| Do you want to appear smarter, better educated and more well-rounded than you actually are?
Well, a good way to start may be to read all the books being released by Alberta authors and publishers this spring. The last time I did a spring literary roundup like this one, an acquaintance asked whether I had read all the books I had mentioned. Honest to a fault, I could only answer, "Yes."
FICTION
Alberta’s fiction writers are exceptionally heterogeneous, a thumb in the eye to those who see in the province a desert of oil barons and Lonesome Cowboy Ralph clones. Governor General’s Award winner Robert Hilles presents A Gradual Ruin (Doubleday Canada), a whopping novel set behind enemy lines during the Second World War and northern Ontario in the postwar years. Survivors: Seven Short Stories (Cormorant Books) is well-known Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb’s first work to be published in English. The characters in Margaret Macpherson’s debut story collection Perilous Departures (Signature Editions) find themselves on unpredictable journeys. Marie Jakober, who won acclaim and a major-league U.S. publishing deal with The Black Chalice, returns with Even the Stones (Edge Publishing), a fantasy novel blurbed by none other than Ursula K. LeGuin. Esi Edugyan, late of Calgary, fictionalizes the black community of Amber Valley as Aster, Alberta in The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (Knopf Canada). In Tyler Trafford’s The Story of Blue Eye (Thistledown Press), Quaker capitalism and Peigan spirituality intertwine. Three of George Ryga’s six novels are collected in The Prairie Novels (Talonbooks).
POETRY
As always, there’s lots of poetry. This spring sees the return of two Stephansson Prize winners – Tim Bowling, with The Memory Orchard (Brick Books), and Richard Stevenson, with A Charm of Finches: Haiku, Senryu and Tanka (Ekstasis Editions). At the time of this writing, Lord Stanley’s cup is still up for grabs, so I can’t say whether the 10th-anniversary edition of Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play (Wolsak & Wynn), a book of hockey poems, will create good vibes or bad for Flames fans. Bob Stallworthy follows his well-received From a Call Box with Optics (Frontenac House). Michael Bradford debuts with Personal Effects (Coteau Books). And The Ubiquitous Big (Coach House Books), the notorious Ian Samuels’s second book, delves into the language of popular culture with a nod, a wink, a nudge and Philip Marlowe’s gun.
DRAMA
While it may be difficult to find drama titles on bookstore shelves (no commercial potential), a handful of Alberta-authored plays do make their way into print each season. Robert Astle, the erstwhile Edmontonian who co-founded the Small Change Theatre company, gives us a dialogue – don’t we need more of this inter-species communication? – between man and piano in The Piano Tuner (Signature Editions). Three of Stewart Lemoine’s plays are collected in A Teatro Trilogy (NeWest Press). The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by the aforementioned Ryga was a landmark in Canadian theatre and the script was a best-selling book. Now it may be time to pay attention to The Other Plays (Talonbooks).
NON-FICTION
Alberta writers offer a feast of non-fiction. Elizabeth McLachlan, author of two successful books on Prairie teachers, turns her eye to the Prairie sentinels in Gone But Not Forgotten: Tales of the Disappearing Grain Elevators (NeWest Press). Simon Evans traces the evolution of the cattle business through one famous 122-year-old ranch in The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History (University of Calgary Press). George Melnyk, no slacker, is back as the author of My Mother is a Space Alien (The Banff Centre Press), an unusual collection of essays about film, and as the editor of Canada and the New American Empire: War and Anti-War (University of Calgary Press). River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Gold Rush (NeWest Press) is the story of two men following in the footsteps of their long-deceased grandfather on the Klondike stampede. Brindle & Glass has re-released the masterful Hope’s Last Home: Travels in Milk River Country by Tony Rees. Please be careful driving to the bookstore to purchase Harm’s Way: Disasters in Western Canada (University of Calgary Press), edited by Anthony Rasporich and Max Foran. Historian Judy Larmour and naturalist Henry Saley reveal unknown sides of Alberta’s agricultural heartland in Stop the Car! Discovering Central Alberta (Blue Couch Books). Noreen Olson humorously exposes facets of rural life – although the names have been changed to protect the author – in The School Bus Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (Douglas & McIntyre). Writer David Staples and photographer Greg Southam documented Barb Tarbox as she became a Canadian hero while dying of lung cancer. Their work is collected in the memorial volume Barb’s Miracle: How Barb Tarbox Turned Her Deadly Cancer into a Life-Saving Crusade (River Books). Elizabeth Hudson recounts her experiences as a prostitute and drug addict in Vancouver and Calgary in Snow Bodies: One Woman’s Life on the Streets (NeWest Press). And finally — really finally – well-known Calgary author Nancy Millar has collected some of Canada’s most interesting and unusual memorial lines in The Final Word: The Book of Canadian Epitaphs (Brindle & Glass). |
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