 Note from Editor Editor's Note
by Olga Stein
Apart from death, what Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych", Joyce's "The Dead", and Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" have in common is their visceral affect on the reader. In general, short stories have that poetic capacity to charge at the reader's emotions before engaging the intellect. A thoughtful inspection of any short story should lay open the author's handiworkùthe design, purposefulness of word choice, control of tempo, the artifice as such. But these tend to work behind the scenes.
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 | Uncomfortably Numb
by Sharon English
The Porcupine's Quill
191 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 0889842507
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Book Review Adolescent Bravado Conceals a Tender Heart
by Michelle Ariss
'Oh. Dear Robert.'
'Who art in England.' Regina bowed her head.
'Hallowed be thy hair.'
'Thy cockdom come.'
'Thy lust be done.'
'On my willing body.'
'As it is on mine.'
We nodded solemnly. Regina let the jackets fall in place...
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| Book Review Money, Three Ways
by Shane Neilson
Naomi Klein, doyenne of green-haired suburboradicals. George Soros, billionaire philanthropist. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-winning economistùall three of these authors are quite concerned about what we all wantùwealth. Each is even more concerned with the moral dimensions of wealthùless what we want, and more what we should have and others should have.
Klein is the junior correspondent of the group.
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| Book Review A Moral Imperative
by Nicholas Maes
Although it has been almost sixty years since the Holocaust ended, we still have not digested its many implications, to judge by the amount of print that keeps appearing on the topic. Indeed, this defining event of the twentieth century continues to inspire so many novels, movies and historical studies that, according to one recent book, it has become something of an industry, a self-serving phenomenon that all too often feeds upon itself.
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| Book Review Ireland's "Superhighway Poets"
by Todd Swift
Breaking The Skin is an anthology of "an emerging generation"ùin this case of poets from the North and South of Ireland, born between 1957 and 1975, who have published no more than one collection (most since 1999). These new poets write mainly in the English, although there is a brief selection of work translated from the Irish at the back
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| Book Review Mulling over Muldoon
by Jana Prikryl
Paul Muldoon's trademark styleùwords that are made to skid across the English language like skipping stones and, with each lexical skip, mutate into similar words, many only seen in dictionaries, with the poem generated in the wake of this repeated mutationùcompels a level of concentration that is hard to muster unless you're balling your fists and steadily sipping coffee through a straw
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 | A Whistling Woman
by A.S. Byatt
Chatto and Windus
421 pages $38.95 cloth
ISBN: 0701173807
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Book Review Whistling Out of Chaos
by Cindy MacKenzie
A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt's latest novel, is, as the French say, a casse-tete. Opening it is to enter into a confusing and dream-like world, a cerebral space rich with a wide range of ideas as fully present as the novel's human characters and in fact, often "stronger than individuals," as "they twist, pull and mould" the reader's mind.
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| Book Review No Fairy Tale Ending
by Kjeld Haraldsen
Iwas once madly, reelingly infatuated with a pair of identical twins (the cravenness of my desire makes me wince even now, twenty years later). Teutonically chiseled, cool-eyed, their sly, foxy faces were helmeted with ultra-grainy, ultra-palely blond hair; in addition to appearances, they shared a creepy "Shining"-style telepathy. (There was an older, plainer sisterùperpetually, understandably glum
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| Book Review Carveresque Settings and Themes
by Patricia Robertson
In his debut collection, A Day Does Not Go By, Sean Johnston at first glance deploys the kind of affectless and apparently artless prose made famous by Raymond Carver (in a direct line of descent from Ernest Hemingway) and badly imitated ever since. Hemingway himself, of course, knew better.
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 | One Man's Trash
by Ivan E. Coyote
Arsenal Pulp Press
136 pages $16.95 paper
ISBN: 1551521202
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Book Review Community, Country and Kitchen Table
by Joy Parks
Ivan E. Coyote wants three things from her readers, or those fortunate enough to experience a performance of her work.
"I want them to laugh. Then cry. Then think. In that order" she grins.
"Kitchen table stories" is how she defines her unique short fictions that deal with her childhood in the North, her family, her experiences of being queer/transgendered and her life in the close-knit community of the working class east-Vancouver neighbourhood that's been her home for 11 years.
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| Book Review Tales from a Saskatchewan Desert
by K. Gordon Neufeld
If the name "Saskatchewan" evokes miles and miles of waving crops punctuated by an occasional grain elevator, think again. In the south-western part of the province near Maple Creek can be found the Great Sand Hills, a huge expanse of rippling sand dunes reminiscent of a scene from "Lawrence of Arabia".
Guy Vanderhaege, in his best-selling novel The Last Crossing, portrayed the sand hills as a place that native people preferred to avoid.
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| Book Review Faster, Must Go Faster
by Jeremy Lott
If I were to give an award for the breeziest book on globalization, it would go to either Thomas Friedman's faddish, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, or Alan Shipman's new offering: The Globalization Myth. The lingo in the latter is happening, the jokes are targeted at the pretentious and it almost manages to make a subject that defies readability entertaining. Some, however, may mistake this breeziness for a lack of insight or imagination, which would be a miscalculation.
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| Book Review A Journey Across the Periphery of Hell
by Fred A. Reed
My Three Selves is the story of Morris (Moishe) Schnitzer's survival in German-occupied Europe for six years, from 1939 to 1945. Born in 1922 into a prosperous Jewish family in Bochum, in the industrial heartland of Germany, Schnitzer, as an adolescent, witnessed the rapid collapse of the prosperous community that had nurtured and educated him.
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| Book Review Etty Hillesum Speaks to Us
by Manny Drukier
We ached and despaired over the fifteen-year-old Anne. As we read The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-43, we find that the city and era are the same. In 1944, just months before the war's end, betrayed by a neighbour, the Frank family is discovered in their Amsterdam hideout. Only the father survives.
Etty Hillesum, twenty-seven years of age, holds that it is her duty to bear witness to the murder of a people. The diary is her testimony.
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| Book Review Theatre by Keith Garebian
by Keith Garebian
Musical theatre is the special gift of America, and Sweeney Todd is one of the best gifts from that nation. The Todd legend concerns a barber who, in revenge for the wrongs committed against him and his family, turns into a serial killer in London. He slits the throats of his victims while they are in his tonsorial chair and shuttles their corpses through a trapdoor into the cellar of his shop, where his female accomplice turns the flesh into stuffing for her pies.
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 | A Streak of Luck
by Richelle Kosar
Cormorant Books
288 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 1896951473
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Book Review Larger Forces at Work
by Maureen Garvie
It may be constitutionally impossible for a Canadian writer, even in the age of "Joe Millionaire", to write a book that ends happily ever after. So when we read on the dust jacket of Richelle Kosar's new novel that the hapless Masaryk family has won a lottery, we wonder how long it will be before their bubble bursts The Masaryks believe the bad times are finally over.
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| Book Review Shattering Dichotomies
by Rhea Tregebov
Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen is Globe and Mail theatre critic Kate Taylor's ambitious first novel. The book opens within the restrained, contemplative mind of Sophie Weil Bensimon, who is visiting the famous PFre Lachaise cemetery in Paris, musing over the graves of her own and her husband's family, as well as those of Oscar Wilde, the Comte de Montesquiou and other notables of the fin de siFcle, including Marcel Proust.
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| Book Review Unapologetic Sentimentalist
by Joel Yanofsky
Charles Bukowski is the writer you can't help think of when you read Montreal writer Neale McDevitt's debut collection of short stories One Day Even Trevi Will Crumble. Bukowski with muscles, that is. Short and stocky, with a shaved head and goatee, McDevitt looks like a weightlifter, which is, coincidentally, what he used to be. A member, in the mid-Eighties, of the Canadian Weightlifting team, he participated in the Pan-Am and Commonwealth Games.
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 | The Deep
by Mary Swan
Porcupine's Quill
91 pages $16.95 paperback
ISBN: 0889842485
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Book Review Deep In Denial
by Shaun Smith
"Based on an actual historical incident, all individuals and events in this accounting are fictional," so states the copyright page of Mary Swan's historical novella, The Deep, her first book. The incident is the death of two Canadian women, Ruth and Esther, fraternal twins who travel to Europe as volunteers during W.W.I. The accounting is an overly precious, self-consciously literary, occasionally clumsy, frequently turgid work of middling mannerism.
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| Book Review The Ineluctable Fading of Memories
by Michael Greenstein
Norman Levine is a master of the monosyllable, a painter of lambent brushstrokes, and a musician of minimalist dialogue and narration. These characteristics are naturally allied with the short story genre and its attendant epiphanies, rather than the longer novelistic format and its character development. Most of the stories in this collection have been previously published, but the final one, "The Ability to Forget", is new.
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| Book Review Stories Exploring Beginnings and Endings
by Alex Boyd
Writers, like anyone else, can't be blamed for having a strong interest in how relationships begin and end. Tell Him You're Married from Stan Rogal and Wound Ballistics by Steven Manners are almost completely consistent in approaching relationships from these two different angles, but the writers' techniques are also very different.
Rogal gives us an extremely conversational first-person narrator who relates attempts at new relationships more often than established ones.
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| Book Review What Younger Women Want
by Sarah Rosenfeld
"Is there anyone my age writing stories I'd want to read?"
Carolyn Foster asked herself this question in her mid-twenties, after growing up with the top ladies of Canadian literature like Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. Foster is the editor of She Writes: Love, spaghetti and other stories by youngish women, a collection of short fiction by a new generation of young Canadian women writers.
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 | All the Men Are Sleeping
by D. R. MacDonald
Doubleday Canada
349 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 0385658893
|  | Hungers
by Genni Gunn
Raincoast
235 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551925664
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Book Review Opposite Coasts and Perspectives
by Lawrence Mathews
It's hard to imagine two more markedly different books of contemporary short fiction than these-different on such anachronistic, indefensible grounds as depth, richness, subtlety, sense of the complexity of the human condition, and so forth.
If I've lost you already, you may well like Genni Gunn's Hungers. "If I could find something positive to think about, I would," says one of her characters, an utterance that could have served as the book's epigraph.
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| Book Review Letters to Bless the Eyes
by Keith Garebian
The Armenians will not be starved or murdered out of history, despite the efforts of Turkish and pro-Turkish propagandists to deny the genocide of 1915.
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| Book Review Awaiting a Global Ethic
by Anthony Skelton
It's Saturday. You have just finished reading the paper and have decided to go for a stroll in a nearby park. After a time, you come to the edge of a stream, a favorite spot for neighborhood families. From the corner of your eye you notice that an unattended child has slipped into the water and is struggling to stay afloat. Without your help she will surely drown. But aiding her does not come without a cost to you: your Gap khakis, suede jacket and new loafers will be ruined.
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 | Keeping Afloat
by M. Travis Lane
Guernica Editions
94 pages $12 paper
ISBN: 1550711318
|  | Drunkard's Path
by Deanna Young
Gaspereau Press
104 pages $14.95 paper
ISBN: 189403144x
| | Slow-Moving Target
by Sue Wheeler
Brick Books
88 pages $14 paper
ISBN: 189407808x
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Book Review The Everyday Matters
by Christopher Doda
"Nothing is too small to say" is a line from M. Travis Lane's "Solar Remission," the opening poem in Keeping Afloat, that could easily serve as a motto for Lane's collection as well as for Sue Wheeler's Slow-Moving Target and Deanna Young's Drunkard's Path.
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| Book Review Rural and Urban Mapping
by Andrew Lesk
If I could step beyond this page and give Adam Dickinson an award for his wondrous debut it would have to be . . . well, I'm not on any jury, but I do have this space. And I'll use it to say that Dickinson's poems are luminous, subtle, and exceptional
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 | Country of Cold
by Kevin Patterson
Random House
308 pages $24 paper
ISBN: 0679310460
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Book Review Sensitive Men and Insensitive Women
by Nancy Wigston
Kevin Patterson's first book, The Water In Between, was a wry, superbly intelligent take on one of fiction's most seductive scenarios: the romantic who runs away to sea. In Patterson's case, a failed romance combined with a dismal career as an army doctor in the prairies resulted in his decision to sail away to Tahiti. The fact that he had no sailing experience and bought an unattractive ferro-concrete boat did not deter him.
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| Book Review Growing Up in Rural Hell
by Jessica Lara Ticktin
With three volumes of poetry under her belt, one of which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award (Hometown, 1991), Laura Lush slips out of the role of poet and dons the garb of short story writer. Lush grew up in Brantford Ontario. Her protagonist, Grace, is a troubled, bored teen stuck in rural hell. She yearns to feel passionately about something; to seek out meaning beyond the borders of her limited existence
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| Book Review Killing Memories
by Anna Atkinson
Published almost simultaneously with the release of Atom Egoyan's Ararat, Lorne Shirinian's new volume of short stories, Memory's Orphans, also takes as its subject the 1915 Armenian genocide and subsequent diasporaùevents that for so long have haunted the history of World War I as nearly invisible ghosts.
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| Book Review Shaming a Canadian Court's Decision
by James Allan Evans
In 1966, The Trial of Steven Truscott by Isabel LeBourdais was a Canadian bestseller. Yet it had nearly failed to find a Canadian publisher. McClelland and Stewart had signed a contract, but Jack McClelland developed doubts, for LeBourdais was doing what was just not done in the 1960s. She was suggesting that the Canadian judicial system was an imperfect instrument. A court in Goderich, Ont.
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| Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor,
In his review of Lewis Lapham's collection of essays, Theatre of War (BiC, March 2003), Brian Fawcett criticizes Lapham for having "excessive confidence in his own judgment," as though this trait is to be avoided in a writer of persuasive essays. He is willing to dismiss some of the most incisive, subtly satirical and courageous homegrown attacks on the current American administration because none of the questions posed "have easy answers.
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| Essays Canada and the Short-Story Cycle John Oughton in Tandem with Gerald Lynch
by Gerald Lynch
The short story has long been considered a staple of Canadian literature, and short-story writers like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Norman Levine and Alastair McLeod rank among the English-writing world's best. But many readers might be surprised by Ottawa critic and fiction writer Gerald Lynch.
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| Essays A Few Days with Don the Bookman
by Daniel Bell
Montreal, Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Just arrived from Hong Kong. My father, Don Bell, had fallen gravely ill. He was too short of breath to talk on the phone. I had sent an email that was read to my father, begging him not to leave me. He seemed fine about two weeks ago (during my last visit to Montreal), but my sister Valerie told me that this latest lung infection will most likely prove to be fatal.
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| Essays Notes on Morality by Alfred Stein
by Alfred Stein
These notes were written by Alfred Stein (1930-1995) in the spring of 1995 shortly before he passed away. Excerpts were published in the March and April editions. This set of notes consists of aphoristically expressed thoughts on a wide range of subjects. As a whole the notes are largely a sustained meditation on the nature of morality and meaning and they canvass a vast terrain of philosophical, mathematical, logical and literary ground.
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| Up Front Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Bestsellers Lists
* Stats based on period from March 12 to April 16
Top 50 Bestselling Fiction
1 J.K.
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 | Terminal Avenue
by Jim Christy
Ekstasis Editions
198 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 1894800087
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Maurice Mierau
Jim Christy is part of an intrepid and growing number of Canadian writers publishing crime novels with small presses. Terminal Avenue is the third novel in his trilogy of noir detective stories set in Vancouver in 1939. Christy has a long publication record as a poet, fiction writer, and biographer of Jack Kerouac. His reputation and Terminal Avenue's steep price tag both lead one to expect solid entertainment value in this new novel.
Christy is good at atmosphere and amusing dialogue.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Maurice Mierau
Crime Fiction
Val McDermid is a Scottish-born crime novelist who established herself in the 1990s. The Last Temptation is her latest book, and the last in a trilogy that features Tony Hill, a psychological profiler of serial killers. Most of McDermid's other novels are serials with recurring characters detective Kate Brannigan and journalist Lindsay Gordon. McDermid herself spent sixteen years working as a journalist, and read English at Oxford.
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| Margery Looks Up
by Meredith Andrew
The Mercury Press
160 pages $17.95 paper
ISBN: 1551281015
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Malca Litovitz
The heroine of Toronto writer Meredith Andrew's second novel is an idealist who studies philosophy at the University of Toronto. There are references to Innis College, High Park, the Robarts Library, and other local landmarks, but the development is internal and has more to do with a landscape of feeling, mood and affections. Margery meets her first boyfriend, Tom, in an ethics class. It is her hope to raise their bond to a soul connection.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Isabel Vincent
Non-Fiction
In the early 1990s, when I was researching a book on Latin-American terrorist groups and their Canadian links, a source at Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told me (in an off-the-record conversation, of course) that I had accumulated more information than the agency itself had on two Canadians suspected of kidnapping a high-profile businessman in Brazil.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
South African born Beverley Naidoo was forced into exile in 1965 as a student. Her first book, Journey to Jo'Burg: A South African Story, and published in 1985 was banned in South Africa. She has explored the lingering effects of racial hatred in her novels Chain of Fire and No Turning Back and in her short fiction collection, Out of Bounds. Her novel, The Other Side of Truth, won the prestigious Carnegie Medal.
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 | Keesha's House
by Helen Frost
Candlewick Press
116 pages $26.95 cloth
ISBN: 0374340641
|  | Jinx
by Margaret Wild
Walker and Company
215 pages $27.95 cloth
ISBN: 0802788300
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Looking for something a little different? Why not try a young adult novel in verse. Since Karen Hesse's 1997 Newbery Award-winner Out of the Dust, we've seen the growth of a considerable body of blank verse novels that explore some very important aspects of teen life including racism, suicide, homosexuality, single motherhood, literacy, eating disorders, school shootings and first love. These verse novels have an accessibility that makes them attractive to teen readers.
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 | A Stone in My Hand
by Cathryn Clinton
Candlewick Press
208 pages $21.99 cloth
ISBN: 0763613886
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Eleven-year-old Malaak Abed Atieh's world is collapsing around him. It's 1988, and we're in Gaza City. This is occupied territory. Malaak doesn't understand what's happened to her father who went one morning to Israel to look for work as a mechanic and never returned. We later learn that the bus he was travelling on was bombed by the shabab, the youth fighters in the intifada.
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 | A Brave Soldier
by Nicolas Debon
Groundwood Books
32 pages $15.95 cloth
ISBN: 0888994818
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Deborah Wandal
A Brave Soldier is written and illustrated by a man who grew up in northern France, surrounded by countryside that continues to give up the remnants and ghosts of the World War I battles fought upon its soil. The big reasons for war are not explored or rationalized in this book. Instead, the story challenges us to consider the very ordinary, human dimensions of war, beneath the noise of ideological rhetoric
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
A new refugee from war torn Somalia, Hassan finds his new English home dull and grey and colourless. He has no friends and doesn't understand English. Shown some paints, he begins to paint a picture of his home, starting initially with bright and vibrant colours that remind him of the life he left behind. But after painting his picture, he adds red and orange flames, darkens the vivid blue sky to a murky purple and smudges out figures.
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 | Dear Ichiro
by Jean Davies Okimoto. Illustrated by Doug Keith
Kumagai Press $27.95 cloth
ISBN: 1570613737
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Deborah Wandal
This story establishes an important link between childhood feelings of anger and hatred, and global issues pertaining to war and peace between nations. When young Henry's best friend becomes his worst enemy through a thoughtless act, Henry's great-grandfather finds a way to talk about Henry's "I'll hate you forever" outburst of hurt and vengefulness.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Deborah Wandal
During the bombing of Sarajevo in 1992, a cellist, Vedran Smailovic, played in one of the city's squares for 22 days to commemorate 22 of his neighbours who were killed while standing in a bread queue. The Canadian author has succeeded brilliantly at integrating this event and the horrors the city's inhabitants endured during the months of bombing, with a fictional tale of a boy forever changed by the experience of hearing the cellist.
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 | Little Soldier
by Bernard Ashley
Scholastic Press
230 pages $22.99 cloth
ISBN: 0439224241
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Bernard Ashley's Little Soldier explores how race hatred infiltrates into the very deepest recesses of a child's soul, fuelling the ethnic conflicts that, in this case, burns between the Kibu and Yusulu tribes in a fictionalized African country that is in part modeled on Zaire.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Deborah Wandal
Dedicated to the children of war, the story follows a Lebanese teenager, Karim, as he escapes war-torn Beirut, travels a dangerous route over the mountains to Chlifa, and then on to Montreal and a new life. But this journey and time-line is completely fractured within the novel, because Karim himself is unable to move on with his life
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 | Camel Bells
by Janne Carlsson
Groundwood Books $8.95 paperback
ISBN: 0888995164
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
First published in 1987, Camel Bells looks at pre-Taliban Afghanistan 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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