Folks: I think Elizabeth Anderson, the American graduate student in “Chiquita Canada” (Geist 7), should take her “fluevogs” and run, not walk, to a Canadian library for some really basic Canadian history

Copies of Spycatcher by Peter Wright (General Publishing) are washing up in great numbers these days in the secondhand bookstores, and so may be had for a song. This book, the memoir of a British spy, is an unsettling testament to the power of fiction—in this case the fiction of John LeCarré, whose invented world of spy and counter-spy so completely subsumes its real-world counterpart that Wright’s book can be read as a straightforward commentary on, and validation of, LeCarré’s work.

The Exterminated Angel by Gerard Godin (Guernica Editions) is an eighteenth-century satire dressed up as a twentieth-century murder mystery in the manner of Chandler and Hammett, and great fun to read. The real subject of the book is Montreal in the early seventies, a time and a place that Godin, who sports a beret in his mug shot, lays out quite mercilessly in a mere 128 pages.

Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them “conversations,” but “monologues” would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belong to the reader. Books like this are rare, and we should have more of them; there is something quite satisfyingly voyeuristic in the reading of them.

Songs of Aging Children, by Ken Klonsky (Arsenal Pulp Press) is a remarkable book of stories about troubled teenagers—people who too rarely find their way onto the centre stage of contemporary fiction. These are very good stories, well imagined and very well crafted.

The Anatomy of Arcadia by David Solway (Véhicule Press) pretends to be an anti-travel book, written against the grain of the “usual” travel book, but is really an anti-travel-guide-book filled with hard words that seem to be inserted into the text for no other reason than to vex even readers who are not afraid of hard words. On a single page, for example, we encounter replevin, lupercalian and detunicating.

Life Skills (Coteau Books) is a collection of stories by Marlis Wesseler, who, according to the publisher’s blurb, “lives in Regina with her husband Lutz and son Evan”—an example of the biographical minutiae that book lovers learn to ignore—or at least to forgive feckless blurb-writers so often tempted to offer them. But such is not the case with this book, whose only weakness is that there isn’t nearly enough biography in it: for, with each of these stories, one turns again to the author bio, yearning for any kind of detail that might connect her—“in her own life,” so to speak—with the substance of the stories she tells.

Alberto Manguel’s News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House) has been sufficiently praised by the reviewers; now that it’s out in paperback the rest of us can add our praises to theirs. This is, quite simply, a great book with a big theme.

All of Baba’s Children by Myrna Kostash is back in print (NeWest), which is a good news for anyone who doesn’t already own a copy of this seminal Canadian work: go out right now and buy it. You’ll have to ignore the cover, which is, to say the least, ugly, and the typesetting, which is hokey.