Red Shoes"An exemplary work of literary biography." |
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Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwenHarper Collins, 1995. Paperback 1996.
Eyes outlined with khol, dressed in an embroidered purple tunic and writing of places far away, of magic, of cats and of demon lovers, Gwendolyn MacEwen seemed to many an exotic and mesmerizing presence. In less than twenty-six years, she published twenty books and became with Margaret Atwood the most celebrated poet of her day. Yet by forty-six she was tragically dead; many suspected suicide. In Shadow Maker, biographer and poet Rosemary Sullivan sets out to recover the many faces of Gwendolyn MacEwen…. [She] moves beyond the confines of traditional literary biography and pulls back the curtain on the process of writing MacEwen’s biography as she searches the silence behind the writing, decoding the life like a piece of metaphysical detective work. Shadow Maker won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, the Canadian Author’s Association Award for Non-Fiction, the UBC medal for Canadian Biography, the City of Toronto Book Award, and was nominated for the Ontario Trillium Award. The Genie Award-winning documentary Shadow Maker: Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998) by Brenda Longfellow (Gerda Productions) is based on Sullivan’s biography. Critical Praise for Shadow Maker"With rare empathy and a genius for analysis, Sullivan freely probes and interprets MacEwen’s inner and outer lives.... As any great biographer must be, Sullivan is also a magician, for she has succeeded in making Gwendolyn MacEwen rise from the pages of Shadow Maker, not to be forgotten." "This ability to be fully involved, emotionally and intellectually, with her subject and yet to maintain balance in her analysis sets [Rosemary Sullivan] apart from other Canadian biographers...." "Rosemary Sullivan has two great virtues as a literary biographer ... the ability to shape a compelling story and tell it with incomparable grace [and] an implicit sense of the moment in which her subject lives. Sullivan sets all her scenes as a dramatist would.... [She also has] a deeply felt understanding of and respect for the creative process and for the intensity of the life that feeds it." — "It is hard to put down this book, both for the life being reconstructed ... and for the probing intellect and engaging presence of the biographer." "Shadow Maker has an incisive, empathetic immediacy that raises it above the cumbersome, overly detailed work of so many biographers." |
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By Heart: Elizabeth Smart/A LifePenguin Books, Canada, 1991; Lime Tree Press, England, 1991. Paperback 1992. Translated into Spanish by Laura Freixas, Circe Publishers, Barcelona, 1996.
Elizabeth Smart, author of one of the century’s most brilliant works of poetic prose, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, lived a life of extremes. Rebelling against her affluent Canadian upbringing and exiling herself to London, she embarked on a passionate romance with George Barker—smitten by his poems long before she met him in person—in what was to become one of the most intense and extraordinary love affairs of this century. By Heart is, by turns, a compelling account of a remarkable woman’s single-handed struggle to support her four children, a literary love story, a portrait of mid-century bohemian artistic circles and, above all, the life of a gifted writer fighting for self-expression. By Heart was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Critical Praise for By Heart"Excellent. . . . Sullivan is herself an outstanding writer, tempering her evident admiration for Smart’s achievements with the wry reflections of those who knew her subject intimately. . . . Sullivan’s biography settles for no half-measures, and gives the tribute to Elizabeth Smart which her life among the rogues and rascals thoroughly deserves." "Informed with enthusiasm… tells its story with remarkable story vividly." "Wonderful… as vibrant and gutsy as its subject." "Writing her own sub-version of the Grand Central style, Rosemary Sullivan has produced a harmonious and illuminating account of a culture and habitat rich in significant incongruity." "It is clear from the first page of this immensely readable book that the association of Rosemary Sullivan and Elizabeth Smart is one of the truly successful biographical pairings. . . . By Heart makes an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of women’s lives and rings yet another variation on the theme of how talents can be lost and voices suppressed." "By Heart is a sensitive tribute to an important writer and an exceptional woman." "A massive and poignantly rendered journey through one of the most fascinating lives in Canadian letters." "By Heart has the momentum of a well-paced novel, but also the discursive intelligence to pick out the patterns in a life that Smart herself frequently found baffling." "Sullivan demonstrates amazing empathy with her subject, and her biography itself becomes a work of art." "Carefully and wonderfully, Rosemary Sullivan recreates a life, a myth, a world now past. Here are passion and sensitivities so strong and wilful they outrun the grave." "When I finished Rosemary Sullivan’s enthralling life of Elizabeth Smart, my first response was to wonder how I could have lived so long without knowing anything about her except that she had written one of the most remarkable novels of our time. A second later I changed my mind and realized how fortunate I was to meet this amazing woman on the pages of one of the best contemporary biographies I have recently read. Ms. Sullivan writes so gracefully and with such objectivity and restraint that all the contradictions of Smart’s astonishing life leap off the pages with an impact that resonates in one’s mind long after the last page of her book is read … [She] has captured Smart’s vitality and complexity in what is sure to become a biography of international significance." |
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The Garden Master: The Poetry of Theodore RoethkeUniversity of Washington Press,
1975.
Critical Praise for The Garden Master "Sullivan is principally concerned with psychological patterns in Roethke’s life and work. [She] supplements her psychological expertise with a thorough knowledge of the relevant poetic and mystical traditions." "Although Sullivan’s style and method are scholarly, she writes with sensitivity and perception." "This is an important, excellent study of Theodore Roethke, man and poet. . . . The book has made a significant contribution to an understanding of this fascinating, complex figure." "My appreciative guess is that this books will stand as the definitive study of Roethke’s poetry on eclectic, comprehensive, and sequential principles." |
Poetry
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The Bone Ladder: New and Selected PoemsBlack Moss Press, 2000.
"The poems in this collection embrace experience open-heartedly. Their beauty is poignant; home is seen by the exile, freedom by the oppressed, love by one familiar with loss. How grateful we can be for poems that are unafraid of love’s necessary risks and sorrows." |
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Blue PanicBlack Moss Press, 1991.
In her new book of poems, Rosemary Sullivan writes about our compulsion to read our lives as fiction. We feel panic when we can’t find any logic to the narrative. The poems are meditations on love, travel, friendship – we are trajectories, which other lives cross through, apprehensible only in passing. Blue Panic confronts hard realities; yet, if there is any meaning to this life narrative, the poet insists it is only to be discovered with an open heart and enough love. "The poems in Blue Panic tell of the human desire to locate a narrative thread that would allow us to make sense of our lives." |
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The Space A Name MakesBlack Moss Press, 1986.
The Space A Name Makes is an exciting first book by Rosemary Sullivan. The poems are about the world that collects around the mystery of a name, an identity -- poems of love, of family history, of the poet’s neighbourhood Bloor Street and of her travels. Winner of Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 1986 (League of Canadian Poets). "Sullivan’s poems are lean and vigorous, with the colloquial directness of a documentary film." |
Anthologies
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Short Fiction: An AnthologyCo-editor Mark Levene.
Oxford University Press, 2003. This collection presents a skilfully chosen blend of international and Canadian short fiction from the early nineteenth century to the postmodern era. The authors represented include young and rarely anthologized writers as well as well-known figures fundamental to any survey of the genre; nearly half are Canadian. The range and variety of the stories included present many opportunities for discussion not only of the story’s formal elements but of issues such as gender, race, politics, and cultural identity. |
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The Oxford Book of Short Stories by Canadian WomenOxford University Press, 1999.
The fifty stories in this collection, first published in 1999 and now available in paperback, form a kind of collective narrative of women’s experience, past and present. Their authors reflect the country’s racial and ethnic diversity as well as its geographic expanse, and they work in a wide range of styles. Yet all write confidently and eloquently about women’s lives. |
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Poetry by Canadian WomenOxford University Press, 1989.
This book presents the work of over seventy writers in a historical collection that is the first of its kind. Spanning almost two centuries, it reveals a fascinating range of cultural backgrounds, temperaments, and styles. At the same time, the historical perspective makes it possible to trace remarkable evolution not only in the concerns the Canadian women have addressed in poetry, but in the craft with which they have done so. |
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More Stories by Canadian WomenOxford University Press, 1987.
As a sequel to the popular Stories by Canadian Women, More Stories by Canadian Women explore the lives of women from childhood to old age. . . . Strongly individual in style and voice, these seventeen writers have created detailed portraits of women – as mothers, as lovers, as friends, as fighters, as victims, as victors, and, above all, as survivors. |
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Stories by Canadian WomenOxford University Press, 1984.
Spanning a century, Stories by Canadian Women presents the work of twenty-nine women writers in the first historical collection of its kind. . . . Some of these writers have written as nationalists and some as feminists, but all have been shaped by two facts of being – nationality and gender. |
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The Writer and Human RightsEd. Rosemary Sullivan et al. New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1983; Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983.
After personal trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in 1979 where Rosemary Sullivan met dissident writers and viewed samizdat literature by her colleague and friend Josef Skvorecky, she returned to Canada to work for Amnesty International. In 1980 she founded the Toronto Arts Group for Human Rights, and conceived and organized an International Congress called The Writer and Human Rights in aid of Amnesty International. The congress took place over ten days in Toronto in October 1981. Seventy writers from thirty countries participated, including Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag, Eduardo Galeano, Carolyn Forché, Jacobo Timerman, Allen Ginsberg, Allan Sillitoe, Josef Brodsky, Yehuda Amichai, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Wole Soyinka, Thomas Kinsella, Margaret Atwood, John Fraser, Josef Skvorecky, George Woodcock, Rick Salutin, Marie-Claire Blais, Gaston Miron, Timothy Finley, Joy Kogawa, Robert Zend, and Ian Adams. The papers from the congress were published as The Writer and Human Rights. |
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Elements of FictionEd. Robert Scholes and Rosemary Sullivan.
Secondary Editor: Canadian edition, 1985. Abridged Edition, 1986. Revised editions, 1988, 1994.. Elements of Fiction represents an outstanding collection of eighty short stories which, taken together, represent the developmental history of modern fiction. |