Canadian Women: The New Guard

Canadian Women: The New Guard

Posted  July 14 2011 Category: Fiction Editor: Jonathan Mendelsohn

The next Margaret Atwood may very well be out there right now. Could be she’s started writing. If so, she’s likely already published. And while it would be rather presumptuous to suggest that one of the three women highlighted below will rise to such iconic heights, it’s fair to say these already established authors—who have been both admired by critics and lay reader alike—are well worth keeping an eye on. They are stars who continue to rise.

Miriam Toews

Some readers believe that what is taken from a novelist’s life is less worthy or intriguing than that which is wholly imagined. That writers as diverse and accomplished as Philip Roth, D.H. Lawrence and even Leo Tolstoy (in his novelThe Cossacks) took liberally from their own lives to create fictive worlds might be good reason to shake this belief. More to the point, when you were brought up in a Russian Mennonite community in Steinbach, Manitoba it would be foolish not to mine said material.

For more go to Indigo's Fiction Blog

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A Literary Map of the Middle East - Indigo Fiction Blog Piece #2

This is the introduction to my latest "Literary Review" on Indigo's Fiction blog:

 Even now, or perhaps especially now—with the hope that has emerged with the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and the potential for revolution in Syria (and less so in Libya)—the ever-pressing concern remains over the stability of the Middle East. And that’s not to mention the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Dictatorships, military rule, a peace process that may never come to pass: what good, one wonders, can come of all this strife? It brings to mind that wonderful quote from the film “The Third Man” about Italy having thirty years of warfare, terror and murder under the Borgias but producing Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; while in Switzerland they had peace, democracy and five hundred years of brotherly love: “And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The hope, then, is that all that strife will—at a minimum—contribute to the overall cultural value of the region, and it doesn’t take much digging to discover all that it has to offer in literary treasures ... 

Read the rest here.