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Book Reviews in April 2005 Issue

Feed My Dear Dogs
by Emma Richler

Knopf Canada $35.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0676976719
Book Review
A Review of: Feed My Dear Dogs
by T.F. Rigelhof
"Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatized to the great world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet he had borrowed from his mother's kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from ...
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The Sad Truth About Happiness
by Anne Giardini

Harper Collins Canada $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005948
Book Review
A Review of: The Sad Truth About Happiness
by Michael Harris
Thirty-two-year-old Maggie Selgrin is given three months to live. Being the good middle-child of her family, she feels the important thing is not to make a fuss. Happily, the magazine quiz that informed Maggie of her death-date also presents a loop-hole, a backdoor she might use to dodge out of her sentence-if she can only change her "Are You Happy" answer from a lackadaisical "I don't know" to an unquestioning "Yes." If she can convince herself that the lukewarm tapioca life she lives can be termed "Happy", then Maggie gets to potter away another 60 years. ...
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Rue du Regard
by Todd Swift

DC Books $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 091968811X
Book Review
A Review of: Rue du Regard
by Andrew Steinmetz
the church, Swift observes that "candles/Light the pale faced members of the choir", and "stiff-necked listeners crouch forward/In low pews, Anglican or just off-the-street". Swift captures Cripplegate wonderfully. He remarks how Palestrina's medieval Matins Responsary captures "the post-war mood". And then: "How venal, then, to notice all the time-worn suits,/The dresses past their fashion. Decrepitude cradles us". It is that last phrase-"Decrepitude cradles us."-that makes Swift worth listening to. ...
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Snow Water
by Michael Longley

Jonathan Cape $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0224072579
Book Review
A Review of: Snow Water
by Michael Kinsella
the notes of music and sycamore leaves carried to all corners of the battlefield (as in "Sycamore") or a harmonica playing, out in no man's land, a music-hall favourite that "lasts until the end of time," (as in "Harmonica") there is an awesome, tender and terrible symmetry to Longley's exquisite observations, which are, in effect, similar to the other stories he has told in catalogues. What we find in Snow Water is an appreciation of nature which is not simply some sort of taxonomy, but rather a ceremony that is meant to go on forever, trickling through the lives and the lost lives of those in the poetry. Here is ...
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Bonfires
by Chris Banks

Nightwood Editions $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 0889711968
Book Review
A Review of: Bonfires
by John Lofranco
ook often feels rushed. The poet wants to get his or her work out there, and so sacrifices sober reflection for momentum and energy. This doesn't appear to be the case with Chris Banks. ...
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Gabriel's Wing
by Allan Cooper

Gaspereau Press $20.07 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031830
Book Review
A Review of: GabrielÆs Wing
by John Lofranco
it is the isolated simplicity that seals the deal. We are made to feel like we've heard this wisdom before, but, thankfully, we are not told where. The transposition of heart and wheat is natural, and as a reader, my heart sang along to the wheat's challenge. When the poet has us whispering along with the wheat, that's the "something" we've been looking for. ...
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The Minstrel's Daughter
by Linda Smith

COTEAU BOOKS $9.95 Paperback
ISBN: 155050309X
Book Review
A Review of: The Minstrel's Daughter
by M. Wayne Cunningham
has produced a spellbinding, lots-of-fun book with credible characters, human and animal. It's great entertainment and a great lead off for her new series. One might even say, "It's the cat's meow!" ...
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Book Review
A Review of: Ayesha, My Queendom Come
by W.P. Kinsella
As a young man I remember thrilling to the phantasmagorical novels of A. Merritt, like Ship of Ishtar, and the novel She by H. Rider Haggard, the fantastical story of an immortal white Queen. Brinckman, owes a huge debt to H. Rider Haggard, as he tells the tale of a modern woman from Ottawa who, as a neglected and abused child discovers the novel She, and interprets and adopts a passage from the novel, which she takes to mean that it's alright to kill anyone who stands between her and what she desires. At twelve she kills her drunken mother's abusive boyfriend, and lets her mother take the rap and go to prison. ...
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Book Review
A Review of: Far From Home: Dr. GrenfellÆs Little Orphan
by W.P. Kinsella
Far From Home is the tale of a little girl named Clarissa who, in 1924, has been sent to live in a children's home in Newfoundland, far from her family, because she suffers from polio. The main problem here is that the author claims her book is based on a true story, and as most of us know, true stories are usually boring beyond belief. Clarissa's circumstances are neither original nor interesting. We are bored with the routine business at the orphanage that fills two hundred pages. I very nearly quit reading at fifty and again at one hundred pages. Only in the final twenty pages, after Clarissa is ...
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White Man's Cotton
by Randy W Somerton

Jesperson Publishing $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894377060
Book Review
A Review of: White ManÆs Cotton
by W.P. Kinsella
For what it is, a bloody, crime-adventure story, it is not bad. The telling is like a lout screaming at you. There is little literary merit, and quite bit of the dialogue is like chunks of concrete falling from the characters' mouths. However, the novel's saving grace is that to my knowledge the concept is unique. A group of wealthy black men unite to create a society called White Mans Cotton, to take retribution for the appalling evils inflicted on black people. They have a huge man known only as The Catcher, who kidnaps selected individuals who have been exceptionally cruel toward ...
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The First World War - Volume 1: To Arms
by Hew Strachan

Oxford University Press UK $49.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0199261911
Book Review
A Review of: The First World War: Volume I: To Arms
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae, ...
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The First World War in Africa
by Hew Strachan

Oxford University Press UK $25.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0199257280
Book Review
A Review of: The First World War In Africa
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae, ...
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The Outbreak of the First World War
by Hew Strachan

Oxford University Press UK $25.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0199257264
Book Review
A Review of: The Outbreak Of The First World War
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae, ...
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Financing the First World War
by Hew Strachan

Oxford University Press UK $25.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0199257272
Book Review
A Review of: Financing The First World War
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae, ...
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101 Top Historical Sites of Cuba
by Alan Twigg

Beach Holme Publishing $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0888784406
Book Review
A Review of: 101 Top Historical Sites Of Cuba
by Greg Gatenby
A much more accessible history has just been published by Alan Twigg, for some decades now the pre-eminent chronicler of literary British Columbia, and increasingly of climes somewhat warmer. Five years ago he issued Cuba: A Concise History For Travellers, a straightforward account with a strong emphasis on the years of the Fidel junta, aimed, I suppose, at the thousands of Canadians headed for the beaches of Varadero. Now he has given us a richer book, 101 Top Historical Sites Of Cuba-richer because it covers the entire island, including the remotest spots, and manages to tell the history of the island through ...
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Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography
by Hermione Lee

Princeton University Press $27 Hardcover
ISBN: 0691120323
Book Review
A Review of: Virginia WoolfÆs Nose: Essays On Biography
by Greg Gatenby
Hermione Lee is globally regarded as one of the better literary biographers in Britain, and so it was with relish that I dove into her latest volume-not an account of an author's life, but a collection of essays about the actual writing of biography. In lesser hands, Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography could have been just another example of academic masturbation wherein the author moans about how tough his job is and how terrible his life sleuthing after the essentials of an author's history (with nary a mention of his tenure, sabbaticals, or indexed pensions). But Lee is too smart and ...
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The Wolf King
by Judd Palmer

Bayeaux Arts $16.3 Hardcover
ISBN: 1896209823
Book Review
A Review of: The Wolf King
by Antony Di Nardo
The Wolf King is Number Three in Judd Palmer's "Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children". In a note from the author we are told that if you think to yourself, "How unusual it is to be me; how preposterous life is!" then a fable such as this one might just be the antidote to get you through that thought. I'm not so sure. We usually expect fables to be accompanied by an inherent moral or lesson and that, I would think, should help sort out what makes life so preposterous. However, as we approach the conclusion of The Wolf King, there are so many endings and different ...
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Ellen Fremedon
by Joan Givner

Douglas & McIntyre / Groundwood $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0888995571
Book Review
A Review of: Ellen Fremedon
by Antony Di Nardo
At one point in the novel, Ellen Fremedon's best friend, Jenny, says, "well, people get tired of the same stories and the same happy endingsthey like reading about something different." That captures how I sometimes felt reading Joan Givner's story. Tired of the same. It's about a precocious, well-mannered, well-educated 12-year old girl who decides one summer to write a book. The book is about herself, her family, including her younger twin brothers who remain nameless throughout, and what happens that summer when a housing development endangers the town's water supply. But, despite the clutch of typical ...
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Peg and the Yeti
by Kenneth Oppel, Barbara Reid

Harper Collins Canada $19.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005387
Book Review
A Review of: The Boy From Earth
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Boys, girls, moms, dads, even grams and gramps will go gaga with the giggles in following the topsy-turvy escapades of thirteen-and-half-year-old earthling, Alan Dingwall, and his ET pal, Norbert, the wisecracking mini-me Jupiterling. The two have been hilariously cavorting about in three previous volumes by Cobourg, Ontario author Richard Scrimger, ever since mighty-mite Norbert landed his teeny-tiny spaceship in the nose hair of Alan's nostril. From his nasal command post he has been barking orders at Alan, issuing edicts to him and unabashedly telling people where to get off, much to Alan's ...
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The Alchemist's Daughter
by Eileen Kernaghan

Thistledown Press $15.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894345797
Book Review
A Review of: The AlchemistÆs Daughter
by Olga Stein
Eileen Kernaghan, author of The Snow Queen and The Sarsen Witch, among other books, and winner of numerous literary awards, believes in a diet of language saturated with beautiful, image-rich, poetic descriptions. Here is one gorgeous passage depicting her heroine, Sidonie Quince's arrival at Hampton Court for an audience with Queen Elizabeth. "The brick walls of Hampton Court Palace, rising before them, were deep crimson where the sunlight struck them, plum-coloured in shadow, patterned with chequered lines of burnt-black. Sidonie craned her neck ...
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Nordkraft
by Jakob Ejersbo

McArthur & Co / Mcarthur (Tp,H $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552784614
Book Review
A Review of: Nordkraft
by Kevin Higgins
Nordkraft is the first novel by young Danish writer Jakob Ejersbo, who already has a collection of short-stories, Superego, to his credit. Nordkraft is translated into English by Don Bartlett. The glossy back-cover is peppered with what, at first glance, looks like over-the-top praise from various reviewers in Ejersbo's native land. According to one, Nordkraft "is so gripping and strangely exhilarating because it brings to light linguistic inventiveness and a devil-may-care power to survive right down to the zero point of human existence." According to another, the novel deserves "6 stars out of a ...
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Radiant City
by Lauren B. Davis

Harper Collins Canada $32.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 000200576X
Book Review
A Review of: The Radiant City
by Ingrid Ruthig
The shimmering surfaces of urban landscapes and the reality of their gritty substrate seem to have left their mark on Montreal-born writer Lauren B. Davis. Her well-received first novel, The Stubborn Season, rooted itself in the thinly masked prejudices, madness, and turmoil of Toronto during the Great Depression. Her second novel, The Radiant City, finds purchase in Paris-a city that, to the bedazzled visitor, radiates the light' mythologized in recent history. Yet for the displaced survivors of the world's horrors who try to make a new life there, it proves more danger zone than haven. ...
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A Perfect Night to Go to China
by David Gilmour

Thomas Allen $26.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0887621678
Book Review
A Review of: A Perfect Night to Go to China
by Todd Swift
Ernest Hemingway spent some time in Toronto, before his legend took hold. David Gilmour's sixth novel, A Perfect Night To Go To China, returns him there. The terse, retro-prose recalls the story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" ("Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said) with snappy dialogue and anachronistically pugilistic behaviour from the tragic protagonist. This is a homage to Hemingway's achingly beautiful, doomed classic, The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta), by way of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (that is, an urban mystery that is really an ontological thriller); indeed, there is a fiesta at ...
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This I Believe: An a to Z of a Life
by Carlos Fuentes

Random House $37.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1400062462
Book Review
A Review of: This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life
by Lyall Bush
"He is the novelist as the world would have the novelist be." - Earl Shorris, The Life and Times of Mexico In an early scene in Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes's big, culturally ambitious novel from 1975, a young man named Pollo Phoibee pulls on a sandwich board that advertises the caf where he works, and begins his usual morning walk through Paris. But the morning has already started strangely: straight out of the shower he had helped his elderly landlady give birth. Now as he walks, he sees all around him young girls, mature women, and grandmothers beginning to give birth in ...
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So This Is Love
by Gilbert Reid

Key Porter Books $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552636364
Book Review
A Review of: So This Is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories
by John Oughton
So This Is Love is Gilbert Reid's first collection of short stories. The assured quality of his prose suggests a longer track record in publishing fiction, but evidently much of his craft has been polished by work in other media, including film, television and radio (he won a Gemini for writing the documentary Storming the Ridge). In themes, and to some extent in level of interest, this is an oddly split collection. About half of the stories-and generally the strongest half-consider some of the horrific events that have become almost mundane media fodder: genocide, civil war, child abuse, rape ...
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Learning to Swim
by Larry Lynch

Gaspereau Press $23.84 Paperback
ISBN: 189403192X
Book Review
A Review of: Learning to Swim
by John Oughton
Larry Lynch is a New Brunswick writer with one novel out. In this, his first collection of short stories, where the protagonists are fairly ordinary men, he alternates between short, almost sketchy tales and longer ones which have the density-and sometimes the complexity-of aspiring novels. There's another tension in the stories which keeps them interesting. First collections often reveal a writer's literary influences, and Lynch seems to have one foot solidly in the pool of realism, and the other in the somewhat airier world of magic realism, where almost anything can happen. He writes with an assured, ...
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Shack
by Kenneth J. Harvey

The Mercury Press $17.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551281074
Book Review
A Review of: Shack: The Cutland Junction Stories
by Eric Miller
Harvey's Shack is set in and around the fictional Newfoundland town of Cutland Junction. When I began "No Better a House", the first story of Harvey's collection, Shack, I thought that his narrative seemed old-fashioned, though not antiquated-as a handsaw, for example, isn't rendered obsolete by a laser. I wasn't prepared for the depth of feeling Harvey's world could induce. The predicament of Harvey's protagonist, the aged Ace Winslow, initially rings too familiar. He is to be moved from his condemned shack to a new government house. Yet certain peculiarities redeem the tale of Ace's expropriation from ...
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A Short Journey by Car
by Liam Durcan

V+¬hicule Press $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651897
Book Review
A Review of: A Short Journey by Car
by Eric Miller
Liam Durcan's Short Journey by Car is a masculine book, in the elementary sense that the book's protagonists are usually men. The masculinities embodied in this collection of short stories are appealingly off-kilter. Though for the most part the characters aren't avant-garde in their predilections, the premises, whether ethical or aesthetic, governing the way in which they are drawn palpably liberate:; Durcan allows his formally inventive imagination to range from Stalinist Russia to contemporary Windsor, Ontario. His preference is to experiment and often surprise. ...
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Most Wanted
by Vivette J. Kady

Porcupine's Quill $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842590
Book Review
A Review of: Most Wanted
by Nancy Wigston
Vivette J. Kady grew up in South Africa, but there is nothing of that far land in these thirteen tales. Instead, the unknown continent Kady explores is the human psyche. These stories present a startling array of characters who blaze their way across page after page, redefining dysfunction as they go. What seems to bind together Kady's odd assortment of children, adults, even the occasional dog, is the unsteadiness of their grip. It's hard to know, in this rich landscape, where to dive in. Why not start with the dog? His name is Duane, and he appears in the title ...
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Ladykiller
by Charlotte Gill

Thomas Allen $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621775
Book Review
A Review of: Ladykiller
by Barbara Julian
I have a fancy that characters in short stories really want to be in novels. After all, the novel is a larger canvas and everyone wants a big life, fictional people as well as real. I suppose this is another way of saying that if characters and their stories are engaging the reader wants to read on to the next chapter and the next-wants a whole novel. If they are not engaging the story was a failure; either way it is hard for a short story to be enough in itself, and it takes a real master to give it a conclusive, satisfying totality. It is not enough to peep through a window on characters engaged in a ...
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Making Light of Tragedy
by Jessica Grant

Porcupine's Quill $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842531
Book Review
A Review of: Making Light of Tragedy
by Barbara Julian
I have a fancy that characters in short stories really want to be in novels. After all, the novel is a larger canvas and everyone wants a big life, fictional people as well as real. I suppose this is another way of saying that if characters and their stories are engaging the reader wants to read on to the next chapter and the next-wants a whole novel. If they are not engaging the story was a failure; either way it is hard for a short story to be enough in itself, and it takes a real master to give it a conclusive, satisfying totality. It is not enough to peep through a window on characters engaged in a ...
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Rosa's District Six
by Rozena Maart

TSAR Publications $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894770161
Book Review
A Review of: RosaÆs District 6
by Antony Di Nardo
Thomas Hardy described the masses as "a throng of peoplecontaining a certain minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing." In a work of fiction, these sensitive souls are realized when the reader recognizes them as breathing, thinking, feeling individuals. They ache and complain, love and desire. They rejoice with friends and family or they don't. They punish their children, gossip about neighbours, curse the weather, and receive the news that breaks their hearts. This is the common currency of the masses and of the sensitive ones among them, and-when a fiction ...
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Book Review
A Review of: Off Centre
by Paul Keen
"Taking a Line for a Walk," a short story in Caroline Shepard's impressive new collection entitled Off Centre, takes its name from a children's book called Harold and The Purple Crayon which is based on an ingenious conceit. Harold is a child who uses his purple crayon to sketch his surroundings. In fact, his drawings form the entirety of the book's illustrations and, by implication, the whole of his world against the blank space of each white page. As I can testify from personal experience, children and adults love the book for the strangely unremarkable way that Harold gets on living with the ...
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Sightseeing
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Penguin $28 Hardcover
ISBN: 0670063894
Book Review
A Review of: Sightseeing
by Antony Di Nardo
You approach a reading of Sightseeing, a collection of seven short stories by the young American-Thai writer, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, from two angles. At first, you're very much the voyeur, a peeping Tom, not leering at the scenes before you, but luxuriating in their lushness. It's hard not to gaze into Lapcharoensap's world, a contemporary Thailand that he peoples with ordinary individuals in extraordinary situations and lavishes with imagery that brings his scenes to vibrant life. Then, you enter his world as the tourist, the foreigner, a farang, and it makes you think, are we who we are because ...
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Any Day But This
by Kristjana Gunnars

RED DEER PRESS $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0889953112
Book Review
A Review of: Any Day but This
by g
This collection of stories by writer and teacher Kristjana Gunnars illuminates the quandaries of a wide range of characters, many of whom share in common a preoccupation with coming or going, leaving or staying put. Place, naturally, plays a strong role in Gunnars' tales, whether it's Edmonton, Saskatoon, B.C.'s Sunshine Coast, or more exotic locales like Norway and Italy. The title of her first story, "Directions in Which We Move", echoes the thematic connections among these lyrical, honest portraits. Arne Ibsen, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, wakes one ...
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The Almost Meeting
by Henry Kreisel

NeWest Press $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896300901
Book Review
A Review of: The Almost Meeting and Other Stories
by Clara Thomas
This book represents a welcome renaissance of interest in one of our most accomplished fiction writers, Henry Kreisel. All the works collected here date from the mid-twentieth century on and the collection is enhanced by sensitive editorial commentaries by E.D. Blodgett of the University of Alberta. Kreisel was a native of Vienna. After the Kreisel family fled the Nazi annexation of Austria, Henry was arrested in England as an enemy alien and dispatched to Canada, where he spent his late teenage years in an internment camp in New Brunswick. He was one of a very few camp ...
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Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler
Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889204381
Book Review
A Review of: Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions
by Clara Thomas
This book represents a welcome renaissance of interest in one of our most accomplished fiction writers, Ernest Buckler. All the works collected here date from the mid-twentieth century on and the collection is enhanced by sensitive editorial commentaries by Marta Dvorak of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, France.. Buckler was a born and bred Maritimer. By far the most part of his life was spent on his farm in the Annapolis valley of rural Nova Scotia, close to the little town of Bridgetown. It was hardscrabble farming land, made more difficult by the constant demands of his ...
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Let's Not Let a Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us
by James Marshall

Thistledown Press $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894345746
Book Review
A Review of: LetÆs Not Let a Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us
by Paul Butler
This short story collection from Thistledown Press explores an underworld of misfits: arsonists, strip club bouncers-people who function outside ordinary social norms, and are emotionally insulated from the pitifulness of their own lives. There is an oddly Canadian texture here, a kind of understatement in which tragedy is filtered through the lens of wry humour. An apocalyptic flavour runs through James Marshall's Let's Not Let a Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us. In the first story, The Last Thing You Want To Look At In A Strip Club, a bouncer ...
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Translating Women
by Bill Stenson

Thistledown Press $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894345770
Book Review
A Review of: Translating Women
by Paul Butler
This short story collection from Thistledown Press explores an underworld of misfits: arsonists, strip club bouncers-people who function outside ordinary social norms, and are emotionally insulated from the pitifulness of their own lives. There is an oddly Canadian texture here, a kind of understatement in which tragedy is filtered through the lens of wry humour. The men and women in Translating Women rarely confront their problems head-on. In "The Only Sign of Fire", husband Lester climbs up a maple tree positioned across from his home and calmly settles in to watch as ...
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Cities Of Weather
by Matthew Fox

Cormorant Books Inc $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 189633220X
Book Review
A Review of: Cities of Weather
by Michael Greenstein
Although the past tense is stronger in Montreal than elsewhere in Canada, the youthful magazine, Maisonneuve, makes a clear case for the future of English creative writing in Quebec. A 28-year-old associate editor at Maisonneuve, Matthew Fox has just published his first collection of short stories, many of which involve the coming of age of a sensitive gay protagonist from Fiona, Ontario (in the vicinity of Alice Munro country) who moves to Montreal to engage in artistic activities. The first story, however, masks the homosexuality of the others in ...
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My Husband
by Dacia Maraini, Vera F. Golini

Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889204322
Book Review
A Review of: My Husband
by Michelle Ariss
"To get back at his wife for taking sides against him in a family dispute involving money, a man in Italy refused to have sex with her for seven years." The Record (Sherbrooke, Qubec) April 4, 2005 If you were in Italy as a tourist in the 60s and are reluctant to relinquish romantic memories of your time there, then I suggest that you avoid My Husband, the recent translation of a collection of short stories by Dacia Maraini, one of Italy's most renowned novelists, poets and playwrights. If, however, you are fascinated by the place ...
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Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions
by Sherrill Grace

McGill-Queens University Press $44.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0773527524
Book Review
A Review of: Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions
by Cynthia Sugars
Canadian poet Earle Birney is famous for having said that Canadians are haunted by a "lack of ghosts." I wonder. This line has provoked no end of speculation, and is certainly meant to be understood metaphorically. And yet, there is something very resonant about the idea of a haunting that both is and is not one. Admittedly, this was Birney's way of nudging his 1960s contemporaries out of their cultural and intellectual somnambulance. It also points to the notorious Canadian identity crisis which persists in dogging cultural debate in Canada today. Notwithstanding the fact that Canada has proven to be ...
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Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball
by Jerrold Casway

University of Notre Dame Press $31.46 Hardcover
ISBN: 0268022852
Book Review
A Review of: Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball
by James Roots
Baseball has been a constant mirror of racial shifts in American society. It has faithfully reflected the country's racial history and the change in status of various ethnic groups: from the segregation of black ballplayers into the Negro Leagues, to their torturous integration after World War Two; from the black players' post-Vietnam dominance of the game, to the rise of Hispanic players in the 1990s. The latest contribution to this branch of US social history, Jerrold Casway's Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, strives to provide a prequel by taking the ethno-cultural time-machine back to ...
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Fruitfly Geographic
by Stephen Brockwell

ECW Press $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550226479
Book Review
A Review of: Fruitfly Geographic
by Andrew Steinmetz
calls. Heat cracks the glass in his hand. ...
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