Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works
Edited by Irene Guilford

Started in the year 2000, Guernica's Writers' Series is dedicated to individual writers. Every title is edited by a guest editor, and contains an introduction; 5 or 6 essays by different critics, scholars, and fellow writers; an in-depth interview; as well as complete biobibliographical notes. They are the ideal tools for students and for anyone interested in the work of contemporary Canadian writers. This page highlights the work in Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works. If you'd like to explore more books in this series click here.

About the Book | Writer Biography | About the Essays | Other Writers Series pages

Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works
Writers Series 8, ISBN 1-55071-137-7
$10.00 Canadian-$8.00 US
Editor Irene Guilford
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". . . Alistair MacLeod challenges us to go further, to take one step back, to look beyond our own borders to the greater world at large. As the migrant workers in No Great Mischief attest, migration and displacement are no longer occasional concerns, intermittent disruptions of history, but rather, constant and steady streams. What do we have in common? What do we share? What can we know, within the limits of human understanding, about one another? This is writing that nudges one towards that most complex and wondrous state of being - an individual rooted in personal history and locale, connected to the past, but also a citizen of the world, a person who would try to understand why Zulus dance. Where do we come from? Alistair MacLeod's birthplace is Canadian, his emotional heartland Cape Breton, his heritage Scottish, but his writing is of the world."

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Alistair MacLeod is a national treasure.

Alastair MacLeod has won The Dartmouth Award for Fiction, The Raddall Award for Fiction, The Trillium Award for Fiction, and the CAA-MOSAID Technologies Inc Award for Fiction.

At the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, Dr. MacLeod won for fiction book of the year and author of the year.

In 2001, his novel, No Great Mischief, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction.

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About the Essays

The essays in this book explore various aspects of his work.

Jane Urquhart speaks of the intensity, depth and breadth of his vision.

Janice Kulyk Keefer writes of the dignity of labour and its influence on his characters lives.

David Williams explores the themes of clan and oral culture. Colin Nicholson shows how identity is a blend of history, legend, storytelling, memory and myth.

Karl Jirgens follows the circular nature of narrative. Douglas Gibson describes the writer/publisher relationship.

And Shelagh Rogers, interviewing Alastair MacLeod in Cape Breton, gives us the writer and the man.

Editor Irene Guilford published her first novel The Embrace in 1999 with Guernica.

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