Contemporary Canadian Authors

Presents a variety of essays on the themes of Canadian fiction.

Revolutions is the first book-length critical survey of twenty-first-century Canadian fiction, with in-depth essays examining subjects such as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the effects of the digital revolution, and the dark legacy of what has come to be know as the Canadian literary establishment. Throughout, close reading is given to many contemporary authors, with particular attention paid to such central figures as Douglas Coupland and David Adams Richards. Alex Good explains and contextualizes this period in Canadian fiction for the general reader, providing a much-needed critical re-assessment of Canadian writing in the new millennium. By offering a contrary yet thoughtful position to that taken by our nation’s most prominent literary tastemakers, Good offers a vigorous commentary on the state of Canadian literature—where we are and how we got here.

Anthology of French and English speaking Canadian stories.

"Ten years, ten authors, ten critics. The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littâerature canadienne reached into its Brown Bag Lunch Reading Series to present a sampling of some of the most diverse and powerful voices in contemporary Canadian literature from Newfoundland to British Columbia. Each piece is accompanied by a concise critical essay addressing the author's writerly preoccupations and practices. The literary selections and essays will be of interest to engaged readers who want direction in analyzing these authors' work as well as to teachers and students of Canadian literature."--

Catching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada’s participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, and Frances Itani’s Deafening, the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War. In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one’s duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects. Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national “character.”

Master short story writer and novelist Lisa Moore brings her talents to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories, spanning the last two decades of the twentieth century to the present. An enthralling and irresistible collection of twenty-two established writers and talented new voices who attest to the richness and continued popularity of the short story. The authors featured include Margaret Atwood, Bonnie Burnard, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields, among others.

Ancient Memories, Modern Identities stands for pagan, peasant memories in a postmodern, urban North America. Second- and third-generation authors, young by adoption but old in their vision, express the phenomenon of migration as both a physical displacement and indelible memory.