Reviews

That Summer

David French is one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights and an accomplished explorer of the power of memory. Since 1972, generations of his fictional Mercer family, transplanted from Coley’s Point in Newfoundland to Toronto, have ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

Live Evil: A Homage to Miles Davis

By Richard Stevenson

Poet George Bowering asked the question: “(How to) come out of/ literature, right into the roar/ of that belly’s horn…” Live Evil is Richard Stevenson’s response: a book-length poetic suite based on the life and ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Poetry

★ Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

By Al Purdy

“This is my last book,” Al Purdy writes in his preface to Beyond Remembering, and with that simple phrase the reader is reminded of what was lost with Purdy’s death in April. Every word of ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Poetry

A Forest Burning

By Carole Giangrande

Carole Giangrande’s rich and ambitious new novel, A Forest Burning, is a story of generations of loss, soul baring, and secrets. The central story, which unfolds carefully, if a little pedantically, is much more compelling ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions

By Carellin Brooks and Brett Josef Grubisic, eds

Short story collections where the criteria for inclusion are something other than excellence are dodgy propositions. They satisfy the editors and gratify the elected writers, but they rarely do either for the readers. Subject-based anthologies ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

By Gaétan Soucy , Sheila Fischman, trans.

In Survival, Margaret Atwood titled her chapter on Quebec literature “Burning Mansions.” She could well have been presaging Gaétan Soucy’s latest novel The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches. Cleansing fires that destroy ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Flat

By Mark Macdonald

The apartment as metaphor looms large in Mark Macdonald’s debut novel Flat. Metaphors for human isolation and the soul-crushing regularity of modern architecture, bird’s nests for disconnected voyeurs – apartment buildings dwarf the novel’s unnamed ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Dominion of Wyley Mcfadden

By Scott Gardiner

On a mysterious mission from Toronto to Alberta, physician-turned-poacher Wyley McFadden picks up a mysterious female hitchhiker somewhere north of Lake Superior. It has all the makings of a good road novel, and Gardiner has ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Canvas of War: Painting the Canadian Experience, 1914 to 1945

By Jack Granatstein

In the foreword to Canvas of War: Painting the Canadian Experience, 1914 to 1945 historian Jack Granatstein writes that the Canadian War Museum holds in excess of 13,000 art works. Over 100 of these have ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture

★ Excessive Joy Injures the Heart

By Elisabeth Harvor

It’s an informal genre but a recognizable one: the novel of a second coming rather than a coming of age, of a still-young woman forced to begin again after the failure of a marriage spanning ... Read More »

February 17, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels

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