Kit Dobson
Kit Dobson
The Briscoe-MacDougall family retire to their lakeside cabin each summer. This annual vacation is at time to unwind and refresh, a time to relax away from the hustle and bustle of city life.We are Already Ghosts joins the Briscoe-MacDougalls in the summer of 1996 and returns to them at five-year intervals. William, Clare, Helen, Michael, John, Doug, Mike, Jéanne, Françoise, Celeste, Daphne, Benjamin, and Mackenzie the dog live, grow up, and grow old as the world changes in small ways and in devastating ones. The shock of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan tear across the globe; the Great Recession steals jobs, savings, and houses; and the politics of colonial Canada come evermore into focus. Marriages are made and marriages fall apart, babies are born, lives end, careers are made and broken, the trash gets taken to the dump, the trees bud and then they lose their leaves. The cabin remains and the family returns, year after year.Impeccably written, crisp, and direct, We are Already Ghosts is a turn-of-the-millennium family epic that documents and challenges Canadian life. Author Kit Dobson writes in conversation with the literary tradition, creating a narratively complex, compelling, and smart novel that is a pleasure to read yet lingers in the mind long after the covers are closed.
Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economyand what that economy means for their creative processes. The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers' works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bk, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced. Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers workand how those conditions affect their writing itselfProducing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.
Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students. Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today's economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada's state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being. An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.