First published in 1970, The Honeyman Festival chronicles one night in the life of Minn Burge, a woman in her mid-thirties who is torn between affection for her family and the need for a life in which impulse and intelligence can once again find play. Pregnant with her fourth child, and unable to take refuge in facile resolutions, Minn interrogates her life with a razor-edge passion in which many readers will find they too are involved. This groundbreaking novel by one of Canada’s most beloved novelists is now available in a beautifully packaged A List edition, featuring an introduction by novelist and short story writer Caroline Adderson.
Before her death in 1985 at the age of fifty-one, Marian Engel had published seven novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous essays and articles. Despite this impressive output and various literary honours, including a Governor General's Award for her novel Bear, Engel's writing has not received the critical attention it deserves. A comprehensive study of Engel's body of work, Lifelines fills a major gap in Canadian literary criticism.
Originally published in 1970, Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson is a collection of candid and wide-ranging interviews with Canadian writers, including Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, and more. With the intuition of an insider, Gibson asks the important questions: In what way is writing important to you? Do writers know something special? Does he or she have any responsibility to society? The result is a fascinating and immensely readable series of conversations with famed writers at the beginning of their careers. The A List edition will feature a new introduction by Graeme Gibson and interviews with the following authors: Margaret Atwood Austin Clarke Matt Cohen Marian Engel Timothy Findley Dave Godfrey Margaret Laurence Jack Ludwig Alice Munro Mordecai Richler Scott Symons
Admired by a generation of Canadian authors and critics, Marian Engel was a writer's writer. This compilation offers an incomparable view into Canadian literature from 1965 to Engel's early death in 1985.
When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: "What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?" Her answer is "survival and victims." Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.
Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” is a major step in redressing that neglect. Extracts carefully chosen by Christl Verduyn from Marian Engel’s forty-nine notebooks — notebooks Engel began in the late 1940s and which she maintained until her death in 1985 — track Engel’s creative development, illustrate her commitment to the craft of writing and document her growth as a major Canadian writer. The notebooks also portray Engel’s surprising leaps of logic, her fascination with the bizarre, the eclecticism of her reading and the depth and variety of her thinking. Finally, they present moving documentation of a woman facing cancer and early death. Christl Verduyn’s illuminating introductory discussions to each of the notebooks unobtrusively guide us in the reading of these sometimes difficult writings. Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” leaves readers with a vivid sense of Canadian culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It provides insight into the literary life of one of Canada’s significant woman writers, including her connections with other Canadian writers, and will be of special interest to scholars working in the field of literature.
CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2023 THE TORONTO STAR 'MUST READ, HANDS DOWN BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR' ‘Cat Person’ meets Station Eleven in this apocalyptic depiction of toxic masculinity. An unnamed man is spending the evening with his ex-girlfriend. She’s obsessed with the 1956 John Wayne classic The Searchers, and she recounts the story as a way for them to talk about their histories, their families, maybe even their relationship. But as he gets more drunk and belligerent, she gets more and more uncomfortable with him being in her home. And then, two days later, a mysterious catastrophic event befalls Toronto, and our protagonist must trek across the city to find Melanie. His quest spirals into increasing violence, bloodshed, and hallucinations as he moves west through the confusion and chaos of the city. Using the tropes of both the Western and the disaster movie, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys looks at the violence of our contemporary masculinity, and its deep roots in shaping our culture. A suspenseful and thought-provoking evocation of our current moment. "Ask the right questions and a conversation about the movies becomes a conversation about your life, family, past, and everything you value: Aaron Tucker’s novel, which starts chatty before turning deeply, unexpectedly inward, grasps the ceaseless, sometimes terrible relevance of violence and troubling art." – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time "In Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, Aaron Tucker refuses the easy projections of masculinity from film history. Instead he gallops into the screen to sift out how drama collaborates with the bloodiest of truths. That this novel shifts from dialogical treatise into a thriller proves that Tucker is well on his way to stealing the weird fiction mantle away from Don DeLillo." – Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes and Little Threats "Sad, smart, innocent and wise. A relentless retelling of a movie and a life, full of hope, if there is any." – John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
