Fiction
15: Best Canadian Stories
Edited by John Metcalf
This year’s anthology contains a satisfying mix of old hands like Leon Rooke, Cynthia Flood, Mark Jarman and Rebecca Rosenblum, and newcomers like Kerry-Lee Powell, Megan Findlay, Kevin Hardcastle and Lauren Carter. There are others too, writers like Adrian Michael Kelly, Kathy Page and Alice Petersen. This is the forty-fifth anniversary of Best Canadian Stories, a book that has always championed the very best of Canadian writing, under the watchful eye in recent years of John Metcalf, who knows more about the Canadian short story than anyone else in the country.
8.5 by 5.5 by 173 pages
$39.95 (cloth) ISBN 978 0 7780 1431 7
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1432 4
ISSN 0703 9476
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Contributors: Mark Jarman, Kerry-Lee Powell, Rebecca Rosenblum, Adrian Michael Kelly, Kathy Page, Cynthia Flood, Lauren Carter, Megan Findlay, Kevin Hardcastle, Leon Rooke, Alice Petersen
“The arrival, late in the fall each year, of this Oberon collection is always cause for fanfare”—Quill & Quire.
“The legacy of this series is massive…a literary institution”—Ottawa Citizen.
Coming Attractions 15
Edited by Mark Anthony Jarman
 | Mona’a Malik is a young Newfoundland writer now living in Montreal. She speaks of the pressure on immigrant families struggling to come to terms with a whole new world. Mark Jacquemain’s dark stories deal with fathers and wives, baseball and beach towns—or even a mouse in an oven mitt that causes a kitchen fire. Jann Everard is at home in the outdoor world—whether she’s portaging a canoe while being eaten alive by mosquitoes or clinging for dear life to a mountain precipice. She has an engaging empathy with her people, whether they are family or lovers or forces of wild and savage nature.
8.5 by 5.5 by 121 pages, cover by Paul-Emile Borduas
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1433 1
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New writers who first appeared in Coming Attractions include Rohinton Mistry, Frances Itani, Peter Behrens, Lisa Moore, Dennis Bock, Neil Smith, Diane Schoemperlen, Timothy Taylor, Bonnie Burnard, Sharon Butala, Steven Heighton, Mary Swan, Caroline Adderson, Rebecca Rosenblum, Gayla Reid, Alexander MacLeod
“Reading Coming Attractions is like test-driving the year’s new cars”—London Free Press.
“Coming Attractions is a who’s who of our best young writers”—The Fiddlehead.
In a Time of Drought and Hunger
Gerard Beirne
A first collection of stories, this book is set in a Cree community in northern Manitoba called Norway House, where Beirne and his family settled when they first came to Canada from Ireland. As an outsider himself, Beirne found it bitterly ironic that a First Nation could be alienated from its own homeland. This book has been a long time in the making, and the disaffected people who fill its pages have moved everyone who has read it.
8.5 by 5.5 by 158 pages
$19.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1434 8
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Gerard Beirne was born in 1962, completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University in 1992, and now lives in Fredericton, NB. He is the author of three novels, The Eskimo in the Net, Turtle and Charlie Tallulah, two collections of poems, Digging My Own Grave and Games of Chance, a CD and a play for chamber orchestra. He has won a number of awards, including Hennessey’s New Writer of the Year.
Poetry
First Thin Light
Shari Andrews
 | Shari Andrews is a major poet whose four collections have been concerned with the effect of history and tradition on the events of today. In this new book she considers the bonds that tie the present to the past in terms of what it means to be female, and the influences both obvious and subtle that have gathered to define her.
8.5 by 5.5 by 78 pages, cover by Keith Vaughan
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1436 2
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Shari Andrews is of Danish descent through her maternal grandmother, whose great-grandparents settled in New Denmark in 1876. Her first book of poems, The Stone Cloak, was an imaginative retelling of their story. It was followed in 2001 by Bones about to Bloom, a broader collection that was awarded a Bailey Prize by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, in 2004 by Crucible, a series of poems based on and inspired by the life of St. Catherine of Siena, and in 2005 by Walking the Sky. Shari Andrews lives with her husband in New Maryland, NB, where she has been a member of the Wolf Tree writing group for twenty years.
Keeping Late Hours
David Helwig
For years David Helwig has been sending poems to friends, as New Year’s presents, from his home in Prince Edward Island. Now these poems can be enjoyed by a wider public. The subjects extend from the game of golf to meditations on the present and the deep past. A series of sonnets deals with the death of a close friend. David Helwig’s sharp eye brings great cities before us as well as the day-to-day landscape of maritime Canada.
8.5 by 5.5 by 98 pages, cover photo by David Helwig
$18.95 (paper) ISBN 978 0 7780 1435 5
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David Helwig is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, essays and autobiography. Born in Toronto, he taught for many years at Queen’s University and now lives in PEI, where he was named poet laureate. In 1971 he founded the anthology series Best Canadian Stories. In 2007 he was awarded the Matt Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2009 he was named to the Order of Canada.
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