| Book Review A Foreword to Friendship Deconstructed
by J Owen
Politics of Friendship (Politiques d'Amité), the first major work of political theory by the French deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, explores a topic that has been sorely neglected by political theorists in recent years. Typically
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| Book Review About the Writing Life
by Ray Robertson
Biographies about authors still alive tend to have, ironically, a certain lifelessness about them. Ironically, but not all that surprisingly. To begin with, there is the simple fact that all sorts of things that were or still are a part of the subject
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| Book Review The Great Tourist Meets the Moderns
by Bert Archer
Modernism's our Ancient Greece. The ideas and the writers and the books we have, chiefly American and British, from the second, third, and fourth decades of this century provide a closer and more reasonable example of the sort of glare a group of thorough
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| Book Review Weirdly the woman
by John Ayre
When Greg Hollingshead won the 1996 Governor General's Award for his story collection The Roaring Girl, there was some question whether he was up to the demands of a full-length novel. While he did publish a short comic novel, Spin Dry, in
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| Book Review Between Sheets Air - Re-tuning language
by Alana Wilcox
The two strings tautened, kin unravelling the ways they used to be heard. Barbara Nickel, "Sonata II in A-Major"
Tauten and unravel-this is what the words of a good poem do. The poet diverts language from its usual
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| Book Review Board games
by John Muggleridge
"Wheat Board becomes voluntary. Go ahead four spaces." I passed on to my kids the politicized Snakes & Ladders "board" game that arrived in the mail at our farm magazine's office the other day from the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.
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| Book Review Bravely Broking the Yankee Doodle Dandy-O
by Kenneth Stickney
The nineteenth-century author, William Kirby, famous as the author of The Golden Dog and other novels, recalled a day in his youth when he sat fishing on the shore at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Beside him sat a veteran of the War of 1812.
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| Book Review Cobbling Modernity
by Hugh Graham
"Plus ca change..." The present and future are cobbled out of the past. Innovators ransack the old. Iconoclasts look back with reverence. `The radical', to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, `is tomorrow's reactionary'. Nothing is truly new, nor is anything new
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| Book Review Coming Uppers
by Judith Fitzgerald
There's nothing quite as invigorating for a middle-aged dame as getting on the blower to shoot the breeze with a bunch of rookie upstarts about something as putatively useless as poetry.
"April was the kewlest month,"
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| Book Review Contact, Compromise or Complicity
by Tod Hoffman
In international relations there's usually a profound gap between what's right and what's done, reflecting the gap between what's ideally just and what's in a state's narrow perception of its immediate self-interest. Not to argue that this is how it
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| Book Review Epistolary Contraband - bearing witness to remaining human
by Maria Kubacki
Krystyna Wituska was nineteen years old and at finishing school in Switzerland in the summer of 1939 when the winds of war were blowing over Poland. A privileged, spoiled child, she nevertheless demonstrated integrity and courage by coming home to face
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| Book Review Putting the Pieces Together Again
by Allan Levine
Curiously enough, Pierre Berton's long journey on the road to becoming a national icon began with little fanfare. As he recalled in a January 1962 Toronto Star column, reprinted in this witty and engrossing collection of his writings, it was during
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| Book Review Recovering a Canadian Archaeology
by M. T. Kelly
One of the earlier recorded hesitations about using the word "discovery" comes from the late nineteenth century, when David Hanbury, a Victorian traveller in the "barren ground" of the Northwest Territories, expressed disquiet at using the term. He compla
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| Book Review Telling History Artfully
by Norman Ravvin
It is ironic that Steven Spielberg, who loves to tell children's stories, shares responsibility for the recent reconsideration of two of the most difficult events of our era. His treatment of the Holocaust in Schindler's List, and of the American
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| Interviews On Belonging and the Beehive - Interview with Gail-Anderson-Dargatz
by Eva Tihanyi
Born in 1963, Gail Anderson-Dargatz grew up near Salmon Arm, B.C., in the lush lake country known as the Shuswap. While attending the University of Victoria, where she is completing a degree in creative writing this year, she met Floyd
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| Interviews Translating the Terrain of Memory - Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba speak with Eva Hoffman
by Diana Kuprel
Eva Hoffman emigrated to Canada from Poland with her family in 1959. They settled in Vancouver. A few years later, she made the move to the U.S. to pursue her studies. She taught literature at Harvard and then worked for
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
It may seem churlish for the publisher to respond to any review as glowing as Michael Peterman's review of Broadview's edition of Set in Authority. But I would like to assure potential readers that "the one
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 | My Year of Meats
by Ruth L. Ozeki,
Viking Penguin
384 pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0140280464
|  | The Handless Maiden
by Loranne Brown,
484 pages $32.95 TC
ISBN: 0385257023
|  | Strange Heaven
by Lynn Coady,
216 pages $17.95 PT
ISBN: 0864922302
| |  | Blood Girls
by M. Cook,
205 pages $16.95 PT
ISBN: 1896300286
| | Nerve
by Barbra Leslie,
160 pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 1896356192
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First Novels First Novels - Bloodlines
by Eva Tihanyi
"Change one thing. The sanctioned family memory, even the police report, states that the gun went off by accident. I know better." With these intriguing opening lines Loranne Brown sets the pace for her exceptional debut novel, The Handless Maiden
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| First Novels First Novels - Bloodlines
by Eva Tihanyi
Another excellent debut is the oddly titled My Years of Meats (Penguin Canada, 362 pages, $33.99 cloth), by Ruth L. Ozeki. It is the interlocking story of two women, Jane Takagi-Little, a "documentarian" based in New York, and Akiko Ueno,
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| First Novels First Novels - Bloodlines
by Eva Tihanyi
Yet another strong narrator appears in Lynn Coady's Strange Heaven (Goose Lane, 216 pages, $17.95 paper) in the form of Bridget Murphy. Bridget, almost eighteen, is hibernating in the psychiatric ward of a Halifax children's hospital after
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| Blood Girls
by M. Cook,
205 pages $16.95 PT
ISBN: 1896300286
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First Novels First Novels - Bloodlines
by Eva Tihanyi
Chances are that, because it is published by a relatively small press, The Blood Girls (NeWest, 211 pages, $16.95 paper), by Meira Cook, will not get the attention it deserves. Cook is a poet who immigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-six from
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| Nerve
by Barbra Leslie,
160 pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 1896356192
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First Novels First Novels - Bloodlines
by Eva Tihanyi
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Nerve (Gutter Press, 142 pages, $15.95 paper), by Barbra Leslie. Nerve is a series of short episodes focused on the sexual exploits of Evelyn, who, starting with the seduction at fifteen of her
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by M. T. Kelly
Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands, by Malcolm Waldron, is the story of the 1923 overwintering by John Hornby and James Critchell-Bullock in the "barren ground" of the Northwest Territories.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Bernard Kelly
Filippo Salvatore is the author of a play called La Fresque de Mussolini, the fresco in question being one painted on the vault of the Montreal church, Madonna della Difesa, showing Mussolini on horseback surrounded by his supporters.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Bernard Kelly
This special issue of the B.C. journal, Raddle Moon, is devoted to contemporary French poets whose work has not been been translated into English. It began in a "scrapbook" that Stacy Doris kept whenever she visited France. Once this collection
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Bernard Kelly
There is a curious split in the performing persona of Sandra Shamas as seen in A Trilogy of Performances. Her tone can be aggressively angry or mordantly mocking, as when she skewers Cosmopolitan magazine and Helen Gurley Brown,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Virtual reality is nothing new. Ever since the first storyteller of prehistory held the first listener enthralled, the power of imagination has given everydayness the extra dimension that makes it worth paying attention to.
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Bruce Bartlett
Lois Burdett's Shakespeare books just keep on coming: four to date (those above, plus a Midsummer Night's Dream), as well as a mini-biography of the Bard. They all have a structure of three elements: (1) illustrations on every page,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Margo Beggs
There are picture-books. And there are how-to books. And occasionally, publishers attempt a little cross-fertilization with the how-to picture-book. Beaver the Gardener fits into this category. In the fourth book of a series from Groundwood,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Jeanette Clark
Eric Walters has what every politician would kill for: name recognition. Here's a guy who's won the Silver Birch Award twice, and as everyone knows, it's kids-38,000 of them this year who vote for the winners-not adults who know what's best.
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Glazier
Outstanding collections of nursery rhymes are so numerous that I approached Kady MacDonald Denton's new collection with reservations. What more can be done with nursery rhymes? But perhaps they are an inexhaustible field,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Mary Ranni
Jean Little is an award-winning, natural-born storyteller with more than twenty books to her credit. Her latest offering, What Will the Robin Do Then? Winter Tales is a collection of twenty-two poems and eleven short stories that are grouped
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Stalking the Stalkers
by Douglas Fetherling
In 1990, two prospective literary biographers, both new to the genre, were competing to see who could come out first with a life study of Elizabeth Smart. An expat Canadian much of her life, Smart wrote By Grand Central Station
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