 Note from Editor Note from the Editor
by Adrian Stein
As you may have noticed, this is the second issue of Books in Canada under a new editorship. As the new editor, my primary task is to reinvent the publication's "handwriting", as it were, while preserving its integrity as an
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| Book Review Family Photos
by Olga Stein
One day, viewing our family's past will be a matter, not of sketching a family tree or looking at rare, faded photographs, but of opening a digital file-the exact sound of our ancestors' voices, every nuance of their character captured and conveyed via
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| Book Review A Note from the Publisher
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce our new editor, Diana Kuprel. Originally from the West Coast, Diana recently received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She is a published translator,
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| Book Review A Self-Portrait of Anne's Author
by Clara Thomas
Once again, Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston have done an impeccable job of selecting and editing to give us the penultimate volume of L.M. Montgomery's voluminous Journals. Their project has been in progress for many years, and has taken the
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| Book Review No Miracles Here - Robertson Davies's Posthumous Collection
by Michael Peterman
For many people, it was an event to hear Robertson Davies speak in public. His well-trained voiced sought out and wooed its audience, exercising a fine sense of comic timing and projecting a seriousness of purpose that left little doubt that what was a
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| Book Review The Good Doctor Bethune's Hardly Hobbled Word Hoard
by Ted Whittaker
Larry Hannant has performed a useful service in collecting the written remains of Norman Bethune. As a thoracic surgeon during the twenties and thirties Bethune invented or helped make popular instruments and techniques used in the treatment of
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| Book Review The Canadian Word Sleuth: babiche, bismarcks, ginch...
by Katherine Barber
Did Samuel Johnson ever have to ask his compatriots and colleagues what they call their underwear? Did James Murray ever have to head to the ladies' lingerie section of his local department store to determine how "brassiere" should be spelled in the
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| Book Review The Mannequin's Happily-Ever-After
by Hannah More
At first glance, Hans & Ingeborg, the limited edition book by award-winning Toronto photographer V. Tony Hauser, is a wedding album. A slightly unconventional one, perhaps-husband and wife are a pair of department store mannequins-but the
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| Book Review Deciphering the Silent Centre of Longing
by Roman Sabo
All post-colonial societies try to reclaim home turf from a version of history imposed by the colonizers who, in order to justify their activities, usually present the colonized as uncouth people in need of enforced enlightenment. Stories about home,
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| Book Review Whipping up a Batch of Bees
by Cynthia Sugars
There are moments in life when you let go and allow your unconscious to carry you on its currents. These are the moments when you experience something that you have been faintly aware of but never able to put into words, when you are able to relive
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| Book Review How Does the Media Describe the World
On November 19, 1998, Ryszard Kapuscinski was invited to Stockholm by the Bonniers Mediauniversitet to take part as Keynote Speaker in the prestigious National Awards for Journalism, the "1998 Stora Journalisttriset".
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| Book Review Four Poems by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Tatars' Wasteland They left behind just sawdust and stalks
yellowed grass dried-up bush cracked earth empty wells
rock piles cold wind just
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| Book Review Jagielski's Ark
"What a hangout!" the university lecturer exclaimed.
"And you'll see Zeus-a strange god," adds the other lecturer.
A reportage about a god! That grabbed me.
Whenever they have a couple of bucks, they scuttle over
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| Book Review The Lively Art of Opera
by Linda Hutcheon
Many readers will already be familiar with Father Owen Lee. Some will have listened to him as an intermission commentator or quiz panelist on the Metropolitan Opera's "Saturday Afternoon at the Opera" radio broadcasts. His formidable knowledge,
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| Book Review Recasting the Hand - Ondaatje's New Poems
by Sam Solecki
Michael Ondaatje is so familiar a figure in contemporary literature-his first book, The Dainty Monsters, appeared in 1967-that it is easy to take him for granted and to forget just how original a writer he is. But even a quick backward glance
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| Book Review Between the Word and the Design
by Francois Lachance
"In us all it still lives-the dark corners, the secret alleys, shuttered windows, squalid courtyards, rowdy pubs, and sinister inns. We walk through the broad streets of the newly built town. But our steps and our glances are uncertain.
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| Book Review A Duologue on the Notorious
by Jack Illingworth
In assembling their intelligent and entertaining ad for the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Canadian poets Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy discarded most of the conventions regarding selection and publication of a writer's oeuvre. Only twelve poems are included
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| Book Review Talking Speculative Fiction
by Mark Wegierski
As is appropriate for a work about speculative fiction, Northern Dreamers is a rather rare form of book-a collection of interviews. The term "speculative fiction" seems to be a Canadian innovation, a convenient catchword for describing science
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| Book Review And then there was common sense
by Michael Taube
After being elected in June 1995, Mike Harris and the Ontario Tories promised a common sense revolution based on solid economic principles and fiscal cost-cutting measures. You could almost hear the trembling of the masses; this was no longer the
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| Book Review Fabulists With a Social Conscience
by Diana Kuprel
That most ancient of literary genres, the fable is designed to deliver a hard-hitting moral lesson, an insightful comment on human nature or clever social critique viz. a pithy, metaphorical form. In The Ark in the Garden: Fables for Our Times,
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| Book Review The American Writer in Parma
by Constance John
Parma sits on a flat agricultural plain east of the Appennine mountains in northern Italy. The Via Emilia, built in four years by the Romans, follows the ancient trade route beside the river Po through the town to the sea. Today, Parma is famed for it
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| Book Review Distrusting Biographers - the other one on Atwood
by John Ayre
There has hardly been a time when people weren't interested in Margaret Atwood. In the early seventies this was generated by the gothic images in her poetry and the novel, Surfacing. There was a suspicion back then that she virtually lived in a
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| Interviews Writers at War - Norman Ravvin speaks with Richard Sanger
by Norman Ravvin
Toronto-based playwright and poet Richard Sanger is in Fredericton this year, serving as the University of New Brunswick's writer-in-residence, while in Calgary, Alberta Theatre Projects is mounting a $200,000 production of his new
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| Interviews Barrelhouse Royalty - Branko Gorjup speaks with Barry Callaghan
by Branko Gorjup
Barry Callaghan was born in Toronto on a quiet, tree-shaded street. At the age of six, he wandered off and was found several miles away in a Woolworth's store by a policeman. The policeman took him home; he has resented the
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| Interviews The Post-Yugoslav Diaspora - Tomislav Longinovic speaks with David Albahari
by Tomislav Longinovic
I recently chaired a panel entitled "Between Languages: Post-Yugoslav Writers in Diaspora". The convention was held in an extravagant resort on the Atlantic coast of Florida. Legend has it that during the 1920s, its eccentric
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| Essays From the Borderlands - The Other's Voice
On November 26, 1998 at the Toronto Reference Library, Books in Canada co-sponsors the first of a series of conversations with authors speaking on crucial issues arising at the crossroads of the
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| Profiles Finding the Other Family
This profile is based in part on a conversation I had with Janice Kulyk Keefer in July prior to the publication of her family memoir, Honey and Ashes (HarperFlamingo), her book of poetry, Marrying the Sea (Brick Books), and a
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Another impressive debut is Kiss of the Fur Queen (Doubleday, 320 pages, $32.95 cloth) by acclaimed playwright Tomson Highway. The book seduces with magic and legend: from the opening chapter, we are drawn into a world at once ordinary
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Joanna Goodman's Belle of the Bayou (The Porcupine's Quill, 176 pages, $16.95 paper) is a very different sort of quest novel-fast-paced, funny, and effervescent, with sharp and clever language and incisive imagery. Arabella Slominski Boot has
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Anyone who's seen "The Kids in the Hall" on television will probably already be familiar with Buddy Cole, the outrageous gay-and-having-fun-being-so sort of flashy, irreverent guest every good party needs. Buddy is the self-absorbed, wickedly funny
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 | Doggone
by Tamas Dobozy,
160 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 1896356141
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First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Tamas Dobozy's Doggone (Gutter Press, 206 pages, $14.95 paper) begins with this admission from the narrator, Gabe: "Okay. Here's the real state of affairs. Honest to gosh. At twenty-nine I weigh in at a hundred and ninety-five pounds,
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
The Bull is not Killed (Stoddart, 224 pages, $26.95 cloth) by Sarah Dearing is set in Portugal. It is 1974, political tensions are escalating, and many-including twenty-five-year-old Luis da Silva-hope the repressive dictatorship will be overthrown
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| Cyclone
by Julia Van Gorder,
188 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 1550501275
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First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
The 1912 Regina cyclone and World War I form the setting for Julia van Gorder's Cyclone (Coteau, 196 pages, $14.95, paper). It's the story of Agnes Jackson, her husband, Edward, and their six children-immigrants from England trying to adapt
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Leaning, Leaning Over Water (Harper Collins, 224 pages, $24 cloth) by Ottawa writer Frances Itani is a series of interlocking coming-of-age stories. It is the fifties, and Jock King has moved his wife and three daughters, Lyd, Trude, and Mimi,
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| Underwood
by P. Tarr,
pages $11.95 PT
ISBN: 1895636175
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First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Finally there is P.G. Tarr's The Underwood (Anvil Press, 132 pages, $11.95 paper), winner of the 20th Annual 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest. Twenty-one-year-old Foster Lutz takes a job as the lounge pianist at the Underwood. To most people it is not
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
Elvis Unplugged (Oberon, 123 pages, price not listed) by Marlis Wesseler, also nominated for both the 1998 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, is the unusual tale of a woman in her late fifties who
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| First Novels First Novels - Elvis and the Shaman
by Eva Tihanui
Of the ten books reviewed in this month's column, 1998 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award- and Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction-nominated Beneath That Starry Place (HarperCollins, 286 pages, $26 cloth) by Terry Jordan is unequivocally the most
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Alana Wilcox
The act of writing is an attempt to find a home in language, to settle its inherent restlessness by cementing a sequence of words. Aritha Van Herk's latest novel, Restlessness (Red Deer College Press, 193 pages, $16.95 paper),
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Keith Garebian
In the summer of 1964, Timothy Findley and his companion, William Whitehead, were romantics who believed that a tumbledown, vacant, nineteenth-century farmhouse on fifty acres of land just outside Cannington, Ontario could be turned into a home, workplace
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Keith Nickson
Sharon Butala has published a steady stream of stories and novels since 1986 when her very first collection, Queen of the Headaches, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. She was a serious, mid-list writer with a modest profile
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Mary Kovack
As the new millennium approaches, it is both timely and inevitable that specialists in the fields of the literary and performing arts have set their sights on the daunting task of compiling "best of" anthologies. With The 20th Century Children's Book
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Jonathan Rollins
It's never too early to introduce children to twentieth-century art; either they'll appreciate the use of colour and the economy of line or else they'll try to put it in their mouth. In either case, you know it's caught their eye. Of course, there are
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Alicia Sloboda
The sole musician playing in defiance of the chaos around him has become almost an icon in disaster and war movies. Who could fail to be stirred by the melodramatic scene in Titanic of the quartet that continued to play on as the ship went down in
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 | Candles
95 pages $8.95
ISBN: 1896184448
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Sherie Posesorski
What's the 25th of Kislev-the first night of Chanukah in the Jewish lunar calendar-compared with Christmas on the 25th of December? According to Toronto teenager Anya Walman, Chanukah, the festival of lights, is a big bore, a second best, a poor cousin,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Mary Ranni
When I was a young teenager back in the sixties, I was always frustrated to find that any ghost I might encounter in a book would eventually be explained away as part of a dream or perhaps just a transparent curtain billowing in the wind on a gloomy night
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Diana Kuprel
ABC books are as old as the unicorn and, depending on the age of the intended-target audience, more or less sophisticated in terms of the accompanying vocabulary content. Award-winning illustrator Frank Newfeld-who has designed such books as Dennis Lee's
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Hero-Making
by Douglas Fetherling
Most of us think of James Wolfe, the victor of the Plains of Abraham, as he appears at the National Gallery of Canada in Benjamin West's painting, "The Death of General Wolfe": a chinless sort of individual, small-boned, with thinning red
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| Great Authors Ryszard Kapuscinski
Kapuscinski is one of the few great writers of our time trying to locate answers to the most pressing and fundamental questions posed for humanity. His is a unique approach to writing which blends the objectivity of a reporter,
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| Great Authors Great Authors of Our Time - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Ryszard Kapuscinski is a world-renowned journalist and author. He was born in 1932 in the eastern Polish town of Pinsk, which was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939. He spent the war years in a small village near Warsaw.
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| Great Authors Seven Encounters with Ryszard Kapuscinski
by Marek Kusiba
Here are the notes from seven of my meetings with Ryszard Kapuscinski. They took place over eighteen years. In the past twelve months, I had the opportunity to visit him while he was writing Ebony.
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