Book Review Owning the Place by Mark Abley Karen Connelly has an enviable, somewhat disquieting ability to possess the spirit of a place. Or, at least, to believe this of herself. Read more...
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Book Review Not Job's Comforter by Merna Summers Mistry's portrait of India in the time of Indira Gandhi depicts lives of struggle, exploitation, and desperate loss, suggesting to the reader that when it comes to meting out afflictions, the Hebrew God was a piker compared to Mother India. Read more...
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Book Review Real Symbols by Mark Cheetham Mary Pratt's paintings have fascinated and given pleasure to an increasingly large and diverse audience over the past 25 years. Read more...
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Book Review Irony Gets Ironic by Stan Fogel Hutcheon's strengths are the clarity of her prose and the thoroughness of her research. Read more...
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| Coming Down by Audrey Thomas, 256 pages $14.99 TP ISBN: 0140249842
| Book Review Looking for Betrayal by Lynne Luven Audrey Thomas's new novel trundles readers through the red soil of West Africa and the shifting sands of memory as William's trek of discovery labors through past and present. Read more...
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Book Review Reality Bites by Eileen Manion Taken together, these two novels, translated from the French, provide a sense of the range of experimental fiction. Read more...
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Book Review Good Old Netherworld by Diana Brebner Rosemary Sullivan has come to this biography with her heart and her agenda on her sleeve. She was haunted by the mystery of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Read more...
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Book Review The Artist as Shaman by Pat Barclay With her sincerity never in question, many of Butala's perceptions and insights easily make connections between her individual experience and the "common humanity" she shares with her readers. Read more...
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Book Review L.A., Yorkshire by Richard Perry Robinson makes an 180 degree turn away from Inspector Banks' society of proprieties adhered to and sinned against, to the smogmurky, drug-elated, violence-addicted fantasy world of Los Angeles. Read more...
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| Macken Charm by Jack Hodgins, 320 pages $18.99 TP ISBN: 0771041853
| Book Review Mourning Glory by Glenn Sumi Populated with larger-than-life characters -- colourful loggers, rustic prophets, and powerful women -Hodgins' fictional universe is as distinct as Laurence's Manawaka or Richer's Montreal. Read more...
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Book Review On the Verge by Irene Mock What are the ways in which human beings bear the unbearable -- death, abandonment, betrayal? Read more...
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Book Review With or Without Quebec by Allan Levine Just when you think that nothing further can be said or written about Quebec's often strained and tortured relationship with the rest of the country, along come two new books that tackle the subject from relatively novel angles. Read more...
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Book Review Plain Speaking by Scott Ellis Revieweing poetry in Canada is like being class monitor in a one room, country schoolhouse when the teacher's away. Read more...
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Interviews Hit Single - interview with Leon Rooke by Nancy Wigston Leon Rooke reveals that readers and audiences aren't the same Read more...
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Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor If BiC sees its mission as primarily a combination of information and boosterism for Canadian writing, it should nevertheless be concerned with the prerequisites of credibility upon which any journal's effectiveness in our literary culture depends. Read more...
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Essays Reading the Labels by Elise Levine Coming through Slaughter displays a knowingness of the unspeakable and how we are each freighted with the dark particulars of history, with the obscene, terrible consequences of time and place goose-stepping us from birth to death. Read more...
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Essays A Rare Book Story by Helen Porter Like most writers from the regions Newfoundland writers rarely see their works on the shelves of mainland bookstores. Even in our own province the books are all clumped together under a sign that reads Of Local Interest. Read more...
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Prose/Poetry Half-Right - student writing award winner I've changed. There can be no aloof square holes for crowding round pegs. Or the other way around. I forget how it goes. I'm flexible, I bend now. I can be whatever's needed. A man taught me that. Read more...
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Prose/Poetry Poetry - student writing award winner In your wedding dress, tight across the chest and tinged yellower than the custard tt began as, I could be a continuation. Read more...
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Profiles A Bit of Wallowing by John Degen Christine Stater steps up from the Gutter. Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - Wise Teen Girls by Eva Tihanyi The season has brought with it a huge pile of books with which I've built a tower in the comer of my study. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Denyse OLeary His method is to exhaustively interview staff and inmates, as well as juvenile court judges. In the news business, a good rule of thumb is go to the source, he explains. And that's exactly where things went wrong. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Denyse OLeary The anthropologist Elizabeth Furniss looks at the Indian residential schools from the perspective of the deaths of two children, one of whom died nearly a hundred years ago. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Review - Fiction by Lorna Jackson Like the quasi-moral tabloid photographer who scuttles around in her book, Soderstrom doesn't bother to give the lurid or painful details of contemporary life any more than a single dimension. Read more...
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| The Voyage by Robert MacNeil, 304 pages $32.95 TC ISBN: 0385469527
| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Pat Barclay Informed detail, thoughtful characterization, and scrumptious political tidbits keep the story zipping briskly along, and the contrast between David's predictability and Francesca's impulsiveness provides agreeable suspense. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Lorna Jackson Matthew Hart relies on satire for the condensation and restraint necessary to such an endeavour, but he underestimates the skill satiric prose demands. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Virginia Beaton What Kinsella is focusing on is the way that time is measured in small towns, with special reference to events, especially disasters. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Tim Bowling Most North Americans give little thought to the land on which they live, or to the natural and historical forces that shape their lives. Read more...
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| The Inuk Mountie A Tom Austen Mystery by Eric Wilson, 128 pages $14.95 TC ISBN: 0002243946
| | Follow the Moon by Sarah Weeks, Suzanne Duranceau, 80 pages $21.89 LB ISBN: 0060244437
| | A Child's Portrait of Shakespeare by Lois Burdett, 64 pages $8.95 TP ISBN: 0887532616
| | | The Last Quest of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh the King by Ludmila Zeman, Ludmila Zeman, 24 pages $19.95 TC ISBN: 0887763286
| | Aunt Mary Buttons by Diane J. Jones, Diane J. Jones, 32 pages $11 TP ISBN: 096994070X
| | Melanie Bluelake's Dream by Betty F. Dorion, pages $5.95 TP ISBN: 1550500813
| | | Camilla Gryski's Cat's Cradle With a Friend or by Yourself by Camilla Gryski, Tom Sankey, 32 pages $9.95 TP ISBN: 1550742582
| | The Twilight Marsh And Other Wilderness Adventures by Todd Lee, Jim Brennan, 96 pages $10.95 TP ISBN: 1896095070
| Children's Books Children's Books - Fringe Benefits by Diane Schoemperlen Being well aware of the growing need to compete for their attention, many children's book publishers have taken to packaging their products with related paraphernalia in order to attract the attention of their young readers. Read more...
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Children's Books Young Adult Books - Getting to the Roots by Heather Kirk Unfortunately, children's books often have shallow roots in the soil of immediate social trends and problems, as well as market demands. Finding good books that go deep is difficult. Read more...
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Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - A Riveting Non-person by Douglas Fetherling In 1956, Anthony Frisch, a poet of the day, organized a national writing competition for Canadian high school students, publishing the winning entries in a special anthology called First Flowering. Read more...
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First Novel Award Student Writing Awards - Rising Stars The work of the winners in the fifth year of the country's leading student writing competition shows remarkable complexity, as well as evidence of experience. Read more...
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Outlook Outlook - The Gardener's Shadow by Brian Bartlett When I recently read this passage, it reminded me how rarely literary criticism connects our immediate world as readers -space, lighting, sound, weather, our most recent meal -- with our impressions of the book at hand. Read more...
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