| Book Review On the Right Track?
by Richard Perry
I have been assigned this small pile of picture-books at a time when the nation's unification seems more threatened than ever, when university students are graduating into a depression economy that holds no job offerings, when ...
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 | Chrome Suite
by Sandra Birdsell,
pages $18.99 TP
ISBN: 077101452X
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Book Review Channel Crossings
by Larry Scanlan
How can a child feel isolated when she has the company of 10 brothers and sisters? Yet that is precisely what Sandra Birdsell remembers feeling almost 50 years ago in Morris, Manitoba.
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| Book Review Landscapes with Figures
by Alex Newman
Wayne Grady has successfully selected stories that depict the landscape and its inhabitants not as enemies to be feared, and thus subdued, but as entities possessing spirit and intelligence.
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 | Last Magician
by Janette Turner Hospital Staff,
pages $5.98 MM
ISBN: 0771042248
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Book Review A World Disordered
by Carole Giangrande
Three cheers for Janette Turner Hospital, who's written a novel of wisdom that not only "speaks" to us, but also moulds itself to the shape of our experience. Her fictional world, like our real one, has lost its physical and psychic borders.
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| Book Review Richer than Richler
by Arnold Ages
This book is unique both in terms of its modest approach to the Quebec-Jewish relationship and the background of its authors. Jacques Langlais is a Catholic priest and a Quebec nationalist; David Rome is a Zionist and historian.
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| Book Review Nasty, Brutish, and Staged
by R Vaughan
Landscape being metaphor in our national agenda, the hapless denizens of our less forgiving climates should probably expect to become literary props, or at least Primal Forces.
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| Book Review Freedom to Be, or Not to Be
by William Christian
Precisely at the centre of the Western understanding of Christianity is the notion of soul as a moral core that establishes our identity. Since the Reformation this freedom of the soul in its relation to God has been the central fact of our experience.
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| Book Review Quick-Fix Anthologies
by Ann Diamond
This anthology represents John Metcalf's personal take on what is newest and best. And given that Metcalf has laboured long and hard on behalf of Canadian writing, particularly the short story, this is not an unreasonable basis for a selection.
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| Book Review Vaulting Ambition
by Gary Draper
This is one of those fictions that fall somewhere between a loosely structured novel and a set of interlinked short stories.
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| Book Review Not So Common Sense
by Gerald Owen
John Ralston Saul likes Voltaire, dislikes his alleged bastards. He holds that Voltaire and other Enlighteners tried to use reason in the service of humanism, but that they were mistaken, and reason took over.
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| Book Review Laboriously Earnest
by Anthony Rudnicki
As far as the labour left in Canada is concerned, free trade is nothing less than a devilish plot by capitalist governments and cigar-chomping plutocrats to disenfranchise the working class.
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| Book Review Evil Around the Corner
by Michael Coren
The most apposite and indicative comment on this profoundly important, tautly written, and absolutely necessary book is that certain people are attempting to discredit it and dismiss its findings.
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| Book Review Murder, She Wrote
by Laurel Boone
One of the mysteries about mystery books is why certain authors and their protagonists become cult figures.
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| Book Review Convincing Characters
by Cyril Dabydeen
Unplotted, never fully formed, never illuminating character in "sudden" or postcard fiction (as in the Chekhovian manner), contemporary Canadian short stories are often wonderfully and amorphously postmodernist.
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| Book Review The Critic Criticized
by Clint Burnham
My problem is that I don't think the position is really "independent," nor do I think that Keith shows why criticism should be that evaluative art.
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| Book Review Star-Gazing
by George Elliott Clarke
These 91 poems are essentially love lyrics - exaltations of the stars and astronomers and the poeticized ana of space sojourners. Indeed, Cooley accents humanity, not technology.
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| Letters to Editor Letters to Editor
I was amused, too, to read your criticism of our sex panel. You say I failed to provide any literary context (namely Hardy, Lawrence, etc.).
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| Prose/Poetry The Lemon Tree
by Patrick Roscoe
Mitch will finally discover that all gardens become mirage ... and he himself only black shadow upon the burning sand.
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| Profiles Profile - Close to the Truth
by Pat Barclay
John Grube, in his introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of 'The Double Hook' (1969), describes Sheila Watson as "a small, bird-like creature who lives on coffee and cigarettes."
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| Opinion Opinion - A Curious Neglect
by Stan Persky
How is it possible for one of the country's most important writers to publish a substantial volume of theoretical and polemical essays, only to find them virtually ignored or treated for the most part to reviews that are amateurish, and ignorant?
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| Taugon on Red
by Sylvia Night,
Vantage Press, Incorporated
pages $15.95 TC
ISBN: 0533097029
| | The Lions
by Paul Sunga,
256 pages $9.99 TP
ISBN: 0920501702
| | Amnesia
by Douglas Cooper,
240 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 1562827480
| | | Stupid Crimes
by Dennis E. Bolen,
178 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 1895636019
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First Novels First Novels - Gritty Terrain
by Douglas Hill
DONNA O'SULLIVAN's In 1980 Sartre Died (Primary Press, 399 pages, unpriced) comes close to being totally unreadable. The book is printed with inadequate margins, and paragraphs run on for dozens, even scores, of pages. There are too many undeveloped, undifferentiated characters and unexplained point-of-view shifts; there is too much clumsy, turgid writing. What is a reader to do with "He loves me she thinks awkwardly," or "And Claire does have great feeling for Molly I know that I muse"? What mi
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| First Novels Last Words - Cultural Attachments
by Alec McEwen
In his 'Books in Canada' piece about the birth, death, and resurrection of a Toronto coffee-house, the Bohemian Embassy, Keith Nickson accredited John Robert Colombo as its "cultural attache'' during the early years.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - An Author in Search of Some Characters
by Eric Wright
I had been expecting this letter for a few years because there were eight of these books out there now, all of them containing the names of at least one of the boys I knew in Mitcham County School.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - Somewhere over the Transom
by Stephen Smith
Everybody has a novel in them, so the old saw says: but then so too does everybody have a pancreas. The question is, can the book be got out? More important, maybe, can it be published once it is out?
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Bruce Whiteman
This month's group of poetry collections is full of passionate intensity, sequestrated, almost ghettoized in the poor lonely objects that poetry books have become.
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| The Landlady's Daughter
by Edward K. Burbridge,
L A & Chicago River Underground Press
210 pages $25 TP
ISBN: 0963126113
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Laurel Boone
The plot is pure Cinderella. Just as middle-aged Elinor Richardson's life in Toronto comes unravelled, she inherits a Westmount apartment building from her cantankerous aunt.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
These 12 stories follow the life of Annie MacDonald - energetic, quixotic, imaginative, and idiosyncratic - beginning with her childhood in rural British Columbia and an early (and failed ) marriage, and then ...
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Karl Jirgens
Quigley's thematic analysis focuses on guilt, alienation, imprisonment, and prejudice, often in the context of Frye's notion of the "garrison mentality."
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Douglas Glover
Dickason deploys a highly readable style in detailing everything from relatively flimsy speculations on prehistoric Cambodian culture influences on tribes in the Amazon jungle to the intricacies of treaty negotiations and contemporary land-claim cases.
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 | On the Hill
by Heather Robertson,
McClelland & Stewart/Tundra Books
pages $6.98 MM
ISBN: 0771075545
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by George Clark
Maybe one reason why Canada is so hard to govern is that the 3,000 people who keep Parliament Hill running guzzle 50,000 cups of java and chomp 1,200 kilos of 'patates frites' every month.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by George Kaufman
This book has a lot of worthwhile things to say to everyone in our society, especially those on both sides of the current debate over "de-streaming."
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Martin Dowding
Today, after many face-lifts, the Alaska Highway is a far cry from the frontier road it once was. Most of it is paved, and the romance of shattered windshields, punctured gas tanks, and a steady diet of mud and dust is all but gone.
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 | China Lake
by Anthony Hyde,
pages $0 MM
ISBN: 0345376951
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Laurel Boone
By the end of the book, each thinks he knows everything, but neither knows as much as the reader, whom Hyde has made privy to the ruminations of both men.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Michael Coren
Abel tells of his experiences in Germany and Iran, Brazil and Kuwait, Romania and China. And he tells of them with a humanity and an empathy for those he writes about that leave an indelible impression on our hearts and minds.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
Dohaney knows her Newfoundland well, and this familiarity is the strongest and most attractive part of what is otherwise quite an obvious, sometimes creaking, but always determined narrative.
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| Mrs. Mortifee's Mouse
by Linda Hendry,
pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0002237555
|  | Projects for a Healthy Planet Simple Environmental Experiments for Kids
by Shar Levine, Allison Grafton,
96 pages $13.95 PT
ISBN: 0471554847
| | Mother Tree
by Ruth Whitehead, Charles Robinson,
Houghton Mifflin Company
pages $6.5 TC
ISBN: 0816430454
| | | Fiona & the Prince of Wheels
by Sandy Watson,
Orca Book Publishers
128 pages $6.95 TP
ISBN: 092050177X
| | Dragon in the Rocks A Story Based on the Childhood of the Early Paleontologist, Mary Anning
by Marie Day, Marie Day,
32 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0920775764
| | Soapstone Carving for Children
by B. D. Gosse,
pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 0921254318
| | | The Boy Who Wouldn't Speak
by Steve Berry, Deirdre Betteridge,
32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 1550372319
| | Steven's Baseball Mitt A Book about Being Adopted
by Kathy Stinson, Robin B. Lewis,
Firefly Books, Limited
32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 1550372335
| | A Toothy Tongue & One Long Foot Nature Activities for Kids
by Diane Swanson, Warren Clark, Carolyn Swanson,
92 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 1551100223
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Children's Books Children's Books - Encouraging Discoveries
by Janet Collins
Reading has always been my doorway to discovery, my avenue to adventure; with the turning of each page, a new delight is revealed. It's too bad that children often miss such simple pleasures in this age of video.
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| Douglas Fetherling In Memoriam - Adele Wiseman, 1928-1992
by Joyce Marshall
Some years ago I had a curious dream about my friend Adele Wiseman. We were walking single file along the balcony of a church when there was suddenly a gap in the flooring. Adele hopped over it nimbly.
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