| Book Review Mazing Grace
by Clara Thomas
On the final day of their two-week honeymoon tour of England, Larry and Dorrie Weller were taken to Hampton Court Palace. There Larry lost himself for an hour in one of the world's most famous mazes.
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| Book Review Klein's True Heir
by Norman Ravvin
Although a generation of postwar Canadian Jewish poets points to A.M. Klein as their literary father, it might be fair to argue that there has been little true continuity between Klein's most Jewish poems and the work of his younger admirers.
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| Book Review George Grant, Subversive
by George Elliott Clarke
Debuting his elegant examination of biblical imagery, The Great Code, Frye deems the Bible "a huge, sprawling, tactless book" sitting "inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage.frustrating all our efforts to walk around it."
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| Book Review MuchCanPopCultLit
by Mary Dickie
Canada is not widely suspected of possessing its own brand of pop culture. Wherever rock and roll came from, it certainly wasn't The Great White North. Like it or not, the same can be said for television, comic books, surfboards, B movies, TV dinners.
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| Book Review Minefield of the Soul
by Robin Roger
"The history of psychiatry is a minefield," writes Edward Shorter, the Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
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| Book Review Lone Star Comes North
by Derek Lundy
Carla Hartsfield is a classical musician as well as a poet, and it shows. Her poems express the most raw and elemental human emotions with an elegant precision. She writes variations on the theme of pain-separation, death, loss, failure, exile.
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| Book Review Life Force & Quirks
by Nikki Abraham
The trouble with a party of eccentrics is that in the absence of regular people, they all seem ordinary. Encountered at an office party, each offbeat character would appear delightfully quirky and charming to anyone who appreciates originality.
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| Book Review Whale Shortage
by John Ayre
By any standard, the fiction of James Houston is a quixotic achievement. With his novels of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natives clashing with white outsiders.
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| Book Review Un Genre de Mon Pays
by Bernard Kelly
And how would you translate "Nous prîmes un bon whisky bien tassé, bien glacé"?
Philip Stratford once wrote, of translators, that "blinded by proximity to their subject, swayed by politics and history, hamstrung by an inevitable, natural, linguistic.
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| Book Review Class-Conscious Prehistory
by Hugh Maclean
For many years it was common knowledge among North American Slavists that there existed an extraordinary dissertation on the genesis of War & Peace, submitted at Columbia University in 1965 by Kathryn B. Feuer (1926-92).
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| Book Review Chainless Mind & Satin-Edged Lapels
by David Donnell
Wilfrid Laurier was the first francophone or Canadien prime minister of Canada. He had considerable style and flourish, but he does not summon up anything like the immediate and palpable quality of John A. Macdonald.
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| Book Review The Oppressive Speed of Modernity
by Michael Stickings
Something unexpected happens in section 26, the central section of Slowness. Milan Kundera not only pauses to consider his role as author and narrator; he also suspends the fiction to transmit his intentions to his readers.
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| Book Review Before & After Markets
by Henry Lackner
Marxism prophesied the death of capitalism, a system "containing within it the seeds of its own destruction." Yet it is Marxism that has died: both as a political reality, and as an ideology that one can afford to take seriously.
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| Book Review Compelling Offer
by Michael Fitz-James
Paul Theroux's latest novel is set in 1996 Hong Kong just before the "Chinese take-away", as the local Brits call it. Our forty-two-year-old hero, Neville Mullard, goes by the nickname "Bunt" (from the nursery song "Bye Baby Bunting").
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| Book Review Away & Back to Manawaka
by Fraser Sutherland
The first thing to be said about this reasonably candid biography is that Margaret Laurence's children deserve credit for allowing it to come about.
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| Interviews From District Six to a Wendy House - Karen Shenfeld on Tatamkulu Afrika
by Karen Shenfeld
The South African poet Tatamkhulu Afrika began to practise his craft in 1987, when he was sixty-six years of age. He had written his first novel, Broken Earth, when he was only seventeen.
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
I was very disappointed in the review of Charles Lillard's splendid Shadow Weather (May) and wondered at the wisdom of pairing up such a passionate, bracing collection of poetry with a reviewer so obviously I
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| Essays Have You Treasure on Your Shelves?
Last winter amidst all the hype surrounding the movie version of The English Patient, a Toronto journalist confessed to his readers that he had not enjoyed the novel. His copy had ended up in a garage sale.
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 | Opium Dreams
by Margaret Gibson,
pages $19.99 TP
ISBN: 0771033273
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First Novels First Novels - Eyes Peeled
by Eva Tihanyi
Opium Dreams (McClelland & Stewart, 240 pages, $19.95 trade paper), by Margaret Gibson, is a first novel, but Gibson is by no means a new figure on the Canadian literary landscape. The novel follows four short story collections, the first
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| First Novels First Novels - Eyes Peeled
by Eva Tihanyi
Although Linda McNutt's Summer Point (Cormorant, 158 pages, $16.95 trade paper) is a much less ambitious and successful work, McNutt, a Nova Scotia poet and playwright, puts both these aspects of her background to good use. In spare, suggestive
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| First Novels First Novels - Eyes Peeled
by Eva Tihanyi
I'll Buy You an Ox (Nimbus, 340 pages, $17.95 trade paper), by Betty Boudreau Vaughan, is also a female coming-of-age story set in Nova Scotia, but that's where the similarities to Summer Point end. Boudreau Vaughan chronicles the adolescence
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 | Leaving Earth
by Helen Humphreys,
Henry\Holt#& Company, Incorporated
244 pages $23 TC
ISBN: 0805059571
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First Novels First Novels - Eyes Peeled
by Eva Tihanyi
Readers who are interested in aviation will be especially drawn to Helen Humphreys's Leaving Earth (HarperCollins, 214 pages, $24 cloth), the story of two fictitious aviatrixes, Grace O'Gorman, already a legend, and her co-pilot, the much less
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 | Black Wine
by Candas J. Dorsey,
285 pages $22.95 TC
ISBN: 0614069122
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First Novels First Novels - Eyes Peeled
by Eva Tihanyi
Black Wine (Tom Doherty Associates, 286 pages, $29.95 cloth), by Candas Jane Dorsey, is a feminist sci-fi quest novel-as ambitious as the adjectives imply. Dorsey, head of Tesseract Books, the foremost Canadian publisher of science fiction, has
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Janet McNaughton
The Prince of Tarn materializes in Fred's room after the less than successful celebration of Fred's eleventh birthday. Fred is sure that his father has hired a kid to play the Prince, who had been the favourite literary creation of Fred's mother, a
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Silvana Bartlett
At first glance, this story seems to rehash a familiar and even predictable plot. A young boy who is saving to buy a bicycle is sent on an errand for his aunt. On the way, he stops to play with some older boys, only to discover when the game is over that
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 | Keri
by Jan Andrews,
96 pages $7.95 TP
ISBN: 0888992408
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Bergwerff
There is a true sense of "wordscaping" in all of Jan Andrews's books: words and language reflect and grow out of the landscape in her work. Where Pumpkin Time is playful with "a pumpkinny-mummish kind of music", and where the lushness of the language
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 | The Runaways
by Kristin Butcher,
168 pages $16.95 TC
ISBN: 1550744135
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Don Aker
"I want to make people uncomfortable. I want them to stop pretending that street people aren't there. I want them to do something to help." Spoken by the protagonist Nick Battle, these words sum up the message of Kristin Butcher's The Runaways, I
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 | Dancer
by Shelley Peterson,
pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0889841772
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Alex Browne
To put it mildly, Dancer doesn't lack plot. First there is the winning of the Fuller Trophy at the Royal Winter Fair, then an attempted horse-napping, then a performance for the Queen, then a sabotaged girth, then a successful horse-napping (after
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| At Large At Large - Not in Convenience
by Michael Coren
The article barely made the major daily newspapers. It was tucked away on a deep inside page, taken off the wire from the Canadian Press. "An adult magazine that features explicit nudes photos of teenage girls has been pulled off the she
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Escape from North to North
by Douglas Fetherling
I've often been frustrated, in picking up some new U.S. book touching on Canada, by the way American authors, scholars as well as popular ones, display flaws in their basic knowledge of this country: cities misspelled and in the wrong locations
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