John Metcalf – författare

Paving Our Ways covers the international history of road paving in an interesting, readable and technically accurate way. It provides an overview of the associated technologies in a historical context. It examines the earliest pavements in Egypt and Mesopotamia and then moves to North Africa, Crete, Greece and Italy, before a review of pavements used by the Romans in their magnificent road system. After its empire collapsed, Roman pavements fell into ruin. The slow recovery of pavements in Europe began in France and then in England. The work of Trésaguet, Telford and McAdam is examined. Asphalt and concrete slowly improved as paving materials in the second part of the 19th century. Major advances occurred in the 20th century with the availability of powerful machinery, pneumatic tyres and bitumen. The advances needed to bring pavements to their current development are explored, as are the tools for financing, constructing, managing and maintaining pavements. The book should appeal to those interested in road paving, and in the history of engineering and transport. It can also serve as a text for courses in engineering history.

Paving Our Ways covers the international history of road paving in an interesting, readable and technically accurate way. It provides an overview of the associated technologies in a historical context. It examines the earliest pavements in Egypt and Mesopotamia and then moves to North Africa, Crete, Greece and Italy, before a review of pavements used by the Romans in their magnificent road system. After its empire collapsed, Roman pavements fell into ruin. The slow recovery of pavements in Europe began in France and then in England. The work of Trésaguet, Telford and McAdam is examined. Asphalt and concrete slowly improved as paving materials in the second part of the 19th century. Major advances occurred in the 20th century with the availability of powerful machinery, pneumatic tyres and bitumen. The advances needed to bring pavements to their current development are explored, as are the tools for financing, constructing, managing and maintaining pavements. The book should appeal to those interested in road paving, and in the history of engineering and transport. It can also serve as a text for courses in engineering history.

Blinded by smallpox at the age of six, John Metcalf (1717-1810) led a life that might have featured in an eighteenth-century novel. Popularly known as 'Blind Jack of Knaresborough', Metcalf had many and varied careers, including musician, horse trader, fish supplier, textile merchant and stage-wagon operator. Developing a method for building roads on marshy ground, using heather and gorse as a foundation, he eventually became one of the eighteenth century's great road builders, laying over 120 miles of high-quality roads in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Cheshire. Published in 1795 and based on conversations with Metcalf, this book recounts his life in a series of anecdotes. Metcalf starts with his boyhood escapades, and his becoming an accomplished swimmer, climber and gambler. Among the later episodes recounted are his services in raising troops to fight Jacobite rebels, during which he was present at the battles of Falkirk Muir and Culloden.

"One of Canada's best kept literary secrets."-Harper's Magazine "Hilarious, touching and delightful ...brilliant concision and understated humor."-Los Angeles Times Vital Signs brings together the collected novellas by a modern master of the form, by a writer who Alice Munro has said "often comes as close to the baffling comedy of human experience as a writer can get." Elegant, wry, compassionate, and mischievous, with echoes of Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark, Vital Signs will pierce both funny bone and heart. The author of more than a dozen books, John Metcalf is one of the most celebrated writers, editors, and anthologists in Canada.

No other person has done more to celebrate and encourage the short story in Canada than John Metcalf. For more than five decades he has worked tirelessly as editor, anthologist, writer, critic, and teacher to help shape our understanding of the form and what it can do. The long-time editor of the yearly Best Canadian Stories anthology, as well as a fiction editor at some of the pre-eminent literary presses in the country for more than forty years, he has worked to support and champion several generations of our best writers. Literature in Canada would be far less without his efforts.Sifting through a lifetime of reading, writing, and thinking about the short story in this country, and where it fits within the larger currents of world literature, Metcalf’s magisterial The Canadian Short Story offers the most authoritative book on the subject to date. Most importantly, it includes an expanded and reconsidered Century List, Metcalf’s critical guide to the best Canadian short story collections of the last 100 years. But more than a critical book, The Canadian Short Story is a love-letter to the form, a passionate defense of the best of our literature, and a championing of those books and writers most often over-looked. It is a guide not only to what to read, but also one, its author’s most fervent desire, which aims to make better readers of us all.

"John Metcalf comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get."—Alice MunroSet in Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Ottawa, the stories in this collection span the life of writer Robert Ford and his wife Sheila. Playing with various forms of comedy throughout, Metcalf paints a portrait of twentieth-century literary life with levity, satire, and unsuspecting moments of emotional depth.John Metcalf is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow, and Kicking Against the Pricks.

Hugh Hood's Light Shining Out of Darkness collects twenty-five of the best stories by this modern master of the form, whose work remains quite unlike anything else. Best understood as a suite of modern meditations that are everyday explorations of salvation, temptation, and damnation in an irreligious world, Hood balances insight into human failing with sympathy for people and their plights.Hugh Hood (1928–2000) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist and university professor. Hood wrote thirty-two books: seventeen novels, including the twelve-volume New Age novel sequence; several volumes of short fiction; and five works of nonfiction.

Newly acquired by Biblioasis from Oberon Press and edited by John Metcalf, this expanded edition of the annual Best Canadian Stories builds on the forty-eight-year history of the anthology and features fifteen of the best short stories from across Canada that the previous year had to offer.John Metcalf is Fiction Editor at Biblioasis and the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Museum at the End of the World.

Newly acquired by Biblioasis from Oberon Press, and edited by John Metcalf, this expanded edition of the Best Canadian Stories will build on the 46-year history of the anthology and will feature 15 of the best short stories from across Canada that 2016 had to offer.

Finding Again the World brings together a dozen of the best stories by John Metcalf, a modern master of the form. Spanning more than fifty years and ranging from some of his earliest published stories, such as “Dandelions” and “The Eastmill Reception Centre,” to his latest, with “Ceazer Salad” and “The Museum at the End of the World,” this current gathering shows a writer whose voice, at every stage of his career, is unmistakeable. These are elegant and brilliantly charged fictions, entertaining and moving and mischievous: taking the dross and straw of everyday life and transforming it, through some sort of alchemical process of sensibility, into art.With an introduction by Keath Fraser, Finding Again the World is a landmark collection, a sumptuous gathering of singular work: these are stories that will last.

“[Metcalf’s] talent is generous, hectoring, huge, and remarkable.”—Washington PostIn Temerity & Gall, Metcalf looks back on a lifetime spent in letters; surveys, with no punches pulled, the current state of CanLit; and offers a passionate defense of the promise and potential of Canadian writing.In a 1983 editorial letter to the Globe and Mail, celebrated Canadian novelist W.P. Kinsella railed that “Mr. Metcalf—an immigrant—continually and in the most galling manner has the temerity to preach to Canadians about their own literature.” Forty years later, in spite of Kinsella’s effort to discredit him in the name of a misguided nationalism both embarrassing and familiar, John Metcalf still has the temerity and gall to preach, to teach, and to write passionately (and uproariously) about literature in Canada. Part memoir, meditation, and apologia, part criticism and pure Metcalf, the present volume distills a lifetime of reading and writing, thinking and collecting, and continues his necessary work kicking against the ever-present pricks. As is the case with all of his critical work, Temerity & Gall will challenge, delight, anger, and inspire in equal measure, and is essential reading for anyone interested in literature in Canada and its place within the wider tradition of writing in English.Temerity & Gall is printed in a limited paperback edition of 750 copies signed and numbered by the author.

Editor John Metcalf has inspired, challenged, and championed countless writers over his long career. In Off the Record, he encourages six to reveal what one rarely discusses in polite society: how they became writers instead of radio announcers or cabinet makers. The essays collected here, each accompanied by a short story, offer fascinating insight into the relationships between writers, their editors, and their fiction.Off the Record brings together work by six noted Canadian writers, among them the winners of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Butler Book Prize, and the Marian Engel Award: Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page. Their essays are candid, moving, and surprisingly relatable—providing plenty of inspiration for those among us who want to write.

In William Hoffer and the Final Judgement Construction Company, editor John Metcalf compiles a selection of essays on bookseller William Hoffer by a range of Canadian publishers and academics, accompanied by Hoffer’s letters, journal entries, and essays—providing a critical lens for Hoffer's contributions to Canadian letters.“Why a book about a bookseller who has now been dead for more than a quarter of a century? William Hoffer—Bill—lives on in the memories of his contemporaries, many of whom, younger dealers and collectors, he mentored in the niceties of the trade. Far beyond the confines of the trade, however, he bequeathed to Canadians four major legacies. His first legacy was his 80 catalogues of books for sale, or Lists, as he modestly called them. His second legacy was to make us aware of how much we didn’t know about writers and their books. His third legacy was his assertion, implicit in all his negative catalogue entries, of the necessity in evaluation of comparing Canadian writing with world literature in English. To not compare was to remain in the sandbox with a scattering of nasty plastic toys. The fourth of Bill’s legacies to us was his challenge to government subsidy of the arts. In essence, his argument was that subsidy masked the brutal fact that an audience did not exist.” (From John Metcalf's introduction.)

John Metcalf's Shut Up He Explained defies expectations and strict definition. Part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism -- wholly Metcalf -- it is thoughtful, engaged, contentious and often very funny. It offers a full does of Metcalfian wisdom and wit, and provides ample evidence that neither age nor indifference nor attack have withered him: he remains as sharp, critical, constructive and insightful as ever. Indeed, this may just be his most important and engaged book. Certainly it will be among his most controversial. What his critics will refuse to see, of course, is that it is also among his most positive, that it is a celebration of the best literature Canada has to offer, the birth of which Metcalf himself both witnesses and actively encouraged. Shut Up He Explained is magisterial, a virtuoso performance melding several seemingly different strands into one coherent narrative, which should delight and entertain as it serves to argue, elucidate and celebrate.

First published in 1972, Going Down Slow is an intense and very funny novel about one mans attempt to maintain his sanity, and his sense of humour, in the face of mounting odds. Metcalf's young hero, David Appleby, a young school teacher just over from Britain, is pitted against small-mindedness, prejudice, and temptations that are generations old. The writing is, as one would expect of anything by Metcalf, of the highest order. Going Down Slow is a sharp and biting satire, and an unforgettable novel.

Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

Medals and Prizes brings together eight of the best stories and novellas by John Metcalf, a virtuosic champion of the short form. Metcalf was born in Carlisle and emigrated to Canada as a young man, where both his innovations as a prose stylist and his talent as an editor are legendary. Until now, he has never been published in Britain. Spanning more than fifty years, and ranging from some of his earliest published stories to the astonishing late-career ‘Medals and Prizes’, the work gathered here shows us a writer whose voice, at every stage, is unmistakeable. Entertaining and moving and mischievous, these elegant fictions are a homecoming for a writer ready to assume his rank among Britain’s great short fiction masters.Table of Contents:Singles Gents OnlyThe Children Green and GoldenThe Nipples of VenusGirl in GinghamDandelionsMedals and PrizesCeazar SaladKeys and Watercress

"John Metcalf has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country."-Alice Munro The Argus-eyed editor; the magisterial prose stylist; the waggish, inflammatory cultural critic; the mentor and iconoclast. John Metcalf is a literary legend whose memoir maps the underground he labored tirelessly to establish.