Criticism & Essays

Polaroids from the Dead

The “Polaroids” that give Douglas Coupland’s new collection of essays and short stories its title are a series of 10 vignettes, each focusing on the experiences of different people attending a Grateful Dead concert in ... Read More »

October 10, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Notes from Canada’s Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up for Change

By Severn Cullis-Suzuki et al., eds.

The “activist” label can serve both as an honorific – especially when applied to figures such as the late June Callwood – and as a derisive epithet directed against those who agitate for social change ... Read More »

July 27, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

So This Is the World & Here I Am in It

By Di Brandt

Manitoba poet Di Brandt’s So This Is the World & Here I Am in It is the 10th book in NeWest’s Writer as Critic series. The book consists of 12 essays written over 10 years ... Read More »

June 14, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

The Age of Confession: The Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture

By Neil Bissoondath

Neil Bissoondath’s The Age of Confession was the inaugural Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, delivered in Moncton in April 2006 as part of the Northrop Frye Festival. The objective of this new lecture series, according to ... Read More »

May 18, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction

By Herb Wyile

In Speaking in the Past Tense, Herb Wyile interviews 11 Canadian novelists about writing historical fiction. Several recurring topics weave through the informal, conversational interviews, but the predominating theme is that of the tension between ... Read More »

April 5, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Ragged Pen: Essays on Poetry & Memory

By various

Ragged Pen gathers together talks on poetry and memory given by Robert Finley, Patrick Friesen, Aislinn Hunter, Anne Simpson, and Jan Zwicky at the 2005 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference and fleshes them ... Read More »

March 28, 2007 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada

By Noah Richler

Several decades ago, a group of CanLit critics began appealing for more evaluative criticism of our national literature. What they meant by this was a stricter examination of how certain texts worked, an emphasis on ... Read More »

December 15, 2006 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Strange Ghosts

By Darren Greer

Strange Ghosts, the new book from Darren Greer, whose novel Still Life with June was awarded the 2004 ReLit Award, is a collection of 16 recent essays that run the gamut from travel pieces to ... Read More »

July 17, 2006 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Dropped Threads 3: Beyond the Small Circle

By Marjorie Anderson, ed.

Despite the subtitle of this third in a series of collections of personal essays by Canadian women, Dropped Threads 3 rarely breaks away from a limited range of concerns and styles. The first-person singular is ... Read More »

May 30, 2006 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

By David Rakoff

Ex-pat Canadian and long-time New Yorker David Rakoff is an extremely funny man. This, his second release (following a collection of autobiographical essays called Fraud) is for the most part an extremely funny book.Rakoff, a ... Read More »

October 11, 2005 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

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