Off the Record

(Paperback)

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Description

A collection of stories and essays gathered by literary critic, writer, and editor John Metcalf. Featuring six Canadian fiction writers, among them the winners of the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, The Butler Book Prize, and the Marian Engel Award, these collected works offer an in-depth look at the processes and inspiration behind their stories.

Reviews

Praise for John Metcalf

[Metcalfs] talent is generous, hectoring, huge, and remarkable.
Washington Post

"[Metcalf's] exacting eye and his ongoing willingness to call out what he considers substandard, inert, or deadening in our literary culture has earned him opprobrium ... One need not agree with everything [he] says to find much to gnaw on in his analyses of the various ways literary technique and style ... are too often downgraded or outright ignored. ... While its amusing to wrestle with the temerity and gall of Metcalfs settled esthetic standards ... his achievement in translating this approach into practice as mentor and guiding light is invaluable and we are all in his debt."
Steven W. Beattie,Toronto Star

"[Metcalf] deliver[s] a layered and textured narrative highlighting a wide range of writing and writers, one that immerses the reader into the soul of what writing, and thus literature, is supposed to be. And in this, he has succeeded."
Ottawa Review of Books

Hilarious, touching and delightful brilliant concision and understated humor.
Los Angeles Times

John Metcalf has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country.
Alice Munro

In the past few decades, Canada has won a reputation as a prolific producer of high-quality short stories. Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant and John Metcalf are among those who have proven themselves masters of the difficult form.
Macleans

A master stylist confidently at work in his favoured form.
Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature: Second Edition

Masterful ... Harsh reality, hope, and caricature mingle in this tour de force.
Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

Author Bio

John Metcalf has been one of the leading editors in Canada for more than five decades, editing more than two hundred books over this time, including eighteen volumes of the Best Canadian Stories anthology. He is also the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Finding Again the World: Selected Stories, Vital Signs: Collected Novellas, An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir, and The Museum at the End of the World. Senior Fiction Editor at Biblioasis, he lives in Ottawa with his wife, Myrna.