| Book Review Lichee Nuts & Yiddish
by Jennifer Hunter
Norman Flax is having writer's block. By day he sells typewriters with Yiddish keyboards. By night he tries to craft fiction. But this particular night the story he is trying to write isn't working and Lola, his girlfriend, is attempting to help.
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| Book Review Great, Moping Bass
by Michael Greenstein
Expelled with Adam and Eve, flying with Daedalus and Icarus, or tunnelling under with Orpheus, we leave our Garden, even if our Garden never quite leaves us. So Kenneth Sherman reminds us in Clusters.
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| Book Review Eating One Another in B.C.
by Brian Brett
How does that line go, the one from Sweeney Todd? "The history of the world, my sweet-is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." I can't think of a quote more appropriate for Jim McDowell's Hamatsa.
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 | Asphodel
80 pages $12.99
ISBN: 0771073542
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Book Review Dead Guides
by Tim Bowling
The poems in Michael Redhill's fourth collection are serious, mournful, technically accomplished meditations on death, memory, and the essential absence of meaning in contemporary life.
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| Book Review A Rough Crossing
by Pat Jasper
In the foreword to his Obra poética, Jorge Luis Borges talks about literature's magic ability to "recover a past or prefigure a future." he says.
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| Book Review It's sick that he reads?
by Ann Charney
Among the minor pleasures of late night television is the occasional offering of a forgotten wartime propaganda film. The attraction here lies not in the cinematography, or the predictable plot, but in the depiction of the enemy.
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| Book Review Crone vs. Crone
by Alison Hancock
Virgin Territory, Betsy Struthers's latest poetry collection, explores the themes of old age, love, and marriage. The first half of the book (the section called "Encountering the Crone") is dominated by the figure of the crone.
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| Book Review A Serious Sex Worker
by Belinda Beaton
The whore who decides to write her memoirs is not a new publishing phenomenon. Often such works inadvertently reflect the social concerns of their times.
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| Book Review Royal Canadian Mounted Imagination
by Tod Hoffman
Canada's West was not subdued by military force; it was pacified by the police. The Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP), the original incarnation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was charged with a daunting challenge: to bring law to defiantly law.
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| Book Review Loyalties & Betrayals
by Keith Garebian
At thirteen, Nathan Abramowitz asks his grandfather, "What's a good Jew?" It is a question that echoes through this satirically toned two-act play that deals with friendship, loyalty, and growing up.
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| Book Review Flog & Flight
by Michael Fitz-James
Felix Morsom, the principal character in John Mortimer's latest book, is a moderately successful mid-level novelist who lives in the fading English seaside resort town of Coldsands.
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| Book Review Straw into Gold
by Henry Lackner
There are two kinds of Political Correctness. The "Cultural Left" polices a devout anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia. The "Fiscal Right" polices adherence to a "competitive" global marketplace; government and labour force downsizing.
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| Book Review More than War Stories
by Diana Kuprel
In his 1962 essay "Commitment", Theodor Adorno wrote that while "to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz [was] barbarous," literature must resist this verdict, for "the abundance of suffering tolerates no forgetting." Adorno, like many others.
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| Book Review Oval Office with Narcissi
by Charles Levin
"Our increased familiarity with the child's experiences vis-ŕ-vis his parents might well be a factor.that in turn has all kinds of political ramifications. The understanding of the intensity and meaning of narcissistic rage.
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| Book Review Bills & Spies
by Kildare Dobbs
From Allen W. Dulles to William J. Casey, directors of the CIA have insisted that the U.S. spy agency began with the New York lawyer William J. Donovan.
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| Book Review High-Stakes Surrealism
by Ricardo Sternberg
Serendipity: in 1951, on a trip to Brazil, the poet Elizabeth Bishop suffered an allergic reaction to the cashew fruit; while recovering she fell in love with a Brazilian and so remained in Brazil, where she learned Portuguese.
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| Book Review The Light-Fingered Samuel Smiles
by Ted Whittaker
Two American book distributors, Loompanics and Paladin, sell titles that ought to be mailed only in plain brown wrappers: to say it brutally, many of their books explain how to commit crimes.
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| Book Review Lives of the Quasi-Siblings
by Ray Robertson
When my first novel was accepted for publication and I answered the inevitable question of "Where?" with "Cormorant Books," most people would blink a couple times, stare back at me a good bit, scratch their heads.
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| Book Review Not Too Canadian to Travel - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Sharon Siamon
"It's too British! It's too American! It's too Canadian!" Those remarks have repeatedly been voiced by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. According to a recent article by Jane Whitehead in the well-respected magazine The Horn Book,
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| Book Review Old Nick's Modes
by Henry Higuera
Niccolo Machiavelli is an enigma wrapped in a household name. For three hundred years after his death in 1527 he was regarded as a deep threat: a powerful, indeed demonic atheist and a persuasive teacher of evil.
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| Book Review Count & Rule!
by Nathan Greenfield
Professor Alfred Crosby is much too humble when he writes in his introduction that this book is about the preconditions for the "amazing success of European imperialism."
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| Interviews Writing Poor - Phil Jenkins speaks with Frank McCourt
by Phil Jenkins
"If you have anything to say, shut up" is perhaps not the best advice to give a fledgeling Pulitzer Prize winner, but that was what his grandma told young Frankie McCourt, on the morning of his first Catholic communion.
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| Interviews Ulysses in the Outsports - Sandra Gwyn speaks with Patrick Kavanagh
by Sandra Gwyn
One of the most remarkable first novels to appear in recent years is Patrick Kavanagh's Gaff Topsails, a poetic Joycean portrait of a day in the life of a small Irish Catholic outport in Newfoundland.
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| Interviews The Only Skin She Was Given - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Margaret Gibson
by Eva Tihanyi
Margaret Gibson, born in 1948, grew up in Toronto. She received instant acclaim on the publication of her first collection of stories, The Butterfly Ward (1976). One of the stories from that collection , "Making It", was made into the movie Outrageous.
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Despite having published seven books I have never before replied to a reviewer's comments. The review by Douglas Fetherling of The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 unfortunately
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| Essays Writing Books for Children
Writing books for children is hard on the ego. Many adults, the ones who don't read children's books and so know nothing about them, think that what we children's writers do is "easy", or a "nice little hobby", or a fine way to "get your feet wet in the
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| Essays When in Doubt, Blame the Schools
Education is a soup that's always on the boil. Open the Globe and Mail or Books in Canada, and you've got a good chance of finding an article about schooling or a review of the latest books on the subject.
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| First Novels First Novels - Bernardo & Everest
by Eva Tihanyi
At the time of this writing (mid-October), Lynn Crosbie's Paul's Case (Insomniac, 186 pages, $18.99 paper) has already caused a furor because of its subject-matter: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, surely two of the most notorious
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| First Novels First Novels - Bernardo & Everest
by Eva Tihanyi
On a much less serious note, there is Tacones (Anvil Press, 130 pages, $11.95 paper) by the twenty-two-year-old Todd Klinck, the winner of the 1996 Three-Day Novel Contest. "Tacones" is Spanish for high heels and is the name of a fictional downtown
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| First Novels First Novels - Bernardo & Everest
by Eva Tihanyi
A Deathful Ridge (Mosaic, 138 pages, $16.95 paper) by the Nova Scotia poet J. A. Wainwright is a small gem of a novel reminiscent of Timothy Findley's The Wars, to which it owes an obvious debt in both theme and form. Wainwright reconstructs
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| First Novels First Novels - Bernardo & Everest
by Eva Tihanyi
The final novel for consideration this month is Robin S. Sharma's The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (HarperCollins, 198 pages, $24 cloth). Its subtitle speaks volumes: A Spiritual Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny.
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Annette Goldsmith
Like those Canadian Library Association posters that show celebrities posing with a special book, Everybody's Favourites appeals to readers' curiosity about how books inspired someone famous. Arlene Perly Rae, a prominent literacy advocate,
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Gillian Chan
Margaret Wild's latest picture-book has that rare quality of appealing to readers of all ages. The plot is simple, describing a visit that the unnamed narrator and his younger sister, Naomi, make to their Grandma, who lives in a large house with
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 | Angel Tree
by Robin Muller,
pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 0385255608
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Denise Gordon
Kit, who is apprenticed to the evil blacksmith Grimshaw, is devoted to a dying tree by the smithy. While attempting to mend a gouge in the bark, inflicted during one of Grimshaw's violent outbursts, Kit is visited by the angel who planted the tree as a
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - A Shining Contrarian
by Douglas Fetherling
When journalists are asked, as they frequently are, what great figure of the past underlies their profession like a watermark, most will name either H. L. Mencken or A. J. Liebling, both American cranks of the century just ending, though enjoyable,
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