| Book Review Love Unnamed
by Helen Hacksel
"Love" is a word that scarcely makes an appearance in the short stories featured in Promise of Shelter, but it is love-or its failure-that underlies each and every one.
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| Book Review Cardboard & Brimstone
by T. F. Rigelhof
Six sentences into the first chapter of Timequake, his latest book, Kurt Vonnegut writes, "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit...
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| Book Review The Stories of Oh
by Wayne Daniels
The photograph on the cover of Leon Rooke's Oh!: Twenty-seven stories shows the author getting ready to plant a kiss on a charming, moss-flecked girl or deity in stone.
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| Book Review Wonder & Heartache
by Tim Bowling
Often, when I'm reading reviews of contemporary Canadian writing in literary magazines, periodicals, or newspapers, I notice that almost every poet, short-story writer, and novelist is regarded as important.
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| Book Review Vancouver Noir
by Kildare Dobbs
Jim Christy is a free-ranging writer whose last book was about eccentric homesteads in the Northwest Pacific region. This time he indulges nostalgia in a clever pastiche of private-eye romance, set in Vancouver's Chinatown of the Depression.
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| Book Review Brickworks of the Soul
by Jack MacLeod
Maybe three or four times in your life, if you're lucky, a writer will walk right in and hang up his hat in your head, and you know you've got a companion for life.
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| Book Review Grant Map
by Dennis Duffy
"The thesis of great writing cannot be encapsulated into a few smooth phrases.. the purpose of reviewing is not to show that the reviewer is cleverer than the author..
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| Book Review Where are These Voices Coming From?
by Keith Garebian
Watch the words, watch how it happens," advises F. in a koan from Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. What, however, are we doing when we watch words? Are we watching the ordering and patterning of meaning?
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| Book Review More Blood, Please!
by Peter Russell
In a "Note to Political Scientists" at the beginning of this book, Patrick Malcolmson and Richard Myers tell us that their objective is to contribute to a revival of "the traditional Canadian approach".
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| Book Review Art, Anthropology, & Oprah
by Lorna Dawson Knott
How are contemporary debates about the fine arts traceable to a thinker who declared human beings by nature more akin to beasts than to cultivated patrons of the opera?
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| Book Review Not So Freenet
by Henry Lackner
"On July 6 [1993] Justice Francis Kovacs, presiding at [Karla] Homolka's trial, clamped down on the proceedings with an almost unprecedented publications ban. Judge Kovacs' decision was supposed to protect the integrity of the trial process....
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| Book Review The John A. Mythos
by Christopher Moore
He's full of clichés, Creighton. A bit like Shakespeare is dip into the new edition of Donald Creighton's nearly fifty-year-old John A. Macdonald as if it were a new book, and it will seem full of familiar stuff.
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| Book Review The Cruel Teacher
by Jason Hanson
These books are reviewed together because their authors claim that Canadians can better understand Quebec separatism by looking at the American Civil War. Both books are thin and interesting and while neither claims to be comprehensive.
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| Book Review Ten Sets of Neurons Firing?
by Paul Thomson
Reader, before going further, think about the title of this book. Now what did you just do? What is the activity of thinking? Were the title of the book in French, or Chinese, and you a native speaker.
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| Book Review An Unlikely Adventure
by Gerald Owen
Sir William Phips is notable as a persistent but rather ineffectual enemy of Canada and Acadia. He is also remarkable for the parts he played in two transitions into the modern age. As a treasure-seeker, he gave a great stimulus to a new activity.
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 | Slammin' Tar
by Cecil Foster,
288 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 0679308792
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Book Review Spiderbook
by Andrew Faiz
This is a great example, which should be taught in every writing class, of a bad novel. It has pretensions of greatness mangled by the earnest skills of a hack. At half its length with a good dosage of editing and some infusion of art, it could have been
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| Book Review Among the Goths
by John Ayre
There is a lot of aggression in the fencing-theme title and jacket photo of Ripostes, Philip Marchand's first collection of literary essays. In the photo, a sword rests against a fencer's mask in a clean vertical line...
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Bob Davis I am amazed that you included John Muggeridge's apparent rant against "the red menace" in your March issue, and that you did so under the guise of a review of Bob Davis's thoughtful study on the course of Ontario history.
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| Essays Books About the Bad & Beautiful Land
Sometimes when you open one book, you unwittingly find yourself with a month of reading in front of you. That's what happened when my brother-in-law, a transplanted Brit, told me about Jonathan Raban's Bad Land...
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| Essays A Reader from Away - Marnie Parsons on Newfoundland children's literature
Late August and I'm sorting books, clothing-packing for ten months in Newfoundland. My daughter Rachel has been told again and again she's lucky to be going, but rarely seems convinced. Sorting, I think to take on her hesitations too:
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| Essays Critical Condition
"Criticism is the formal discourse of an amateur. When there is enough love and enough knowledge represented in the discourse, it is a self-sufficient but by no means an isolated art.. The approaches to-or the escapes from-the central work of criticism
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| Essays Unfurling the Fern - Clarissa Hurley on Fiddlehead
The fiddlehead is a fern-like plant whose fronds coil tightly in the shape of a violin head. It is indigenous to the eastern provinces, flourishing briefly each spring along the swampy riverbanks of New Brunswick. The harbinger of a new
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| First Novels First Novels - Erupting Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
The Electrical Field (Knopf Canada, 320 pages, $29.95 cloth), by Kerri Sakamoto, is an exceptional novel by an exceptional writer, another example of the quality readers of new Canadian fiction have come to expect from Knopf...
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| First Novels First Novels - Erupting Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
On a much lighter tone: Warren Dunford's Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (Riverbank Press, 255 pages, $17.99 paper) is a playful, entertaining send-up of artistic ambition. Mitchell Draper, twenty-eight, is a gay scriptwriter wannabe moonlighting...
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 | Zack
by William Bell,
176 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0385257112
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Some authors turn out books of uniformly good quality at regular intervals and explore a different field of inquiry each time round. Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley, Diana Wynne Jones, and Robert Westfall are some authors I regularly check the shelves
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Sometimes well-established authors will produce books that would never have been accepted for publication if they had been offered by a person of a lesser reputation. This book is slight even by Munsch standards, yet it may be one of his most appealing.
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Katherine Matthews
In The Faces of Fear, Joan Sandow uses her computer to escape the confinements of her wheelchair. Using the alias "Joanna", she connects with Whizkid (aka Steve Andersen) in a computer chat room.
Both these teens are dealing with pressures:
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Why, oh why, do people insist on putting things into verse when writing for children? Admittedly, children are inveterate users of verse, especially if female, and skipping, ball-bouncing, or doing things with long ropes of elastic bands knotted
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| Children's Books Red Guard and Journal Writing - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Ting-Xing Ye & William Bell
by Frieda Wishinsky
Ting-xing Ye and William Bell were brought up at opposite ends of the world, in societies with different political systems and cultures: Ye in China, Bell in Canada. Chance brought them together in Beijing in the early 1980s and they developed a deep
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
Children shouldn't write books, they should read them. The creative writing they do at school is mainly useful for honing their critical skills and enabling them to enjoy the output of their elders and betters. Of course, every once in a while you
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
As an exercise in communicating a sense of the Canadian north and the flavour of twentieth-century Native life as tasted by a twelve- year-old boy, it is hard to imagine how this book could be bettered. The photographs are ravishing in a low-key way.
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - The Wager
by Douglas Fetherling
Lately I've been reading accounts of the great circumnavigators such as Captain James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, his dynamic French rival in South Pacific exploration. One of Cook's books is particularly wonderful, though it would fall
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