| Book Review Losing Your Name
by Maureen Harris
"Unwed mothers". How quaint the term sounds now and how out-of-date. Like angora sweater sets in pastel colours. I remember when it wasn't quaint but, among adolescent girls at least, a largely unspoken term for the unspeakable.
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| Book Review Mutanabbi of Montreal
by Norman Doidge
"Why is it that so much Canadian poetry has to sound like a Via Rail announcement?" asked Bruce Meyer, one of our contributing editors, of the chopped-up prose that passes for poetry at monotone readings. It was an important question.
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| Book Review The First Eleven
by Richard Greene
Kildare Dobbs has long been known as one of Canada's pre-eminent prose writers. Essayist, travel writer, journalist, and editor, he has won the Governor General's Award and his work figures in various anthologies, including The Norton Reader.
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| Book Review Dual Autobiography - Samantha Hodder speaks with Daphne Marlatt
by Samantha Hodder
Mothertalk follows the life story of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka from her birth in 1896 as the daughter of a samurai in Japan, to her immigration to Canada with an arranged marriage in 1917, through her long life on the West Coast and the Prairies as the mother.
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| Book Review Anarchism in Defence of Literature
by Leslie Mundwiler
In 1955 George Woodcock was offered a university teaching job which was clearly meant to lead to a permanent position. The offer came from the English department of the University of Washington.
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| Book Review When Absurd was Normal
by Paul Wilson
No-one knows how many books were written in secret during the era of Communist hegemony: more than seven decades in the Soviet Union and four in Eastern Europe. But in Czechoslovakia, the country I know best, enough clandestine books were written.
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| Book Review Get a Grip
by Fraser Sutherland
A good cartoonist is a satirical novelist drawn small; a great cartoonist invents a world. J. W. Bengough was not a great cartoonist. In some respects he was not even a good one.
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| Book Review A Passage to Ghoom
by Michael Peterman
This edition of Sara Jeannette Duncan's Set in Authority (1906), the novel she wrote immediately after The Imperialist (1904), is, quite simply, a joy to read and explore.
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| Book Review Fraught with Background
by Keith Garebian
In Morris Panych's Vigil, a man shows up at a decrepit old house ostensibly to attend to his old, dying aunt, but from the first terse scene to the wordless final tableau in this macabre two-act black comedy, comedy resonates in dark salvos.
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| Book Review Global Collision
by Lorrie Clark
The sweeping title of this challenging study of what its author calls "the posthistorical novel" captures the scope of the book as a whole: to interpret and apply the Hegelian thesis of "the end of history."
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| Book Review To Globalize or Not to Globalize?
by Matthew Davis
Louis Pauly begins Who Elected the Bankers? by conjuring up the mixed feelings that we all have about the prospect of a global economy: we feel a sense of liberation, of ever-increasing expansion.
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| Book Review Guilt by Non-Association
by Stan Dragland
The front cover of Loyal Till Death bears a photograph of Pac-sic-wasis, Chief Thundercloud, taken at Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1896. Inside, a note explains that Pac-sic-wasis is "wearing [a] Queen Victoria medal given to him for his loyalty.
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| Book Review Taking No Prisoners
by Kenneth Stickney
"By the beginning of August, the Germans weren't too eager to surrender. We never took any SS prisoners now and sometimes dealt with Wehrmacht formations in the same way," recalled a Canadian veteran of the Normandy campaign of 1944.
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| Book Review Today's Cave People
by Henry Lackner
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith..
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| Interviews Not the Beth of Little Women - Maria Kubacki speaks with Elisabeth Harvor
by Maria Kubacki
Elisabeth Harvor was born Erica Elisabeth Arendt Deichmann in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1936. She grew up on the Kingston Peninsula, where her parents, Erica and Kjeld Deichmann, had a pottery studio, and in ...
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 | Angel Tree
by Robin Muller,
pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 0385255608
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Interviews Hope for Outsiders - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Robin Muller
by Frieda Wishinsky
The noted author and illustrator Robin Muller isn't content to rest on his laurels. Muller, who has won numerous awards for his work, including the 1989 Governor General's award for his picture-book, The Magic Paintbrush (Doubleday), is now
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Safdie Selling Well! I found [Ian Allaby's] review for Moshe Safdie's City After the Automobile an enlightened and balanced piece, that is, until I arrived at the section that section that states, "A friend tells me
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| First Novels First Novels - More than Another Word
by Eva Tihanyi
Every life has its pivotal moments. In the case of Maggie Hoffer in Freedom's Just Another Word (HarperCollins, 344 pages, $26 cloth), by Dakota Hamilton, it is the moment when Mongrel, Maggie's biker husband and father of her
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| First Novels First Novels - More than Another Word
by Eva Tihanyi
Karen X. Tulchinsky's Love Ruins Everything (Press Gang, 280 pages, $18.95 paper) reminded me of a shooter: two beverages layered in one glass, to be consumed together. The novel-one part romance, one part politics-centres on Nomi Rabinovitch,
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| First Novels First Novels - More than Another Word
by Eva Tihanyi
Undercut (Mercury, 191 pages, $17.50 paper), by John Worsley Simpson, is one of Mercury's Midnight Originals, the publisher's mystery series. Unfortunately, this is not one of the most original books in their line-up.
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 | Johnny Novel
by Robert Richard,
104 pages $15.5 PT
ISBN: 1551280523
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First Novels First Novels - More than Another Word
by Eva Tihanyi
A Johnny Novel, by the ex-Canada Council arts officer Robert Richard (Mercury, 103 pages, $15.50 paper), goes to the other extreme: it is so surreal, philosophical, and stylistically daunting that only the most adventurous readers will be tempted
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Phil Surguy
In April 1909, Gladys Louise Smith, aged seventeen, walked into D. W. Griffith's Biograph studio in Manhattan. She had been on the stage since she was eight, first in her native Toronto, then with her mother, brother, and sister
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Belinda Beaton
The Manitoban Nellie McClung (1873-1951) is now remembered more for her role campaigning for female suffrage than for her fiction. As a journalist she wrote some sketches; later, she wrote three novels. Marilyn Davis has collected her
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Michael Fitz-James
A senior Vancouver criminal lawyer, Arthur Beauchamp (pronounced "Beecham"), has decided to hang up his gown and retire to peaceful-but-wacky Garibaldi, one of B.C.'s scenic Gulf Islands. Fighting his twin demons of past alcoholism
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
The joy, playfulness, and imagination that immediately startle and enrich the reader in Make or Break Spring gains extra zest because its plot could have been a parody of the Young Adult problem novel.
The YA problem novel (mother battered
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
You haul the kids up to the cottage, only to have them sit around uttering the "B" word-"I'm bored"-as relationships deteriorate and squabbling becomes increasingly acrimonious in tone and trivial in subject-matter. You become irritable too. You
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Fiction with animal protagonists runs a considerable gamut between anthropomorphism and rigorous, almost scientific, exploration of the world as experienced through an animal's senses and psychology. Beatrix Potter exemplifies the former, Ernest
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Librarians, heaven help us, would probably point a child to this book when asked for a mystery story, or an adventure story, or a story about treasure. We'd be especially vulnerable should teachers instruct their students, "Ask the librarian for a
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Recent books about the Titanic have tended to mirror the sumptuousness of the liner itself. At first glance this one is a dowdy little item, in a typewriter typeface and illustrated with black-and-white photos and reproductions of contemporary
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Madcap Era
by Douglas Fetherling
Sam Solecki's engaging book Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland (Key Porter, $26.95 paper) is the kind of work that McClelland himself would have relished in his heyday at McClelland
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| First Novel Award First Novel Award
This year, the judges' judgements didn't tempt us into a tortuous process of figuring out who had really won. Two judges thought Margaret Gibson's Opium Dreams was the best of the five, the third thought it was the second-best.
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