Sam Solecki

T.S Eliot might have been thinking of Anne Carson when he suggested that “only those [writers] who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.” Of course, going too far often entails out-running one’s readers and being dismissed as too experimental or elitist. On the evidenceof her last two creative…

Josef Škvorecký is a prolific writer, but there is no doubt that his major body of work is contained in the seven semi-autobiographical novels he wrote during the past 60 years. The Cowards, dealing with the end of the Second World War and written during the early years of the communist takeover of…

Sometime in the early 1980s, I drove to Buffalo with a CBC producer to interview the literary critic and novelist Leslie Fiedler, who had achieved more than academic celebrity in the 1960s when he published Love and Death in the American Novel. Although literary and cultural criticism had undergone a sea change during the 1970s with the arrival of French critical theory…