Mark Leiren-Young’s Shylock (Anvil) is similar to The Noam Chomsky Lectures. In this one-man drama, Jon Davies, a Jewish actor who portrays Shylock in a cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, is accused of betraying his fellow Jews and being a “Sturmer character come to life.” The play’s setting is a talkback session after the final performance of the shortened run, and is the performer’s final chance to respond to criticism.
Attention, Joyce Nelson fans: we no longer need to scan the contents pages of Canadian Forum and the Georgia Straight for her astute essays on culture. In June 1996, Nelson started publishing Lynx, a Monthly Newsletter in the Public Interest from James Bay on Vancouver Island, and she already has readers in six provinces.
The Noam Chomsky Lectures (Coach House) is a table play. For two hours Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia sit behind a table and wage war on the Canadian Government and Big Business.
The other book is sure to become what the blurb writers call “an instant classic”: A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk by Ingeborg Marshall (McGill-Queen’s). The title sounds unpromising, and the book itself is a brute at 640 pages, but this is the definitive study of the Native people who disappeared from Newfoundland in the last century.
The latest book from Canada’s Angry Young Playwright Brad Fraser includes a reprint of his infamous Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love alongside the screenplay of his recently produced film version Love and Human Remains (NeWest). The former is one of the most important Canadian plays written in the last.
Word of Mouth (Thistledown) is M.A.C. Farrant’s fourth collection of fiction and is in two parts: stories about Sybilla, a nineteen-year-old mother struggling to survive in suburban Vancouver Island, stretching welfare cheques and coping with perverted, judgmental neighbours (“The McHates”); and the story of a woman raised by her aunt and often absent parents.
From opposite ends of the country come two important books about Indians: one old and one new. The old is a reissue of Rolf Knight’s Indians at Work (New Star).
The best pen-in-a-shirt-pocket photograph you will ever see is the author photo on the back cover of Joe Fiorito’s new book, Tango on the Main (Nuage). The author himself looks pretty good (in fact this is what Philip Marlowe would look like if he lived in Montreal) but the pen in the pocket is, as they say, absolutely stunning.
Alberto Manguel’s wonderful new book, A History of Reading, has been coming out gradually in several countries since the middle of the summer. The Canadian edition, which appeared in October (Knopf), has the best cover of them all.
During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran’s The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran’s fourteen-year relationship with the McNallys, a Catholic family of seven living in North Belfast that he first met as a backpacking teenager in 1979 and has visited many times since.
