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From the archives

Football Fables

The beautiful game bestrides the world like a colossus

But Blind They Were

The fallacy of an empty continent

Alberta and Me

From a land of oil, true enough

George Melnyk

George Melnyk teaches Canadian studies and film studies at the University of Calgary.

Articles by
George Melnyk

A Broken Head

Robotic reveries blur reality and fantasy July–August 2009
When s a murder not a murder? When is a patricide not a patricide? When is Satan involved and when is God? These are some of the questions that Lee Gowan puts before us as he unwinds his first-person account narrated by a janitor reflecting on his upbringing in small-town Saskatchewan and the events that drove him to…

The Wisdom of Bones

A novel hunts fossils and finds the human heart October 2007
Bone sharp is a 19th-century term used to describe paleontologists. Its use in the title of Edmonton writer and poet Tim Bowling’s third novel is both a descriptor for Charles H. Sternberg (1850–1943), its fossil-hunting protagonist, and a metaphor for the emotional dramas that unfold in the story. Sternberg was an American who searched for dinosaur fossils in Alberta during the early part of the 20th…