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From the archives

Claim Game

The high stakes of fraudulent identity

But Blind They Were

The fallacy of an empty continent

The Canadian Conversation

A Polish journalist’s perspective on residential schools

Charles Foran

Charles Foran is author of eleven books. He lives in Toronto.

Articles by
Charles Foran

The Collapse of America

Charles Foran in conversation with Chris Hedges July | August 2018
Long before Donald Trump was dreaming of a White House with gold walls, back when the world’s hugest Twitter account was in its infancy, promoting a blustery businessman’s appearances on late-night television, the American journalist and author Chris Hedges was already lamenting the collapse of his country. As Americans celebrated their first black president, Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter as well as a Presbyterian…

Wanderlust and the Cult of Home

A reissue of early Clark Blaise stories spotlights an important Canadian writer. April 2004
Revisiting early published work can be painful. Often the work is short fiction, a form that does not hide flaws very well. Prose is found to be uneven and characters and scenes lack development. Paragraphs suffer for the presence of one beat too many, or one beat too few. Then there are those summary sentences, epiphanic and diaphanous and…

Out of Sync

Readers and writers strive mightily to imagine the future November 2013
In the spirit of the often personal and doubt-filled essays in this collection, a confession: I am no longer sure about this stuff either. Literary traditions, canons, the way of being in the world, via books, established over the past three centuries, the great 20th-century literary life, the challenging but rewarding career that many of us signed up…

Miscellany with a Mission

A critic deeply devoted to CanLit sets out to woo the general reader. September 2010
My initial exposure to CanLit was not auspicious. It was 1975, and I was a grade nine student in a Jesuit high school in suburban Toronto. A charged young English teacher insisted we read a contemporary Canadian book together. Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood were all then recently…

Prismatic Fiction

Can an author write for deep and shallow readers in the same book? March 2010