 Note from Editor Note from the Editor
by Olga Stein
In August, 1995, Books in Canada was sold to a new publisher. Soon after, the tide of Proteus, the God of Changing Forms, swept into our offices. We were commanded to change our form,
Read more... |
| | Book Review Nation's Salvage Yard
by Rita Donovan
In The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst, Armin Wiebe returns to Gutenthal, the fictional town of previous novels, a community that comes with its own extensive family tree, phrase book, and "Beetfield Chorus". This "Gutenthal Galaxy" is comprise
Read more...
| | Book Review FOOs and Doodlebugs
by Robert Stamp
The Second World War may well be over, even its fiftieth anniversary celebrations now a thing of the past, but the memories linger on, and on, and on. Personal memoirs of land, sea, and air battles from half a century ago promise
Read more...
| | Book Review Landed Parents
by Gayla Reid
You're probably familiar with the Journey story; in an act of brilliant planning, McClelland & Stewart arranges with James Michener to donate the Canadian royalties from his 1988 novel, Journey, to support emerging writers. The result is the
Read more...
| | Book Review Dagger Descends, Rain Ascends
by Allan Casey
Joy Kogawa has a habit of writing fiction around what's filling up the newspapers. Or is it the papers who follow her lead? In Obasan and Itsuka, she offered a first-hand look at the troubled lives of Japanese-Canadians during World War II
Read more...
| | Book Review Richard Gwyn Stick-handles on Thin Ice
by H Forbes
Richard Gwyn's discussion of the Canadian identity or "the idea of Canada" combines enthusiastic endorsement of Canada as a multicultural nation with frank criticisms of the main policies that have made us what we are. Canada, he says, I
Read more...
| | Book Review Conor Cruises the Millenium and fears for the Elightenment
by Waller Newell
Conor Cruise O'Brien is an attractive type of figure, and an increasingly rare one-a passionate liberal. "Liberal" is my term, not his; Mr. O'Brien prefers to speak of the Enlightenment. So I want to make it clear that by liberalism,
Read more...
| | Book Review A Somewhat Schizophrenic Package
by Tim Bowling
The most important point to make about A Likely Story is that it's not an autobiography, at least not in any conventional sense. In fact, the author himself claims that such a genre is impossible. As a result, the book is entirely free of literary
Read more...
| | Book Review Little Brother is Watching You
by Jack Hope
While we may think ourselves politically savvy enough to recognize Big Brother when he comes, and politically secure enough to stop him, Little Brother is coming in through the back door and stealing our privacy, and hence our freedom,
Read more...
| | Book Review Incompatible Canoeists
by Sharon Butala
This is a hard book to review without giving away too much of the plot: Four people who, for the most part don't much like each other, without sufficient explanation as to why, and no guns, go on what they think is a well-planned and
Read more...
| | Book Review The Czech-American Civil War
by I. M. Owen
This big, sprawling novel of the American Civil War really shouldn't work, but for me it does, triumphantly. The narrative technique Josef Skvorecky used in his previous historical novel, Dvorak in Love, is here continued and futher
Read more...
| | Book Review His Mother's Thumb was Missing
by Jim Christy
Stompin' Tom Connors has given us a road book: the story of his life to the age of thirty-one, before his name became known to people who hadn't yet met him. It is fitting, therefore, that the book is like the road: by turns harrowing and funny,
Read more...
| | Book Review Heaven on Earth - Yours, at a Price
by Bryan-paul Frost
This book on the political thought and influence of Alexandre Kojève is further testimony to the absolutely central place this left-wing French philosopher occupies for anyone who wants to think seriously about the meaning of modernity a
Read more...
| | Book Review After Such Resistance, What Ecstasy
by Keith Garebian
The first sentence of James Hoffman's critical biography of George Ryga tells us that Ryga is "a Canadian playwright". The first sentence of his second paragraph calls Ryga "one of our major Canadian playwrights". Then, just in case we may have dozed
Read more...
| | Book Review New Age, or Bad New Days
by Ursula Franklin
Anyone interested in and confused about the future might be well- advised to read these two books together, or rather side by side, not just one after the other. This idea came to me when I began reading Mindfire and started
Read more...
|  | Louis MacNeice
by Jon Stallworthy, John Stallworthy,
pages $50 CT
ISBN: 0571160190
|
Book Review Louis MacNeice's Strings Weren't False
by Kildare Dobbs
The name of Louis MacNeice, as the Irish poet Derek Mahon recently remarked, "is still overshadowed by those of Auden and Spender-to each of whom he was, in significant respects, a superior poet." Having immersed myself for some months in the
Read more...
| | Book Review So? And?
by David Eddie
In his introduction to the necrofiles, the first collection of Donna Lypchuk's columns for eye weekly, William Burrill tells how he first met Donna Lypchuk. He was managing editor of the paper, looking for writers. One stood out, and he met her
Read more...
| | Book Review Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Disaster
by Cordelia Strube
In 1985 Linda Wilson underwent a double mastectomy on the advice of a surgeon recommended by her G.P. Usually this procedure is performed to remove cancerous growths. But in her case the surgery was to remove recurring fibrocystic lumps in her breasts.
Read more...
| | Book Review Urgent Story-Telling
by Beth Cuthand
"We are only one generation away from extinction," says N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize winning Kiowa author and oral traditions scholar. "If our stories are not passed on, we will die."
Aboriginal story-tellers are well aware
Read more...
| | Book Review Un-Present-Mindedness
by William Christian
"Who the hell is Harold Innis?" is a line in a song of the students at Innis College at the University of Toronto (named in his honour). But when he died in November 1952, he was Canada's pre-eminent social scientist. Although he has a
Read more...
| | Book Review Reserve, & Warts & All
by Laura Byrne
Two new books about influential Canadian architects could not be more different-just as, one suspects, their subjects could not have been more different.
Angela Carr, an assistant professor of art history at Carleton University, h
Read more...
| | Book Review Over Their Shoulders
by Patrick McDonagh
love to read other people's correspondence-a pleasure I no doubt share with many. There is something about that privileged entry into the lives and relationships of others that cannot be experienced in any other form of writing.
Read more...
| | Book Review The Great Recycler
by Anne Denoon
Pierre Berton's sixtieth published book picks up where Starting Out, his first volume of autobiography left off, and begins with his arrival in Toronto in 1947. The postwar metropolis he evokes in My Times was still essentially the Good, with
Read more...
| | Book Review Comfortless Remedies
by Desmond Morton
In 1989, something unusual happened. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a single ideology prevailed around the globe. Christianity, Islam, Marxist-Leninists had only dreamed of world conquest for their version of the truth. Capitalism, in contrast
Read more...
| | Book Review System of Blood
by Clive Cocking
I admire the restraint of Vic Parsons and André Picard in not allowing their writing voices to rise above reasoned condemnation in their complementary accounts of Canada's decade-long saga of tainted blood. Where the colossal botch-up of
Read more...
| | Book Review The Class Clown
by Scott Ellis
Margaret Atwood isn't a scholar, as she notes in the introduction to Strange Things. At least not now; she graduated in the late 60s and never really went the career academic route. Her criticism, Survival, et al
Read more...
| | Interviews The Jane Jacobs of the Arctic - Robin Roger speaks with Jacobs
by Robin Roger
In 1904 Hannah Breece was lowered from a steamship into a rowboat and taken though crashing waves and torrents of rain to the island of Afognak, her first post as a teacher of natives in Alaska. This arrival set the tone for her
Read more...
| | Letters to Editor To the Editor
May I add a necessarily long footnote to Doug Fetherling's welcome column (October) on the life and work of Edward Lacey? Among the early appearances of Lacey's work, I would like to add his work in Varsity Chapbook
Read more...
| | Essays On the Virtues of Analogy
Perhaps it is the same with you. A simple attraction to ecstasy. The lurching desire for communication. To see eye-to-eye and tooth-to-tooth. To merge. To mess with. At the most exuberant phase of conversation, to laugh too loud.
Read more...
| | Essays The End of My Critical Career
The English Canadian literary scene contains two antagonistic parties, writers and critics, locked in a vicious northern embrace. The writers would probably say that critics are the ones who are armed and dangerous in this attempted assault, because the
Read more...
| | Essays New-Found Language
by Richard Greene
Ihave spent much of my adult life away from Newfoundland, but my poetry draws constantly on memories of its landscapes, the cadences of its speech, and the strangeness of its history. My struggle to define a poetic voice has been, in
Read more...
| | Profiles Part of him Always at Work
It's party time in Montreal, a hot summer Saturday night in the Plateau Mont Royal, and a goodly number of Montreal's anglo writers have gathered to give a couple of their own a decent send-off. Spirits are generally high: yes, we are
Read more...
| | First Novels First Novels - A Stay-at-home Travel Agent
by Eva Tihanyi
Every once in a while, a book comes along that astonishes the reader with the sheer enormity of its scope. Keath Fraser's Popular Anatomy (Porcupine's Quill, 584 pages, $24.95 paper) is such a book. Fraser, whose last published
Read more...
|  | Troutstream
by Gerald Lynch,
x, 243 pages $15.95 TC
ISBN: 0679308164
|
First Novels First Novels - A Stay-at-home Travel Agent
by Eva Tihanyi
A similar example, albeit on a far smaller scale, of the part illuminating the whole is Gerald Lynch's Troutstream (Random House, 256 pages, $27.95 cloth). Lynch's literary territory is a fictional Ottawa suburb called Troutstream-an "ordinary
Read more...
| | First Novels First Novels - A Stay-at-home Travel Agent
by Eva Tihanyi
A completely different type of humour infuses Colleen Curran's Something Drastic (Goose Lane, 101 pages, $16.95 paper). In Lenore, her thirty-six-year-old narrator and protagonist, she has created a vehicle for the expression of her
Read more...
| | First Novels First Novels - A Stay-at-home Travel Agent
by Eva Tihanyi
The concept of "home", especially the refugee's struggle to come to terms with the loss of it and the immigrant's need to recreate it, is the theme of K. Linda Kivi's If Home Is a Place (Polestar, 176 pages, $16.95 paper). The novel, although
Read more...
| | First Novels First Novels - A Stay-at-home Travel Agent
by Eva Tihanyi
The Esther in Martha Baillie's My Sister Esther (Turnstone, 120 pages, $16.95 paper) is anything but strong and independent, and her aim is more to escape than to find "home". She is anorexic, promiscuous, and suicidal, and the novel is about
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry - Living and Dying
by Uma Paramaswaran
All of us journey from the womb to the tomb; some are moved to contemplate the womb, some the tomb, and some the journey itself: from incubus to floating gardens and dream museums to shadowy carrying places and timely departures.
Douglas LePan'
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Gift Books - Diversity of Gifts
by Diana Brebner
A few years ago, at my eldest daughter's elementary school book sale, I found a small, simple, perfect book called From Ben Loman to the Sea,published by Nimbus Publishing. It consists of a long folk poem by Lance Woolaver, with,
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Theatre Books
by Ann Jansen
Theatre has a notoriously short memory. That's much of its allure: no two performances are ever alike, you have to be there to catch the moment, and the final curtain call means the end of that version of the play forever. The sheer even
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Allan Casey
After twenty-two books of poetry, numerous awards, and accolades from his fellow poets, Patrick Lane has nothing to prove to anyone, and the writing in Too Spare, Too Fierce (Harbour, 69 pages, $10.95) bears the mark
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Helen Hacksel
The Cenozoic spans the last 75 million years of Earth's history. A time of accelerated evolution, it has produced a multitude of plants and animals; human beings are one of its very recent creations. The post-modernist short stories
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Helen Hacksel
Fabrizio's Passion (Guernica, 235 pages, $18 paper) is Antonio D'Alfonso's English version of his French-language novel Avril ou l'anti-passion (VLB éditeur, 1990), dealing with three generations of an Italian village, and the hunger for a new...
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Lori Hahnel
Hazelle Palmer, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, grew up in Montreal. Out of this background comes Tales from the Gardens and Beyond (Sister Vision, 143 pages, $12.95 paper), her first book of stories. This suite of connected tales is
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Lori Hahnel
Altered Statements (Arsenal Pulp, 133 pages, $12.95 paper) is a collection of short fiction from M. A. C. Farrant, a writer in Sidney, B.C. Hers is a surreal world populated with insane, aggressive grandmas, giant, deformed babies and "
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Carmelita McGrath
There are many kinds of stranger and strangeness in Mary di Michele's Stranger in You (Oxford University Press, 92 pages, $12.95 paper). There is the strangeness encountered when we explore identity, as in "Born in August" or "Cara".
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by John Parr
Al Purdy's collected prose, Starting from Ameliasburg (edited by Sam Solecki, Harbour, $39.95 cloth), provides a profile of the artist as a youngster, young man, and not-so-young man. Although these pieces, sixty-two in all,
Read more...
| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Kathryn Woodward
In Graham Petrie's The Siege (Soho, 193 pages, $29.95), the wine "doesn't travel well...and is never exported." One wishes other regional delicacies could be so easily contained. The setting is something like the former Yugoslavia,
Read more...
| | Constant Fire
by Melissa Hardy,
149 pages $31.95 TC
ISBN: 0887509975
|
Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Kathryn Woodward
Melissa Hardy is the 1994 Journey Prize winner. That story, "Long Man the River", is included in this collection, Constant Fire (Oberon, 149 pages, $27.95 cloth, $13.95 paper). Constant fire was what the Cherokee "kindled" when they built a to
Read more...
| | Puddleduck
by Nancy Hundal, Stephen Taylor,
pages $17 TC
ISBN: 0002240122
|  | Big Boy
by E. B. Lewis, Tololwa M. Mollel,
Houghton Mifflin Company
27 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0395674034
| | My Homework Is in the Mail!
by Becky Citra,
80 pages $4.5 MM
ISBN: 0590244469
| |  | Wild in the City
by Jan Thornhill, Jan Thornhill,
32 pages $16.95 TC
ISBN: 0871569108
| | Mister Got to Go The Cat That Wouldn't Leave
by Lois Simmie, Cynthia Nugent,
32 pages $17.95 TC
ISBN: 0889951276
|  | Tess
by Hazel Hutchins, Ruth Ohi,
32 pages $16.95 LB
ISBN: 1550373951
| |  | Sho & the Demons of the Deep
by Annouchka G. Galouchko, Annouchka G. Galouchko,
32 pages $17.95 LB
ISBN: 1550373986
|
Children's Books Children`s Books - More Irreverence, Please
by Phil Hall
As I write this, my seven-year-old, Brett, is asleep at my back on the futon. For her this is a weekend night on which to visit and sleep over at her dad's. For me this is another opportunity to watch her a while as she dreams and grows, another even
Read more...
| | At Large At Large
by Michael Coren
December of this year marks a literary centenary of a special kind. One hundred years ago, Henry Williamson was born in London. He wrote dozens of much admired novels, including the hugely successful Tarka the Otter, an anthropomorphic
Read more...
| | Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Backward Glance
by Douglas Fetherling
I didn't know until I had dinner with him recently that Greg Gatenby, the director of literary programs at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, and founder of both the International Festival of Authors and the World Poetry Festival,
Read more...
| | Outlook Outlook - Writers on Celluloid
by Brian Bartlett
One of the most original, impressive films to reach North America from Europe this year was Il Postino (The Postman). Its story involves a shy, lovestruck postman who befriends the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in 1952
Read more...
|
|
