| Book Review A Book of Ruin Maintenance
by Jill Cooper Robinson
I am trying to recall the halcyon days before I wore my house around my neck. Of course the exercise is fatuous, since I have lived here at "Fortress Hollis Street."
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| Book Review Cars without Cars
by Ian Allaby
Since ancient times the city builder's sacred duty has been to wrest order from chaos. The architect Moshe Safdie takes up the torch here, to examine North America's most conspicuous urban form, the dispersed megacity.
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| Book Review Better Off in the Ether
by Nikki Abraham
It is easy to be critical in conversation. We read a book, and if it fails to move us, we dispose of it in a dismissive sentence or two over coffee with a friend, and that is that.
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| Book Review Laughter from the Attic
by Richard Lubbock
Whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, hilarity can only be a blessing. Pessimists like to jeer at Fate and so make themselves mightier than the gods. Optimists always laugh because Fate has turned out to be toothless, and therefore merits ridicule.
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| Book Review How Did You Sleep?
This is the winner of the Writer's Union of Canada's annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. And these are the jury's comments:" `How Did You Sleep?' is highly innovative and well-wrought."
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| Book Review The Warlike Chomsky
by Randy Allen Harris
Noam Chomsky lies. Or something. He does something to the truth, something unseemly. My admiration for the man is great, so I've been obliged to generate many theories about his fact-manglings over the years. Maybe it's selective memory.
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| Book Review The Wings are the Things, Wherein...
by Anne Steacy
In the prologue of Carole Corbeil's powerful, haunting second novel, the disembodied narrator's voice says, "The best stuff, my mother always said, happens `off-stage'. Remember this: a plot is a rumour set down.
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| Book Review Epistolary Novelists
by Clara Thomas
In the spring of 1982, Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman were together at Adele's house in Toronto, looking over the large cache of letters that Margaret had written to Adele since 1947, the year their friendship began.
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| Book Review More Hate, Please
by Ian Coutts
Will Ferguson claims he hates Canadians. Can you blame him? Just look at them. Go on, look at them. Look at Pierre Berton with that bow tie and bad comb-over.
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| Book Review Trapping Teenagers
by Margaret Calverley
Holden Caulfield opens The Catcher in the Rye by saying: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like."
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| Book Review A Shabby Genteel Story
by Patricia Heighington
Isabel Mackenzie, the youngest child of Ontario's "Little Rebel", William Lyon Mackenzie, was to become the mother of Mackenzie King, the dour bachelor who became Canada's prime minister. She was born in New York City in 1843.
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| Book Review Loyalist Docudrama
by Dennis Duffy
Hamlet tells Horatio that there may well be more things in the world than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle once pointed out, however, that...
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| Book Review The Spirit of Nichol Lives On
by Paul Dutton
There are two good reasons for celebrating Darren Wershler-Henry's very classy first book. First, there is the welcome appearance of this young Toronto poet's work of the last few years in bound and shelvable form.
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| Book Review A Couch Potato Poet
by Carmine Starnino
With some exceptions (which I'll talk about later), David McGimpsey's poetry debut, Lard Cake, is mostly a collection of slick, self-conscious parodies of TV clichés and pop-culture myths.
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| Book Review Taking Flight
by Richard Greene
Don McKay is a poet of considerable gifts, which are, in general, badly deployed. His poetry has a rhapsodic quality, a rush and tumble, that lends itself to reading aloud, but not always to closer inspection.
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| Book Review Lowry's Last Decade
by Ted Whittaker
When reading these fiercely vivacious, death-by-heartbreak letters, remember a comment about their author by one of his long-suffering friends: "Just one look at the old bastard makes me happy for a week."
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| Book Review Walues Inwestigated
by Gerald Owen
Once upon a time, "values" were not in people's mouths as they are now. So little known were they, that when first imported to North America around the turn of the century, Harvard professors spoke of them as "walues", imitating the English pronunciation.
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| Book Review Oh Brave New Net!
by Mark Wegierski
Derrick de Kerckhove, professor in the Department of French and director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, worked closely with Marshall McLuhan throughout the seventies.
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| Book Review Writers as Teachers
by Judith Adam
Poets, playwrights, and novelists were traditionally held to be genuine teachers. The contributors to this volume of essays try to revive that understanding.
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| Book Review Universities & the Higher Flattery
by Michael Clarke
Probably the last thing the world needs is another tedious book on the idea of the university. Certainly it's the last thing that the world's students need.
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| Book Review Shouting with the Faintest
by John Muggeridge
During Eatanswill election rallies, Mr. Pickwick adopted a policy of shouting with the loudest. Accuse him of cowardice if you like, but under the circumstances, how else was he to prevent his famous bald head from getting bloodied?
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| Book Review Poems with Photographs
by George Johnston
Tamarack & Clearcut declares itself, in its proportions and beautiful cover, to be a book intended for display, which it will no doubt achieve on many coffee tables.
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| Book Review Thanks?
by William Mathie
I read David Solway's book of essays and addresses, and pondered this review, as I began to grade the year's first essay assignments in my second-year university course.
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| Book Review The Serious Buffoon
by John Pepall
John Crosbie is the Mulroney cabinet minister held in the highest regard by the general public and by journalists. He is the only one, except for Kim Campbell and Erik Nielsen (who resigned as early as 1986), to have published memoirs.
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| Interviews A Shapeshifter - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Lynn Crosbie
by Eva Tihanyi
Lynn Crosbie, born in Montreal in 1963, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (her dissertation was on the American poet Anne Sexton). She is a teacher, editor, poet, cultural journalist, and now, with the publication of Paul's Case (Insomniac).
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| First Novels First Novels - Mags, Dogs, Blues, & Calumny
by Eva Tihanyi
Sure to raise the hackles of Toronto's close-knit magazine world is George Galt's highly entertaining roman-à-clef Scribes & Scoundrels (ECW Press, 251 pages, $18.95 paper), the story of Max Vellen, an editor at Berger's
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| First Novels First Novels - Mags, Dogs, Blues, & Calumny
by Eva Tihanyi
The same can be said for Erika Ritter's The Hidden Life of Humans (Key Porter, 376 pages, $19.95 paper), a comic novel that is disappointing, considering the background of the author. Ritter, as a playwright, essayist, columnist, and broadcaster
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| First Novels First Novels - Mags, Dogs, Blues, & Calumny
by Eva Tihanyi
Speaking of wanting out: Margie Taylor, a former Calgary radio host, quit her job at the CBC after two decades in order to complete her novel, Some of Skippy's Blues (Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing, 284 pages, $21.99 paper). The book is set
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| First Novels First Novels - Mags, Dogs, Blues, & Calumny
by Eva Tihanyi
In The Blood Libel (Great Plains Fiction, 265 pages, $19.95 paper), Allan Levine delivers something far more substantial than a murder mystery. The Winnipeg teacher, journalist, and author of three non-fiction books puts his Ph.D. in history to
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Keith Garebian
SCTV was created by self-admitted "children of television", steeped in North American pop culture. Its original cast members, some of whom were alumni of McMaster University, did some of their purest work at the beginning of their
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Derek Lundy
Canadians may be too complacent or stupid to know it, but there's a war on. It's episodic-we're in a lull until the next unity referendum-and there aren't any anglo guerrillas ambushing patrols of the Quebec army from Montreal island rooftops, or
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 | Monogamy
by Adam Phillips,
pages $23.5 TC
ISBN: 0679442642
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Robin Roger
At 216 words, this review is longer than many of the aphorisms coined by Adam Phillips in Monogamy (Pantheon, 144 pages, $17 paper), his collection of thoughts on the coupled condition. Aphorists are intellectual stripteasers-they should be called
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by K G
Mel Gussow's Conversations with & about Beckett (Grove Press, 192 pages, $29.95 cloth) is a concise collection that projects some of Samuel Beckett's personality and genius. Not intended to counter Beckett's numerous detractors or to provoke
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - The Long Way of a Dissenter
by Douglas Fetherling
Few details survive about Daniel Defoe's participation in what, for him and the others involved, was probably the single most influential event in their lives: the Battle of Sedgemoor on July 16th, 1685, when the ragtag anti-Catholic for
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| First Novel Award First Novel Award Shortlist
"Wynveen's use of The Golden Bough is one of the most interesting aspects of Angel Falls.. It is his notable accomplishment that he succeeds not only in holding the reader right to the end of Ben's tragic story
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