| Book Review Think then Create
by Freida Wishinsky
In illustrating Silver Threads, Michael Martchenko has come full circle. Like the main characters in the book, his mother was a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada. She brought her family here in 1950. He himself was born in France, and was seven
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| Book Review The Iron Cage is Haunted
by Hugh Graham
Meaninglessness is a uniquely modern idea. Before the Industrial Revolution, a world which attributed itself entirely to God could only have taken the concept as a contradiction in terms. But now, it is widely accepted that there has been a decline
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| Book Review Something She's Been Meaning to Tell Us
by Dennis Duffy
No reader of fiction in English needs to be informed that Alice Munro's stories have brought new meaning to the form, that they are distinguished both by complexity and accessibility, that they repay frequent re-reading, and that the more widely you read,
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| Book Review Did Not, Did Too
by Theresa Goldberg
In the summer of 1843, a young girl, barely sixteen, by the name of Grace Marks, was arrested in Toronto for two brutal murders. By nineteenth-century standards, it was an unusually sordid and mysterious crime-a lovely, pregnant, and unmarried housekeeper
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| Book Review X-Rae Vision
by Allan Golombek
One of the best things about From Protest To Power is the joy of reading Bob Rae lecture against the dangers of spending and deficits. It may be an example of an expression he often uses in the book: "Too late smart, too soon old." The phrase seems to be
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| Book Review Even If They Say So Themselves
by Hugh Segal
When the cooks decide to share their philosophy of the kitchen with those who have sat in the restaurant, it is always a worthwhile endeavour. This is an especially valuable effort, because the cooks offer us no respite from the rightness of each recipe,
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| Book Review What Happened to Helen?
by Nella Cotrupi
Having long steeped myself in Northrop Frye's published works, I couldn't help but wonder, as I wound my way through these two volumes of letters, cards, and notes (1,048 pages!) exchanged by Frye and Helen Kemp (his wife-to-be), where the echo of the
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| Book Review This Microcosm is Her Oyster
by Anne Steacy
"Out here," says the inner voice of Oyster's Jess, "where the lone and level red sands stretch as far as the eye can see, I feel as though I could be the sole and final reference point for the very idea of dates and maps and language, such poignant ideas,
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| Book Review Opening Up in Disguise
by Helen Hacksel
The butterfly is a creature of transformation. From its incarcerating cocoon, it graduates to a crawling stage, then to a fragile winged freedom. Charles Foran's new novel reflects this journey from imprisonment to some kind of freedom. The book is
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| Book Review But It's Not Such a Crowded Theatre
by Nathan Greenfield
Given his belief that scholarly culture is a conversation in which all participants say, "Yes, but," Professor Peter Emberley must expect that others who "love" universities will have concerns about parts of Zero Tolerance. Mine have little to do with
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| Book Review At Home in Her Skin
by Pat Jasper
The central metaphor of Rough Skin is one of building up protection against the perils of the outside world. Our skins are what hold us together, define our boundaries and identities as separate beings and, at the same time, being erogenous organs, they a
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| Book Review Fresh-Water Fish out at Sea
by I. M. Owen
In case there's anybody out there who has never read Mavis Gallant, I open the book at random looking for a paragraph that exemplifies her special qualities-the perfection of her style, her acute observation, and her pervasive yet unobtrusive wit. Here's
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| Interviews How to Give Poetic Prose a Good Name - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Anne Michaels
by Eva Tihanyi
Anne Michaels was born in 1958 in Toronto, where she still lives. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond (1991), which won the Canadian Authors Associa
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| Interviews Enact the Wrestle - Michael Redhill speaks with Dennis Lee
by Michael Redhill
In May of this year, I suggested to Dennis Lee that the time might have come for a fresh, mid-stride summing-up of his work, considering that his new and selected poems, Nightwatch (McClelland & Stewart), had just come out. The result was two full morning
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Michael Coren's article on me and McClelland & Stewart's publishing policy (ironically entitled "Responsible?") deserves a response, which I hope will receive the same prominence as Mr. Coren's surprising accusations.
I wonder if Mr. Coren
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| Essays Val Clery & the Original Books in Canada
I was lucky enough to have Val Clery as a friend for more than thirty years. For the first twenty or so of those years, I always had a hard time
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| Essays In Memory of Val Clery
(This, like the preceding memoir by Douglas Marshall, is a speech spoken at Val Clery's memorial service.)
DEAR friends, friends of Val Clery,
This is a day to put aside grief. We have been lucky, exceptionally lucky, to have taken part in th
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| Essays A Quarter Century of Decline
Just as the paranoid may have real persecutors, the conservative may be right when he says that life was better twenty-five years ago. Or rather, in this part of the Canadian woods, not better, but there was more hope. The loss of hopefulness is worse
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| Essays The Contemporary Anybody
What explains poetry's present anaemia and neurasthenia? Suffocating under the weight of its own importance, it hovers between life and death, a patient aetherized to flatline, a pale ghost of its former self.
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| Essays Children`s Books
by Fraser Sutherland
For more than three decades running I have re-read Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol on or around December 25th. Perhaps doing so has been an escape from the experience or memory of a generally unhappy occasion. Though it had the usual trappings
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| First Novels First Novels - Stolen China, Stolen Dory
by Eva Tihanyi
It's no easy thing to write a political novel that never forgets that it's first and foremost a novel. In Stolen China (McClelland & Stewart, 254 pages, $26.99 cloth), John Fraser has succeeded in doing exactly
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 | Gaff Topsails
by Patrick Kavanagh,
pages $19.95 TP
ISBN: 0920953956
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First Novels First Novels - Stolen China, Stolen Dory
by Eva Tihanyi
Gaff Topsails by Patrick Kavanagh (Cormorant, 431 pages, $19.95 paper) is an introspective, dense, brooding work that follows a handful of characters in a Newfoundland village through one day, June 24th, 1948. It is the summer solstice and
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 | No More Worthy
by William Chalmers,
80 pages $14.95 CT
ISBN: 0889821577
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First Novels First Novels - Stolen China, Stolen Dory
by Eva Tihanyi
In No More Worthy (Oolichan, 176 pages, $14.95 paper), William Chalmers fleshes out an actual event that took place in 1912 in the Okanagan Valley and, in the process, turns it into a symbolic tale, one that resonates: fact imbued with the
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| Chokecherry
by Norma Hawkins,
144 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 0778010392
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First Novels First Novels - Stolen China, Stolen Dory
by Eva Tihanyi
Chokecherry by Norma Hawkins (Oberon, 112 pages, $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper) is the first-person account of Becky Hastings's adventures as the wife of a newly ordained Anglican minister in a small Saskatchewan town. The often humorous anecdotes
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| First Novels First Novels - Stolen China, Stolen Dory
by Eva Tihanyi
The White Rose (The Day the World Looked Up) by Theodore Norbert Bromley (Reign of Blessings, 194 pages, price unknown, paper) is the sort of book that gives the term "New Age" a bad name. Stanley, growing up in a devout Catholic family in
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 | Simple Machines
by Adrienne Mason, Deborah Hodge, Ray Boudreau,
32 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 1550743112
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Kevin Pitt
Deborah Hodge's series on "Starting With Science" is a worthwhile classroom supplement for science programs from grades one through five. Younger students would be better served by direction from their own teachers, but the series will do well as a source
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Diana Halfpenny
The word Christmas invariably conjures up a stock collection of images that have gradually become part of our idealization of that particular special day: the Christ child radiating love from his manger in the stable; Santa Claus flying through the night
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Olga Stein
There is a genre of Russian folk-tales that have as their starting-point a simple and foolhardy peasant boy called Ivan-"little foolish Ivan", or in Russian, Ivanushka durachek. Young Ivan, considered a simpleton even by his closest relations,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Peter Bain
This is the story of a man who lived 5,300 years ago. When his almost perfectly preserved remains were discovered in a glacier in the Alps, scientists gained a unique opportunity to study pre-Bronze-Age civilization. Unlike most archaeological finds
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Sylvia Lassam
The dust-jacket blurb for The Vision Seeker states that this "is a book for all people and all ages." It is, however, sure to be marketed and classified as a children's book; this review will deal with it as children's literature, and in this
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Annette Goldsmith
A new book by the Montreal children's writer Christiane Duchesne is always a treat; one in English translation is a rarity. Duchesne is best known for her award-winning novels, such as La vraie histoire du chien de Clara Vic (1990) and La bergèr
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 | The Dust Bowl
by David Booth, Karen Reczuch,
32 pages $16.95 TC
ISBN: 1550742957
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Bart Snow
The Dust Bowl is a sensitive story of three generations of a prairie farming family and their courageous struggle to survive a drought that echoes the devastating "Big Dry" a half-century earlier in the 1930s. Karen Reczuch's illustrations are
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Janet McNaughton
Comic novels that don't quite work aren't much fun to read. One of Gordon Korman's most recent books, Why Did the Underwear Cross the Road?, was like that. A group of kids competed in a good deed contest. Their efforts to do good got worse and
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Sylvia Lassam
Here is a retelling of the wonderful Grimm's fairy-tale in which a king, puzzled by his twelve daughters' exhaustion in the morning and the sorry state of their dancing shoes, promises the hand of one of them to the suitor who can solve the mystery.
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Susan Charron
It is 1096, at the time of the First Crusade. The young hero, Theobald, is off to liberate Jerusalem from the Turks. He has just been knighted, and is honourable, loyal, and courageous. Other main characters are Amalric, another young knight, and Emma,
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| At Large At Large - The Greatest Story Ever Informally Told
by Michael Coren
We dwellers in the contemporary world have an apparently inexorable need to indulge in hyperbole. How we exaggerate! The greatest, the best, the finest, the most successful. The literary context is no different. What we consider to be be
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - The Antidote
by Douglas Fetherling
There's a cogent essay on the art of reading in The Merry Heart (McClelland & Stewart, $32.95), the posthumous collection of Robertson Davies's talks and pieces, ably edited by Douglas Gibson. Permit me to quote from it.
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