| Book Review Placing Place Project
by Staven Nunoda
Painting Place is the first part of a four-volume series to be published by the University of Toronto Press, which will include a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Milne's work and a volume with a selection of his writings. Rarely is this sort of
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| Book Review The Bright & the Blank
by Eric Ormsby
In reading the poems of Crispin Elsted-and perhaps I read with too bookish an eye-I envisage each poem as if suspended, in a kind of vellum luminosity, against the brightness of a blank page. This is not only because the author is a celebrated typographer
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| Book Review Comedy of Westmount Manners
by Belinda Beaton
The newcomer, the interloper, the sophisticate who moves in with a family and ends up drastically overturning their domestic dynamics is a plot device that has been employed in comic novels like Stella Gibbons's 1932 classic, Cold Comfort Farm. Edward Phi
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| Book Review Sententious Park
by Bert Archer
We have lost the knack of distinguishing major from minor literature, and so we are in the habit of raising upon pedestals work that is merely competent.
Like Janice Kulyk Keefer's The Green Library.
In this small story, shortlisted for this p
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| Book Review Fredericton, W.I.
by Andrew Faiz
In this fine, intelligent, and passionate collection, Rabrindranath Maharaj constantly slips into that thin deep land between fantasy and reality. Often the fantasy is embodied by Canada, and the reality by Caura, the archetypical Caribbean island. This
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| Book Review Our Friendly Ghost
by R. M. Vaughan
What is it about Lynn Crosbie's poetry that makes Canada's domestic-angst-with-bitter-coffee-klatsch of capital "P" poets cringe with fear? Is her poetry too bold, too sexy, too famous, too honest...or just too good?
I remember when Crosbie's last b
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| Book Review The Hemisphere's a Stage
by Lynn Slotkin
Talk about a mammoth undertaking. The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (WECT) is described in its press information as "the largest international co-operative publication in the history of world theatre". It endeavours to record and analyse
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| Book Review Fished Up by Double Hook?
by Michael Peterman
This short book is the text of three F.E.L. Priestley lectures delivered in 1994 by David Staines at University College, University of Toronto. "Deliberately written within a millennial perspective," they look back in order to see forward. Their aim is to
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| Book Review A Construct? So?
by Henry Lackner
A spectre is haunting Sander Gilman, the spectre of "God's chosen people". The distinguished president of the Modern Languages Association-with more than forty books and many more academic papers under his belt-warns Jews, and especially "the Jewish
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| Book Review A Grief Observed
by Robin Roger
At the age of eighty, Leo Tolstoy expressed the anguish of maternal loss in his journal: "Yes, yes, my Maman....She is my highest image of love-not cold, divine love, but warm, earthly love, maternal...Maman, hold me, baby me!...All this is madness, but
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| Book Review Salmon with Death Wish
by Libby Scheier
Tim Bowling works each summer as a deckhand on a fishing boat on the Fraser River in British Columbia. This forms the pervasive setting for these poems, whether as foreground or background. "Low water slack" (the book's cover tells us) is that "particular
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| Book Review This is That
by Kildare Dobbs
Sooner or later everyone is seized with the impulse to build, to create one's own monument. With state resources, grandeur is possible; even with private riches one can display original taste. Architects know the force of the freak-outs that affect many
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| Book Review Lives of the Fashion Saints
by Anne Steacy
In her introduction to this bizarre offering, Marian Fowler enthuses that it can be read as a manual to master "a revitalized concept of what it means to be female." The reader is then treated to a surprising set of feminist ideals, catalogue of virtues:
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| Book Review Le Medecin en Colere
by H. D. Forbes
Trudeau wants to be remembered for what he opposed, not what he favoured. That is the conclusion suggested by reading his latest, and probably his last, collection of writings.
What Trudeau opposed, above all, was nationalism, especially its Quebec var
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| Book Review Can Do, or Could Do Then?
by Mark Lloyd
The recent publication in paperback of The De-Moralization of Society invites a wider audience to consider a book that very much deserves our attention. What makes Gertrude Himmelfarb's study so important is that it addresses the chief dissatisfactions of
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| Book Review Cold Comfort U
by Joseph Knippenberg
I have friends who love being irritated. It gets their intellectual juices flowing. They would enjoy Michael Keefer's Lunar Perspectives. So would those who are "into" contemporary trends in literary criticism, ranging from postmodernism and
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| Book Review Iran at the Door
by Victoria Rowe
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s Iranian writers experimented with the short story and free verse poetry. The ornate flowery poetry of the past was thought inadequate to express the changes both in society and in the role of the writer. Iranian literature
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| Interviews Facing the Books - John Ayre speaks with Alberto Manguel
by John Ayre
When Alberto Manguel gives a reading for his new book A History of Reading, he shows about thirty slides of paintings and photos of readers, both mythical and real, which he has included in the book. Some of these images that he has gathered from his
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| Interviews Snow-Covered Injustice - Mary Soderstrom on Trevor Ferguson
by Mary Soderstrom
The woods begin on the other side of Trevor Ferguson's back yard in the hills above the Ottawa River. That should surprise no-one who has read his first novel, High Water Chants, or his two most recent books, The Fire Line and The Timekeeper. The woods,
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| Interviews Szymborska - a single person in temporarily human form
by Diana Kuprel
Before finding herself in the international spotlight upon winning the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature, Wislawa Szymborska was less known to Canadian audiences than the two other Polish candidates, Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Her position on
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| Interviews Breathing History - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Linda Granfield
by Frieda Wishinsky
As a child Linda Granfield loved reading factual books. As an adult she loves writing them. Raised in Melrose, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, Granfield devoured books about figures in United States and Massachusetts history.
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Already Daunting I am grateful to Norman Ravvin (October) for his generally fair descriptions of Erland Josephson's novel, A Story about Mr. Silberstein, and for his kind words about my translation. But I am dismayed by his
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| Essays How Terry Found & Lost the Blues
In May of 1992, books by three African American women soared onto the New York Times bestseller list. They were Toni Morrison's Jazz, Alice Walker's Possession of the Secret Joy and Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan. Of the three, Jazz perhaps aroused
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| Prose/Poetry Tracing it Badly
This is the winner of the Writers' Union of Canada's annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. And here are the judges' comments:
"`Tracing It Bad
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| First Novels First Novels - From Hard Boil through Golf to Dream
by Eva Tihanyi
Crime figures in all the novels this month, and where there is crime in fiction, sure enough there must be sleuths. In The Dark Embrace (Mercury, 224 pages, $15.95 paper) Paul Stuewe's "detective" hero is the unlikely Walter McDumont
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| First Novels First Novels - From Hard Boil through Golf to Dream
by Eva Tihanyi
The Rouge Mysteries (Jasper Press, 182 pages, $14.95 paper), by John Swan, the pseudonym for the Hamilton writer Kerry J. Schooley, also falls into the "hard-boiled" school of detective fiction. However, it lacks the unity of The Dark Embrace
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 | Teed Off
by Nicola Furlong,
pages $7.99 MM
ISBN: 1551970910
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First Novels First Novels - From Hard Boil through Golf to Dream
by Eva Tihanyi
Teed Off (Commonwealth Publications, 402 pages, $7.99 paper), by Nicola Furlong, focuses on Riley Quinn, aged thirty-three, a former LPGA star whose career ended abruptly because of a car accident injury-an accident for which she blames her sister
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| First Novels First Novels - From Hard Boil through Golf to Dream
by Eva Tihanyi
The nucleus of Shani Mootoo's hypnotic Cereus Blooms at Night (Press Gang, 264 pages, $18.95 paper) is also a crime, one committed many years before the novel opens. Mala Ramchandin lives in Paradise on a fictional Caribbean Island. Now an old
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 | Gall Stones
by Laurie Smith, Alex Skakoon,
pages $0 TC
ISBN: 189634500X
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Judith Fitzgerald
Gall/stones (Scratch'n'Sniff Co-op, 64 pages, $8 paper), laurie smith's début, offers an acute and mesmerizing series focusing on surgery the Windsorite underwent in four stages, "the disease", "procedures", "demerol dreams",
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Keith Garebian
In his outrageously intemperate essay in Callas: Images of a Legend (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 261 pages, $108 cloth), Attila Csampai idealizes Callas to the point where discretion, discrimination, and taste vanish in a blaze of superlative
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M. T. Kelly
Thelon: A River Sanctuary (Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association, 202 pages, $26.95 paper) is David F. Pelly's attempt to recreate a holy place. "Holy" is a word this practical, organized writer might object to, even if chapter one
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Susan Mason
This is the story of an idealistic, somewhat naive young woman who became fascinated by South Africa while on a short visit there in the summer of 1991. Two years later, her degree in political science at the University of Calgary almost completed
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 | The Stone Lion
by Bill Slavin, Bill Slavin,
32 pages $17.95 TC
ISBN: 0889951543
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Bergwerff
A friend of mine from university who was afraid of heights had a disconcerting habit of screaming, "Put me down!!!" at the top of her lungs if she was watching a film and was confronted with a scene shot from a high perspective. The treacherous
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Janet McNaughton
Well-written children's books about Canadian women's history do not exactly abound. This is the second such title I've reviewed in about six months. Not enough to call a trend, but a good sign. That Martha Black is part of Canadian history at all is
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Janet McNaughton
Some plots do not summarize gracefully. Those little twists that make for lively reading can look very strange indeed when squashed into less than a hundred words. This is certainly the case with Awake & Dreaming. In this book, a neglected nine
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Donna Nurse
The illustration on the cover of The Fish Princess immediately intrigues. It depicts a skimpily clad girl sitting cross-legged on a deserted beach. A few feet away, black waves slap against a solitary row-boat that rests partly upon the shore. The
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Don Aker
Standing in the school counsellor's office, Mike, the teen protagonist in Matt Hughes's short story "Bearing Up", notes wryly that "the visitor's chair was buried in books in which adults explained exactly what you had to do to be a successful teenager."
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Fitz-Gibbon's The Patchwork House gives the same sense of pleasure as well-written science-fiction or a novel set in the Middle Ages, equally enriched by the sense of alien and unfamiliar mental perspectives. The book traces the occupancy of a West
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| At Large At Large - Required Foul
by Michael Coren
How appropriate that the Ontario town of Milton is thus named. The devout Christian John Milton was one of the finest and most significant authors and poets ever to have lived. From the author of Paradise Lost to Joyce Carol Oates
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Some Thoughts
by Douglas Fetherling
after reading Lord High Executioner: An Unashamed Look at Hangmen, Headsmen, & Their Kind, by Howard Engel (Key Porter, $22.95) Capital punishment is the most extreme form of censorship. I am thinking of Mumia
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