 Note from Editor Editor's Note
by Olga Stein
In reviewing Jacques Derridas The Work of Mourning (BiC Aug. 02), Stan Persky relates a central concern
of the book: “. . . if a friend dies and you’re called upon to say something at the funeral or to write an obituary,
how do you deal with the difficulty of speaking in the midst of grief? ...
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| Book Review Probing and Prodding Eroticism
by Michael Greenstein
Love triangles are rarely symmetrical, and the one at the centre of Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise
of the Stepmother and its sequel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, is no exception.
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| Book Review Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage in Canada
by Joy Parks
On the first Sunday of December 2000, Rev. Brent Hawkes announced to his congregation at Toronto’s Metropolitan
Community Church that he would begin conducting legal same-sex marriages early the following year.
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| Book Review Poems About Holy Women
by K.D. Miller
Some Bones and a Story is Alice Major’s sixth collection of poems. It consists of sixteen first-person narratives
delivered by saints, nuns, Blesseds, and a token apostle. (A Blessed, as Major explains in her Afterword, is someone
who enjoys “just-south-of-sainthood status.”)
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 | Dove Legend
by Richard Outram
PorcupineÆs Quill
173 pages $14.95 paper
ISBN: 0889842213
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Book Review Poems for the Soul Reborn into an Age of "Stringent Myths"
by Robert Moore
A septuagenarian who has cultivated a modest but respectable place at the margins of general recognition
for thirty-five years, Richard Outram has been vigorously championed of late by writers like Alberto Manguel,
who has called him “one of the finest poets in the English language,” and more recently,
Peter Sanger, who just brought out, in limited edition, In Her kindled shadow
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| Book Review A Study of The New Age
by Dennis Duffy
Amonograph on a work widely acknowledged as a masterpiece figures in many an academic’s cursus. Keith’s is not quite that.
Canadian Odyssey deals instead with Hugh Hood’s twelve-volume fiction, The New Age, whose claim to grandeur seems a truth
far from universally acknowledged.
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| Book Review Twisted Imaginings from Stephen King
by Matt Sturrock
When I first discovered Stephen King as a kid in 1988, he had three audiences. There were the horror junkies whose sallow
faces were mainly consigned to pulp fiction conventions and hobby-shop cabals; there were the more upstanding types who
made guilty forays into his oeuvre while on vacation; and there were the legions of adolescents (male mostly)
graduating from Silver Surfer and Incredible Hulk comic books
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 | Lures
by Sue Goyette
Harper Flamingo Canada
289 pages $32 hard cover
ISBN: 0002005069
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Book Review Suffering Beautifully
by Maureen Lennon
In her debut novel, Lures, poet Sue Goyette demonstrates that she possesses, in spades, perhaps the single
most important ability necessary for the creation of good fiction—a facility for creating characters
who linger in the memories of readers.
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| Book Review Irish Historical not on the level of O'Neill
by Jerry White
’ll admit that I was originally attracted to Annie Coyle Martin’s debut novel The Music
of What Happens for reasons that are not entirely fair to her or her book.
I had just finished reading Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim Two Boys and found it zesty and full of life and
literary sophistication; a little masterpiece.
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| Book Review Unearthing an Ancestor
by Derek Lundy
t is surprising how quickly we disappear from sight and sound after we die. Of course, we expect that to
happen eventually. Within a hundred years, we are certainly in the historian’s bailiwick;
later the archaeologist sifts through bones and post-holes to make a few bare inferences.
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| Book Review A Tsar Goes Missing
by Matt Sturrock
Few modern histories are rife with more mystery and tragedy than that of Russia. The country is fertile ground
for intrigue and upheaval: traditionally, its leaders have been intractable, unstable, one way or another defective;
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| Book Review Richlerian Tales: The First Book and the Last
by John Ayre
In the recent televised tribute to Mordecai Richler, his New York editor and long-time friend Robert Gottlieb
confessed that among his authors, Richler was unusual.
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| Book Review The Mad and Those who Treat Them
by Gordon Phinn
The mad, like the poor and the appallingly rich, have always been with us. For despite the optimistic
jingles of those enamoured of progress, societies of all kinds continue to accumulate all manner of casualties,
citizens unkempt and curiously off-kilter.
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| Book Review Against the Grain of Established Beliefs
by T. F. Rigelhof
Choosing to live and work in Montreal might have something to do with Fairmount bagels or Pâtisserie de
Gascogne or the Montreal Symphony Orchestra or any number of other peculiar and personal preferences
but what really holds many of us
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| Book Review Explaining Centuries-Old Hatred
by Nicholas Maes
One has to be half mad to attempt a history of the Jews and the Catholic Church.
The subject requires not only a familiarity with a vast range of material, both religious and historical,
but a capacity to interpret events from multiple perspectives.
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| Book Review An American Gadfly
by Pat Barclay
Meet, if you haven’t already, one of America’s best-known professional gadflies, Michael Moore.
Moore’s been mad as hell and publicly refusing to take it anymore ever since he first leveled a
movie camera at the chairman of General Motors, Roger Smith.
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 | Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Knopf Canada
352 pages $32.95 cloth
ISBN: 0676973760
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Book Review Lessons in Faith and Zoology
by Irene DSouza
Forging an individual writing style entails risks for all authors, especially sensitive writers whose
second book does not fare well: too over the top with magic realism and you are trespassing on
South American territory;
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 | Tracing Iris
by Genni Gunn
Raincoast Books
230 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551924862
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Book Review Patterns of Lossùof People and Civilizations
by Ada Donati
In her latest novel, Tracing Iris (Raincoast Books, 2001) which follows Thrice upon a time (Quarry Press),
On the Road, (Oberon Press) and Mating in Captivity (Quarry Press), Genni Gunn confirms her special skill
for weaving complex narrative patterns.
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| Book Review Birth of a Network
by Stephen Knight
Much like Canada’s history, the history of the CTV television network is filled with a few swashbuckling
entrepreneurs, lots of politics and plenty of bureaucratic machinations.
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| Book Review The Lonely and Rebellious in Two Collections
by Heather Birrell
It always seems a shame that there is such a strong tendency in Canada to divide our short fiction into camps:
realistic vs surrealistic, psychological vs symbolic, rural vs urban, traditional vs cutting edge.
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| Book Review Affairs Without Heart
by Cindy MacKenzie
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford has written a collection of ten short stories organized on the
theme of adulterous love that does not moralize about the “sin” of infidelity even though it tells the story
of such affairs over and over. The “sin” is found in the debasement of the spirit of love.
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 | The Falling Woman
by Shaena Lambert
Vintage Canada
205 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 0679311491
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Book Review Metamorphoses of Desire
by Malca Litovitz
This first collection of ten short stories by a Vancouver poet form a series of snapshots of women poised midlife,
when we assess our lives. The characters dive into discoveries, dreams, fears, forbidden sexual encounters, and protests.
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| Book Review Canadian 20th Century Women Well Depicted
by Clara Thomas
Marilyn French is a well-known feminist scholar, teacher and novelist. A History of Women, her work-in-progress,
is obviously designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative work, a bedrock standby for all enquiring women and
especially for those who teach and take Women’s Studies courses. Accordingly, this first volume,
From Eve to Dawn, bears a heavy weight of expectation.
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| Book Review What's New and Different Lives of Women Then and Now
by Naomi Black
These four books are all concerned with women and—not the same—all of them reflect the impact of feminism.
Barbara Kelcey insists she is not a feminist, but her Alone in Silence is nevertheless part of the
feminist attempt to retrieve the missing lives of the female half of the human race.
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| Book Review First Woman on Canada's Supreme Court
by John Pepall
In 1976 Bertha Wilson became the first woman on a provincial court of appeal, Ontario’s, and in 1982 the first
woman on the Supreme Court of Canada. The coming of the Charter has drawn public attention to the judges of the Supreme
Court of Canada.
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| Interviews Dead Girls: Lament for those Lost and Forgotten Interview with Nancy Lee
Vancouver writer Nancy Lee’s debut story collection, Dead Girls, appeared in April to rave reviews.Unusually
prescient in its subject matter, the girls in Lee’s title story and in several others had been inspired by the
dozens of women who’ve vanished from Vancouver’s Skid Row,
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| Interviews PIùSumming Up Meaning from the Irrational Interview with Yann Martel
Interview with Yann Martel.
My introduction to Yann Martel came ten years ago. I went to see him read a novella-length story called
“The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” which concerned the friendship of two college-aged men, one dying of AIDS.
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| Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor, Those who contend that poetry is a moribund art form are not rebuffed by the popular success of Christian Bök’s Eunoia.
For what they are referring to more specifically is lyric poetry, “a verbal device that will preserve and reproduce any feeling
or set of feelings indefinitely,” in Philip Larkin’s pithy definition.
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| Essays Don Bell's FOUNDE BOOKERS
The three rules you should observe when scouting for books, I was told a few years ago by a dealer much younger
than myself but vastly more experienced; the three rules, he told this then novice scout who was attracted to
the field after reading a book called How To Be A Book Scout (attracted to the idea that a scout doesn’t have
the overhead or responsibilities of running a shop;
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| Essays Wilted Laurels (or, A Sad Ballade to the Poets Inglorious)
by David Solway
Apart from yesterday’s newspaper, there are two things that seem to age overnight: a learned footnote and a bad poem.
We need not worry about the former since none have been inserted here. But of the latter it may even be said that a
bad poem is born old and dies young, sapless and etiolated.
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| Essays My Life with Northrop Frye: A Personal Take on the Nationalist Debate in Canlit History
by Susan Glickman
Anyone involved with Canadian literature is bound to find herself wondering—during those rare moments she
isn’t contemplating the returns policy of the publishing industry—if our traditional absorption with nationalism
is still relevant in the new global culture of migrancy.
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| Essays Timothy Findley (1930-2002)
by David Gardner
Tiff wrote: “Remembrance is more than honouring the dead. Remembrance is joining them—being with them in memory.
Memory is survival.” [Inside Memory p7]
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| Essays Female and Modernist Poems and Stories of Louise M. Bowman
by Michelle Ariss
I t is thanks to writers like Rosemary Sullivan and Anne Cimon and no thanks at all to the modernist poet E.J. Pratt
that the work of Louise Morey Bowman has not been entirely lost to Canadian literature.
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| Essays Dispatch from a Conference Abroad: Globalization and the Short Story
by Cyril Dabydeen
It was more than serendipity that brought me to the 7th International Conference on the Short Story in English
in New Orleans, Louisiana, in July; and the Conference’s theme of globalization forced me to confront—or
confirm—my own assumptions about the genre.
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| Prose/Poetry Poetry
Watchdog and Rooster
Surveying the henhouse with profound
vigilance, taut on his tether,
alert in sleet as well as heatstroke weather,
crouched, eye ajar, the farmer's hound.
The rooster, however,
accustomed to the chuckling palaver
of his cackleophilous concubines,
disliked the stolid silence of the dog
who hunched there like a stinkpot on a log
and only uttered small, obsequious whines
about his master's boots at supper-time.
Let us see (the rooster mused) if this dull mutt,
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| First Novels First Novels
by W.P Kinsella
Back Flip, by Anne Denoon (Porcupine’s Quill, $24.95, 323pages, ISBN: 0889842388), follows an Altmanesque cast
of characters in the Toronto art scene over several months in 1967.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Deborah Wandal
This fall’s line up of books for children and young adults is simply stunning as you’ll see from this very first
offering of the season. There’s much more to come in upcoming issues of Books in Canada—a round-up of new and
exciting international fantasy fiction—everything from Carnegie award-winner Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Karen Krossing
First published in 1987, Camel Bells is an extraordinary look at pre-Taliban Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Hajdar. It is a novel that moves back and forth in time, chronicling the Marxist coup of 1979 and the ensuing Soviet invasionùthe beginning of the nearly ten-year struggle between Russia and the mujahadeen freedom fighters that ended with the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988/1989 and that lead, ultimately, to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1996.
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 | Tribes
by Arthur Slade
HarperTrophyCanada
144 pages $15.99 paper
ISBN: 0006391702
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Gillian Chan
First published in 1987, Camel Bells is an extraordinary look at pre-Taliban Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Hajdar. It is a novel that moves back and forth in time, chronicling the Marxist coup of 1979 and the ensuing Soviet invasionùthe beginning of the nearly ten-year struggle between Russia and the mujahadeen freedom fighters that ended with the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988/1989 and that lead, ultimately, to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1996.
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 | A Stone in My Hand
by Cathryn Clinton
Candlewick Press
208 pages $21.99 cloth
ISBN: 0763613886
|  | The Breadwinner
by Deborah Ellis Read by Rita Wolf with an afterward by the author
Listening Library
cassettes pages $28
ISBN: 0807209732
|  | Camel Bells
by Janne Carlsson
Groundwood Books
96 pages $8.95 paper
ISBN: 0888990804
| |  | Second Story Press
75 pages $10.95 paper
ISBN: 1896764444
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
First published in 1987, Camel Bells is an extraordinary look at pre-Taliban Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Hajdar. It is a novel that moves back and forth in time, chronicling the Marxist coup of 1979 and the ensuing Soviet invasionùthe beginning of the nearly ten-year struggle between Russia and the mujahadeen freedom fighters that ended with the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988/1989 and that lead, ultimately, to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1996.
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| Outlook Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Bestsellers Lists
Kathy Reichs, Grave Secrets (Scribner, hardcover), Tom Clancy, Red Rabbit (Putnam, hardcover),
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, hardcover),Robert Jordan, Crossroads of Twilight (Tor, ardcover)
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