| Book Review Paddle with the Ego, under the Sky
by M. T. Kelly
At his son's wedding, "Canada's own Mr. Canoehead, Bill Mason," danced with a canoe on his shoulders, "blasé about poise or whom he might hit in the process." He narrowly missed the bride before someone grabbed a dangling line on his boat and led him
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| Book Review Disjunction Jones
by David Reed
Fraser Sutherland's new book revisits one of the most horrific cultic tragedies of this century. It appears after nearly two decades of chronological distance, but with the existential immediacy of last night's nightmare. The "logical" terminus
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| Book Review Trudeau as Absentee Author
by Bob Rae
THE young Pierre Trudeau brought out two splendid books. The first, The Asbestos Strike, contained a brilliant essay by him on the changes under way in Quebec society, changes that were being held back by the oppressive corruption of the Duplessis regime.
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| Book Review Old Monsters Crawl Out
by Yan Li
I TURNED these pages with great curiosity. Jan Wong, the author of Red China Blues, seems so similar to me, in age, gender, race, and professional background. Unlike me, however, she is a foreigner to the Chinese. I wondered about her reflections on th
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| Book Review Abyss? or Gulf?
by Bernard Kelly
ON Monday, April 2nd, 1900, the École littéraire de Montréal held its fifth and final public meeting in the Château de Ramezay, a curious-looking building with as many tall chimneys, it seems, as mullioned windows. Despite the storm blowing outside, the a
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| Book Review Up From Mud, Frost, Stumps, & Rock
by Lynn Warren
LAST Christmas my father sent me pictorial place mats he had found at the back of some auction. They are the kind by Pimpernel: tinted reproductions of old engravings, surrounded by borders of pale green and gold. They show Canadian scenes from the age of
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| Book Review A Lover's Quarrel
by Carmine Starnino
Ashbourn, John Reibetanz's first book, was a remarkable feat of ventriloquism. Most poets begin their careers by exploring their own experience, but Reibetanz tried to recreate the daily life of a small East Suffolk community by taking on the voices of
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| Book Review An Astonishing Chameleon
by Lynn Crosbie
I met with David Donnell at the Bar Italia to discuss Dancing in the Dark, his latest collection of poems and stories. He is, politely, not appalled when I pull out a Fisher-Price recorder to tape our discussion (red and white with huge, coloured button
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| Book Review Love from Shoplifting
by Mark Breslin
ONE thing you have to give Generation X: they really know how to go for the bronze. The twenty-something generation, slackers to the core, have made a cultural statement out of flying under the radar, wearing their lack of ambition as a badge of pride.
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| Book Review Better than Self-Contained
by Rosemary Aubert
THE other day I was reading Cosmopolitan, that familiar and stalwart beacon on the fortified border between women and men, when I encountered the helpful notion of the SCU or self-contained unit.
Apparently an SCU is a person, either female or
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| Book Review What's Not Quite Expected
by Allan Golombek
IT IS HARD to find any politically aware Canadian who does not have a strong opinion about David Frum. Frum can almost serve as an ideological barometer; how one feels about him (and how strongly) pinpoints one's place on the right or left side of the
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 | Kingsway
64 pages $10.95
ISBN: 1551520281
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Book Review Vancouver Ghost Road
by Jennifer Hunter
KINGSWAY is not a pretty street. It slashes diagonally across grid-prone Vancouver, defying the methodical efforts of urban planners to create a logical pattern of city thoroughfares. It's an unruly six-lane traffic corridor, connecting the proletarian
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| Book Review Falling off the Bench
by Michael Fitz-James
Back in the early seventies, when I was an English Literature student at Carleton University, I lived in a communal rented house in Ottawa's Sandy Hill district. My housemates and I were troublesome tenants, and one March day the landlady arrived on our
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| Book Review North End Rock & Roll
by John Goddard
Some of the best pop songs seem to write themselves. In late 1969, after a lengthy American tour, the Guess Who were halfway through a Canadian show when Randy Bachman, the lead guitarist, broke a string. He replaced it on the spot, and while tuning up
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| Book Review Not a Hard Time Obeying Orders
by David Yanowsky
"The Weimar Republic was succeeded by the only German regime-by the only regime that ever was anywhere-which had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews, for `Aryan' had no clear meaning other than `non-Jewish'."-Leo Strauss,
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| Book Review Down, Resurgent Dismal
by Henry Lackner
So many Canadians are out of work, so many are on welfare, so many businesses fail, the debt is so high, and the economy is growing so slowly, because the Bank of Canada's policies are misguided. The free-wheeling bank with its zeal for zero inflation
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| Book Review Hung Between Two Thoughts
by Andrew Faiz
DURING her recent promotional tour Jan Wong, the former Maoist and Globe and Mail China correspondent, told the story of growing up in Montreal in the fifties and sixties. Her father owned a Chinese restaurant, and she was one of two Oriental students
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| Interviews A Thousand Years to be Born - Robert Fulford speaks with Saul Bellow
by Robert Fulford
Saul Bellow is eighty-one this year, but his appearance and manner suggest that he's at least a decade younger. He's physically spry and intellectually sharp-as sharp, in fact, as his prose has always been. His eyes shine with curiosity, understanding,
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
I was delighted with Maggie Helwig's review of Susan Glickman's poetry collection Hide and Seek (May). What I appreciated so much were her comments about the need "for breaking taboos" surrounding
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| Self
by Yann Martel,
384 pages $28.95 TC
ISBN: 0394281608
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First Novels First Novels - The Knopf Four
by Eva Tihanyi
Yann Martel, the thirty-three-year-old author of the acclaimed story collection The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, is possibly the most innovative of the group, in both form and content. Self is a first-person account of one "self"
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| First Novels First Novels - The Knopf Four
by Eva Tihanyi
Fall on Your Knees is equally ambitious and inclusive of diversity. MacDonald, an award-winning actress and playwright, has created an extraordinary family saga of gothic proportions. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, the story unfolds
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| First Novels First Novels - The Knopf Four
by Eva Tihanyi
The Cure for Death by Lightning is a family saga of a somewhat different sort. Beth Weeks, now an adult, reflects on a pivotal year in her life, the year she turned fifteen. It was "the year the world fell apart and began to come together again,"
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| First Novels First Novels - The Knopf Four
by Eva Tihanyi
Both the most overtly political and the most opaquely written of the four books is Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here. Brand, who has published a number of poetry volumes, including the best-selling No Language is Neutral (1990),
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Damian Tarnopolsky
The re-issue of Michael Ondaatje's second novel, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage, 244 pages, $14.95), will doubtless win less attention than the forthcoming film of his third, The English Patient. This is a pity, for although
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Judith Fitzgerald
Originally published in 1990, The Small Words in My Body (Kaleyard Books/Gutter Press, 88 pages, $12.95 paper), provides, to a wider readership reasonably presumed not to be acquainted with Karen Connelly's writing, an opportunity to
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Judith Fitzgerald
Reading Stephen Morrissey's second instalment of The Shadow Trilogy, The Yoni Rocks (Empyreal Press, 68 pages, $12 paper) painfully recalls Robert Graves's indictment of mechanically tooled lyric practitioners geared to mumbly-jumbly
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 | The Cursed
by Dave Duncan,
Ballantine Books
400 pages $22 TC
ISBN: 0345389514
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Kenneth Stickney
The Cursed (Ballantine, 418 pages, $22 cloth, $6.99 paper), the latest effort by the Calgary fantasy author Dave Duncan, takes us into a dark age of war and barbarism that follows the fall of the Qolian Empire. Duncan is a prolific
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| At Large At Large - Many Mourners, No Rescuers
by Michael Coren
Every now and again Canadian literature falls into a contrived paroxysm. It usually occurs when a certain type of writer dies or a certain type of politician makes a certain type of speech about a certain type of writing. Recently it happened
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - The Canadian Way of Death
by Douglas Fetherling
Somewhere in the files at Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph in London is an advance obituary for David Twiston Davies, the forty-eight-year-old Canadian who is that paper's chief obituary writer-an important position, as the
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