Peckertracks is a tough, unsentimental and funny portrait of a boy growing up in a small town on the prairies. The novel depicts, with its elliptical and anecdotal structure, the way the central character, a somewhat romantic Percy Lewis, is shaped by family, school, community and friends, till he reaches the age of 17 and leaves Depot for the outside world. A fish certainly not ready for that ocean. SHORTLISTED for the Books in Canada First Novel Award 1979.

Peckertracks: A Chronicle

Literature & Fiction

Dragland, Stan

Poetry

Brick Books

Those familiar with Stan Dragland's work recognize an author who works in protean literary forms. Journeys Through Bookland is about how we educate ourselves and the influences that guide us - fairy tales, individual teachers, family life , dreams and nightmares. Stan Dragland is at his most moving in this book. He makes fiction out of all these sources, so that by the end an individual and a true voice emerge.

Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages

By the author of Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour (a "critical collage") and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature Of Treaty 9 (winner of the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Criticism of Canadian Literature) - nine passionate essays on the writing of seven important contemporary Canadian writers: George Bowering, Leonard Cohen, Christopher Dewdney, Dennis Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Al Purdy and James Reaney.

The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing

History & Criticism

James Reaney on the Grid

Porcupine's Quill

A quarter of a century old and youthful still, Brick Books offers this selection, as inclusive as we could make it, of the writers we have published through the years. Most of these writers are poets, since Brick Books specializes in poetry, but we're pleased to flavour the mix with other forms like the historical prose of Greg Curnoe's Deeds/Abstracts and the terpsichorean prose of Michael Ondaatje in Elimination Dance/La danse eliminatoire. If we do say so ourselves, New Life From Dark Seas is much more than the souvenir of a significant anniversary. It's a feast for passionate poetry readers like the editors, those who like to stretch within and across the genre -- from P.K. Page's strict-form Holograms, to Dennis Lee's free jazz verse in Riffs, to Michael Kenyon's prose-poem fiction, Rack of Lamb, to Phil Hall's leaping "language" /work poems, to ... this could go on. Let it go on, dear reader, in you.

New Life in Dark Seas

Apocrypha, a shaped collection of writing by Stan Dragland produced over two decades, is a passionate meditation on the meeting of life and literature, and a text of rumination, invention, and rhapsody. Dragland looks at the texts of strangers and colleagues, including Michael Ondaatje, Roy Kiyooka, Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah, Matt Cohen, Agnes Walsh, and others, weaving together personal reminiscences with theoretical and critical looks at their work.

Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Writer as Critic)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

NeWest Press

Against a 1913 background of bitter feuding over water levels along the Napanee River in eastern Ontario, two young people find themselves persuaded to a hut in the Long Swamp south of Bellrock. A third youth, deaf and untrained in speech, imagines he can keep them safe from a danger he intuits but cannot understand. The novel is centrally about their interactions and, more generally, about the power of story and the beauty of true communication. The Drowned Lands follows the thinking and feeling of the main characters, including a circle of important background characters (a teacher, a doctor, the parents of the young folks, a dynamiter, custodian of the threatened dams along the river, and Bad Bob, a Barnardo Boy gone wrong). The controlling point of view is that of a narrator whose views, while not often intrusive, are important to the conduct of the story. Through him, the author probes sensitive matters like, among others, justice (flawed), individuality versus conformity, the effect of political and social conflict on the lives of individuals, the relationship of humans to the natural environment.

The Drowned Lands

Literary

Pedlar Pr

The Bricoleur & His Sentences

A new and exquisite volume of critical essays by Stan Dragland, one of Canada's best essayists, **Strangers and Others: Newfoundland Essays** is a collection of Dragland's writings on Newfoundland subjects, literary and otherwise. (Novelists Paul Bowdring and Lisa Moore, poet Agnes Walsh. . .) He has approached the material from the perspective of an inside/outsider in Newfoundland: a resident of Newfoundland originally from elsewhere who nevertheless finds the figure of the stranger inscribed in much Newfoundland art. Edited by Don McKay.

Strangers & Others: Newfoundland Essays

Goon Show meets Jonathan Swift: that's The Great Eastern. Guy Davenport meets the CBC: that's Dragland. // Much has changed in the profile of Newfoundland culture in the time since The Great Eastern went off the air on CBC Radio. There has been a new and wider wave of Newfoundland cultural renaissance, making it more and more difficult for Canadians to sustain "Newfie" stereotypes. But in 1996 it was still possible for the likes of Stan Dragland to know little more than the stereotypical about Newfoundland. The stereotype exerts a strong invisible influence until something shatters it. For Dragland, that was The Great Eastern show. Written partly in the spirit of the show, Dragland's essay is not only thoughtful but funny. It's meant to be an entertaining book, fun to read if not light and frothy, unorthodox in form and content. In that it's like several of Dragland's other books and, come to think of it, if one can locate readers interested in unconventional non-fiction that finds its own form: jackpot!

Strangers & Others: The Great Eastern

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Books by Dragland, Stan