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.

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.

Like the paintings of Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper, Hugh Hood’s short fiction looks hard at what some might call the surface of things. Like the finely wrought realism of those canvases, Hood’s super-realist style doesn’t just see—it sees into. While his early publications prompted his reputation as an originator of Canadian modernism, Hood’s work taken as a whole reveals a philosophy far older: that of the allegorist. Like Dante’s pilgrim, Hood’s narrator finds spiritual truths in recognizable forms, affirming again and again the imagination’s capacity for penetrating insight and the transcendental potential of art. As he wrote in 1971, “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subjects. I hope my gaze has helped to light them up.”

With a foreword by John Metcalf, Light Shining Out of Darkness collects twenty-five of the best stories by this modern master of the form, whose sensibility set him apart from the writers of his generation and continues to distinguish his oeuvre as among the 20th century’s most enduring. Best understood as a suite of modern meditations, seemingly quotidian explorations of salvation, temptation, and damnation in an irreligious world, Hood balances insight into human failing with compassion for our shared condition.

Now in its 47th year, Best Canadian Stories has long championed the short story form and highlighted the work of many of the writers, throughout their respective careers, who have gone on to shape the Canadian literary canon. Caroline Adderson, Margaret Atwood, Clark Blaise, Lynn Coady, Mavis Gallant, Zsuzsi Gartner, Douglas Glover, Steven Heighton, Isabel Huggan, Mark Anthony Jarman, Norman Levine, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Diane Schoemperlen, Russell Smith, Linda Svendsen, Kathleen Winter, and many others have appeared in its pages over the years and decades, making Best Canadian Stories the go-to source for what''s new in Canadian fiction writing for close to five decades.

The short story is perhaps Canada''s greatest contribution to literature, and in this edition established practitioners of the form—including Tamas Dobozy, Cynthia Flood, K.D. Miller, and Lisa Moore—are joined by powerful emerging talents—like Paige Cooper and CBC Short Story Prize winner David Huebert—in a continuation of not only a series, but a legacy in Canadian letters.

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 Post

In 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.

"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.