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World Body
"World Body" is the fourth and final volume of the new and selected stories of Clark Blaise. The first three volumes are celebrations of variant lives within the familiar outline of a not-quite Clark Blaise whom Clark Blaise would nevertheless recognize. In "World Body" it is evident that Blaise's fiction and its autobiographical sources have drifted further apart; the stories here explode the easy identification of a writer with his own life-experience. Blaise weaves an intricate tapestry of terror and desire.
Pittsburgh Stories
`Written over four decades, Pittsburgh Stories, is the second in a projected four-volume set of Clark Blaise's selected short stories. Set largely during the forties and fifties, these nine stories, with one exception, are reminiscences about a distant Pittsburgh adolescence. The previous and inaugural collection in the series, Southern Stories, was also unified by one locale. `Blaise's prowess as a writer is evident from the outset. The opening story, ``The Birth of the Blues,'' written in 1983, is clearly the work of a skilful, deft craftsman. A well-honed tale, it impresses with its subtlety and detail. The protagonist, young Frank Keeler, witnesses his father's humiliation before a woman who has hired him to fix her pipes. Standing before the two Keelers in her bathrobe, she reprimands Frank's father and summarily dismisses him. In so doing, she sets both father and son alight with desire, ``becoming for Keeler, the prototype of all beautiful women. For his father, the most perfect bitch.'' '
Southern Stories
The stories collected here in Volume One are among the earliest in Blaise's forty-year publishing career. The experience of Florida -- particularly the underdeveloped north-central areas close to modern Disneyfied Orlando -- profoundly affected a `Yankee' child with Canadian parents. The Florida Blaise describes is little-changed since the Civil War. The stories in this volume trace a young writer's journey towards his life's work. By the close of his Florida experience, he has discovered a way of integrating his Canadian, and especially his French-Canadian, background into a sub-tropical foreground. Included are two very early stories, `A Fish Like a Buzzard' and `Giant Turtle, Gliding in the Dark', which have not previously been published in book form. Southern Stories assembles the best of Clark Blaise's early work in one collection. His powerful writing is as relevant to our times now as it was when these stories first appeared. Included here are stories from A North American Education, Tribal Justice, Man and His World and Resident Alien.
Montreal Stories
`I grew up without a home -- what was it, the south, Pittsburgh? -- and by my mid-twenties the anxiety had grown palpable. My most potent memories were southern, but the inherited memories were of my parents' Canada, especially Montreal, where they had met and life had taken an improbable turn for both of them. But by 1966, when I moved my family to Montreal, my parents had divorced, my father was in Mexico, my mother had returned to Winnipeg, I had married a woman from India, and I didn't know where I'd come from or where I was going. Montreal provided the answer. `I re-entered a world I had never made, Montreal, and determined I would become the son I might have been, and would assert authority over an experience I could and should have had, but never did. Confusion remained, but at least I would be the French and English son of befuddlement, the crown prince of Canadian identity.' - Clark Blaise
An Other I
This is the first full-length study of the short stories and novels by Clark Blaise. It follows his development as a deeply self-conscious writer who becomes involved in the dualities of the world around him -- dualities that are reflected in the structure of his fiction and in the narrative strategies he employs to convey an image of himself. Lecker frames his discussion with an opening chapter that provides a detailed discussion of Blaise's aesthetic stance. Subsequent chapters focus on Blaise's first two short story collections, and on readings of Blaise's two novels. The study includes an original chronology by Clark Blaise, which provides a creative rendering of the important dates and turning points in his life and literary career.
Clark Blaise
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Clark Blaise
This volume represents the first full-scale appreciation of Clark Blaise's writing in more than 25 years and the first comprehensive study of his now more than 20 books. Included are previously published essays by, among others, Robert Lecker, Alexander MacLeod, Catherine Sheldrick Ross, and the volume's editor, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, along with new essays by William Butt, Stephen Henighan, W.H. New, and Sandra Sabatini, as well as a brand-new autobiographical essay by Blaise himself. As important as these essays are for their insights into Blaise's works, they offer something more: a rich range of examples showing us how we, as readers and as writers, can come to understand much more intricately and to practice much more powerfully the art of the essay ourselves.
