Although Cynthia Flood’s new collection of short stories, Red Girl Rat Boy, demonstrates her attention to the art of fiction much more than to politics, the recent grumbles of electoral campaigning in the east-central Canadian news turned my attention to her characters marked by political signs: social workers, pacifists, feminists. Flood knows the signs…
Joel Deshaye
Joel Deshaye is an assistant professor at Memorial University. He is the author of The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980 (University of Toronto Press).
Articles by
Joel Deshaye
Works of Art on the Art of Work
Two story collections map today’s nine-to-five realities October 2012
Art responds to work in Cary Fagan’s My Life among the Apes and Rebecca Rosenblum’s The Big Dream, two recent short-story collections set in and around Toronto, where so many Canadians go to find jobs. In an age when Canada’s finance minister declares that “there is no bad job” and when the minister of labour similarly opines that the economy should be considered an essential service to be protected from…
The Young, the Old, the Now and the Gone
The generation gap yawns in two new story collections. April 2011
“All the old kindnesses are gone,” says Clyde Brind’amour, 48, the main character in a short story from Richard Cumyn’s latest collection, The Young in Their Country: And Other Stories. Sarah Selecky’s Richard, who is 30-something in This Cake Is for the Party, says that “the now is so thin…