Everything you need to know about Anarchism in Canada can be found in Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (Arsenal Pulp), an enormous collection of anarchist writing and publishing in this country since 1976. Here is recorded the genesis and passing of such publications as Open Road (headline on the first edition: “Never Say Sorry to the Pentagon”), Bevy of Anarchists (“Mother, sister, nurturer—Just say no!”), Demolition Derby (“Abolish Montreal?—the Sooner the Better!”), No Picnic (“People, not Ism-oids!”), Demanarchie (“Le climat social annonce un été chaud”), Reality Now (“For Defense of Life on Earth”), Bulldozer (“The Only Vehicle for Prison Reform”), Endless Struggle (“Absolutely No Government”), Resistance (“The Struggle Continues”) and Kick It Over (“Sustaining Development or Developing Sustainability?”).
The Historical Atlas of Canada by Derek Hayes (Douglas & McIntyre) contains reproductions of more than three hundred antique maps, which comprise a true history of the occupation of a continent. This is a beautiful book, almost impossible to put down.
Sheila Heti, author of The Middle Stories (Anansi) has received much praise in the Globe and the National Post, all of it deserved. The stories in this little volume are very short and very good: formidable might be the right word.
George Fetherling has been exploring again, this time halfway around the world, part of the time on a cruise ship from hell. Three Pagodas Pass: A Roundabout Journey to Burma (Subway), Fetherling’s fifty-somethingth book, contains no maps, which is an unkindness to readers who like their texts to come with apparatus.
Three of the stories in Calvin Wharton’s new book, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone), have appeared in Geist, and it is a pleasure to see them again in this handsome volume. The cover photograph pictures diverging highways somewhere in Texas, intended perhaps as a spiritual analogue to the imagined space of wanderers in the more northerly western worlds inhabited by his protagonists.
The disappearance of Books in Canada, the once venerable, at times haywire and always interesting monthly review of Canadian writing and publishing, is lamented as part of the evaporation of the “Canadian” component of Canadian literature by Stephen Henighan in his new book of essays, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (Porcupine’s Quill). Henighan is an articulate critic of the so-called “world-class” school of writing, as exemplified in the works of Ondaatje, Shields, Michaels and the dinner-party culture of prizes that begin with the letter G.
Lee Henderson has written some very good stories in The Broken Record Technique (Penguin), a collection of painful tales about families, many of whom live in the suburbs and go to malls. This is narrative territory that may be somewhat over-reported these days, but Henderson is one of its best interpreters, a master of the deadpan who manages always to avoid sinking into ennui.
George Fetherling, in his Biographical Dictionary of the World’s Assassins (Random House), offers a useful five-part typology of assassins that appears to be a first of its kind. (Type fives seek personal revenge, type threes are hired mercenaries, type ones are the most common, etc. Fetherling points out that Lee Harvey Oswald, if all of the theories about him prove to be true, may be the only assassin in history to fit all five types.)
Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is a new quarterly published in Taiwan and Canada by the anonymously named Art and Collection Group Ltd., which turns out to be an ambitious group of editors, writers, curators and artists in several countries in the East and the West, with a focus on “theoretical writing on Chinese contemporary art in an intellectual context.”
The twenty-one stories by Morley Callaghan that appeared in The New Yorker between 1928 and 1938 have been gathered into a small volume by the author’s son Barry, who is the publisher of Exile Editions. Reading these stories today is a little like reading Ben Katchor’s cartoon narratives: they are strongly flavoured with anachronism.
