| Book Review Being, in Love
by Waller R. Newell
The dust-jacket blurb gives us a taste for what is to follow. "This book is the first to tell in detail," we are breathlessly informed, "of the passionate and secret love affair.that lasted for more than half a century." By uncovering this "dramatic love
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| Book Review New Age Baggage Check
by Suanne Kelman
A few years back, the novelist Nicholas Mosley resigned in protest from the jury for the Booker Prize. Why? Because the eligible novels contained no ideas, and he saw that absence as a fatal flaw. I thought of him as I read The Ancestral Suitcase; I
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| Book Review Zeal, Doom, and the Few
by Keith Nickson
There's been some talk of late of that enticing kind called gossip, about a Canadian writer known for-well-over-writing of a delicious kind, and for poetic prose pitched to the same universe-busting intensity as Christopher Marlowe, William Faulkner, and
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| Book Review What the Line was After
by Kenneth Sherman
With the death of Joseph Brodsky earlier this year, twentieth-century Russian poetry comes full circle. It began with Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak-brilliant poets who created their early works in the Soviet Union's relatively benign
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| Book Review An Engagingly Dysfunctional Family
by Diana Shepherd
"I see the long heavy sofa skating across the linoleum and I step out of its path. The sky outside the window is grey and most of the people in the lounge are green. The sofa collides with the wall, seems to consider the situation a moment, then heads
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| Book Review No-New-Found-Man's-Land
by Joel Yanofsky
While the historical novel has always been a popular genre, it hasn't always been well-received by critics and reviewers. I remember a time, not too long ago, when historical fiction was viewed with the same kind of scorn as Harlequin romances. Writers
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| Book Review Tantric Travel
by Helen Hacksel
Arousing the Goddess, as a title, did nothing to attract me to this book. Not that I'm averse to goddesses or to the raising of the long-neglected female principle, but it seems to me that the subject has been overworked in the last few years and that
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 | River
48 pages $12
ISBN: 1550222597
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Book Review Dionysus between Windsor & Detroit
by A. F. Moritz
In River, a female Orpheus in her high vantage-point, the Maple Aparts, gazes over and down at the underworld of Windsor and Detroit and the intervening river of hell. Sometimes she descends there in mind, sometimes in body, seeking her lost loved ones,
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| Book Review Gulf Island Webb
by Ted Whittaker
This book appears as part of a series (in this instance a partial misnomer), "The Writer as Critic", edited by Smaro Kamboureli. Some of the pieces included are not conventionally critical, except in so far as all writing is at bottom about writing. In
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| Book Review Space is Old Hat
by Bruce Meyer
The reissue of Dennis Lee's poetic opus in Nightwatch is something of a landmark, or rather a benchmark, in Canadian literature. On the one hand, there is the expansiveness of a voice that has been called "prophetic", of a poet whose works have had an
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| Book Review The Magic of Happenstance
by Eric Ormsby
Roo Borson's poetry situates itself in the elusive penumbra between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Her poems often speak in the voice of daydream; thus, in Water Memory, her ninth collection, she declares:
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| Book Review The Right Box
by I. M. Owen
Pauline Gedge lives in Alberta, but since her first novel, Child of the Morning, about the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, she has been most at home in ancient Egypt. In her second, The Eagle and the Raven, she veered into early Roman Britain, and I found it
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| Book Review Two-Universe Hockey
by Allen Abel
1. When they are eliminated from the playoffs (or win the Stanley Cup, a 1,000-1 longshot), the Jets will be moving to the noted winter-sports hotbed of Phoenix, Arizona, leaving loving, deserving Manitoba bereft of big-league hockey forever; and,
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| Book Review Belonging in Spite of Yourself
by Shyam Selvadurai
Rienzi Crusz was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada in 1965. His first collection of poetry, Flesh and Thorn, was published in 1974, a time when the presence of non-white writers on the Canadian literary scene was negligible. His writing is thus a
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| Book Review New Poems Out of Sight
by Don Summerhayes
In a broadsheet entitled "How to Write Poetry", which includes the advice, "just try to write down some words & then stop writing/ down words & then later you can start again," Jay MillAr also advises, publish it yrself in small sturdy editions
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| Book Review Horrors & Woodland Beauty
by Libby Scheier
Much of the literature on the Holocaust in the decade or two after the end of the war wondered why Jews had gone docilely to slaughter, instead of offering up resistance. More recent writing has debunked this view-which is not unconnected to other
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| Book Review Conrad Black, Press Lord Redux
by Scott Disher
"The indolent may indeed find fault, but the man of action will seek to rival us, and he who is less fortunate will envy us. To be hateful and offensive has ever been at the time the fate of those who have aspired to empire. But he judges well who accepts
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| Book Review Cons & Credulity
by Derek Lundy
We are all fascinated by the charming, ingenious, and non-violent rogue who bilks his hapless victims with insouciant style or a touch of class. Of course, his victims don't share our admiration, but we don't spend much time sympathizing with them. We
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| Book Review Two or More Lives of My Father
by John Muggeridge
Biographers are among our world's most powerful myth-makers. They tell us what to think about their subjects, and the best-armed revisionists have difficulty getting us to change our minds. Sixty-five years ago, Richard Aldington exposed T. E. Lawrence as
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| Book Review Right to Write Off the Right
by John Pepall
In August 1991, shortly after going to work for Brian Mulroney, Hugh Segal attended the Progressive Conservative Party general meeting in Toronto. There he witnessed "beyond the normal affection for a leader who had brought them to power twice with
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| Book Review Hey, Quit Being So Constructive
by David Eddie
In honour of Neil Postman's Luddism and anti-technology stance, I'm writing this review on a manual typewriter. I hope my editors don't mind. Postman himself has written all twenty of his books with a felt-tipped pen (though I assume he has them typed
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| Interviews Beyond the Miramichi - Maria Kubacki with David Adams Richards
by Maria Kubacki
As far as the literary establishment and the mainstream media are concerned, David Adams Richards is the quintessential regionalist: a gruff, intense, woodsy guy recording the tragic lives of people so much more real (so much poorer, so much less
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| Interviews Hollingsview - John Ayre speaks with Greg Hollingshead
by John Ayre
When Greg Hollingshead received advance notice by phone at his home in Edmonton that he'd won the Governor General's Award for his story collection The Roaring Girl, he acted with the slow deliberation of one of his own characters. He remembers walking up
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| Interviews "Surfing" for Children - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Nyla Ahmad
by Frieda Wishinsky
What do you need to become the editor of two major magazines and the author of a successful new book? You need to be intelligent, savvy, diligent, and lucky. That's true of Nyla Ahmad, the editor-in-chief of Owl and Chickadee magazines and author of the r
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Varieties of Customs Experience. I am always wary when the censorious describe books. Michael Coren describes Dennis Cooper's Frisk (April) with the same venom, tone of disbelief, and quotations out of context that the Bible
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 | Looks Perfect
by Kim Moritsugu,
220 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0864921969
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First Novels First Novels - Fashion, Sharks, and Anger
by Eva Tihanyi
The narrator of Kim Moritsugu's Looks Perfect (Goose Lane, 220 pages, $16.95 paper) is the wonderfully irreverent Rosemary McKinnon, an editor at the fictional Panache fashion magazine in Toronto. Rosemary is smart, single,
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| First Novels First Novels - Fashion, Sharks, and Anger
by Eva Tihanyi
The central metaphor in Dorris Heffron's A Shark in the House (Key Porter, 296 pages, $19.95 paper) is teeth: dentistry, tooth extraction and decay, the murderous teeth of sharks.
Holly Kowalski is a middle-aged widow, materialistic,
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 | Atli's Tale
by Michael Olito,
193 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0888012047
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First Novels First Novels - Fashion, Sharks, and Anger
by Eva Tihanyi
The same can be said of Mike Olito's Atli's Tale (Turnstone, 20 pages, $16.95 paper). Atli, born in Iceland, raised in Canada, and now living in England, is lonely and depression-prone. Up until a month ago, he worked as a miner in the old
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| First Novels First Novels - Fashion, Sharks, and Anger
by Eva Tihanyi
Nyatoro and Ntangatimama are the African protagonists of Migula Miguna's Toes Have Tales (AV Publications, 196 pages, $20 paper). Both are well-educated political refugees who have landed in Canada (fictitiously named the Mississauga Shores).
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| First Novels First Novels - Fashion, Sharks, and Anger
by Eva Tihanyi
But in Fugitive Pieces (McClelland & Stewart, 320 pages, $19.99 paper), Anne Michaels alchemizes anger into art. She tells the story of Jakob Beer who survived the Nazi massacre of his family in Poland when he was seven but, at the age
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Richard Lubbock
At the start of my advertising career in London I had an American boss who would fall to his knees in loud prayer during difficult meetings. That was long ago in the Eisenhower era, but unctuous religiosity remains a standard item
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Alexander Craig
Speaking in Washington, D.C., in March l969, the then Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, said, "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant: No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Alexander Craig
"The existence of a nation," runs one of Ernest Renan's most famous observations, "is a daily plebiscite." It is of course rather more complicated than that, as the great French historian indicates in the rest of this lecture
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Derek Lundy
No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War by Terry Copp, with Richard Nielsen (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 255 pages, $39.99 cloth), is based on the television series of the same title. The series was designed as an antidote to what many
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| At Large At Large
by Michael Coren
A remarkable book has just been published by a rather small academic press. The volume concerns the American south before and during the Civil War, and it deserves to be picked up and distributed by a major international house.
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - The International West Coast
by Douglas Fetherling
In the 1840s, a time of mass credulity not unlike our own, William Miller, an American farmer turned self-ordained divine, convinced his flock that Judgement Day would fall on April 23rd, 1843. The cult members forgathered expectantly.
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