Montreal Stories: No. 3 (Selected Stories S.) - Tapa blanda

... Swan's prose is not imposed conspicuously upon her subject but arises naturally and appropriately from it. Her protagonists are invariably women, most often mature women looking back on incidents in their lives whose significance they now understand for the first time. Swan's prose is clear, even limpid, reminiscent of the seemingly simple but highly sophisticated art of Ethel Wilson.' -- W J Keith "Canadian Book Review Annual"

Mary Swan's first book, a novella entitled "The Deep" (2002), revealed the same qualities that are evident here. I have no hesitation in hailing her as the most gifted new Canadian prose writer to have appeared on the scene for many years. But the key, I repeat, is in the style. These stories must be listened to; every word must be savoured. An exceptional talent is on display here.' -- W J Keith "Canadian Book Review Annual"

One way ... to approach the collection is to soak up the atmosphere of the city that Blaise describes with an almost uncanny acuity. He is a sure master, whether painting landscape -- the mean east-end streets of the 1950s seen as one big icy puddle of frozen gutter water, devoid of joy, colour, laughter, pleasure, intellect or art'' -- or charting social change in the Plateau, the district transformed in the 1980s from a low, squalid slum, dismal and tubercular'' to Soho de chez nous ... young, upscale, arty and French.'' '--Elaine Kalman Naves "Montreal Gazette "

Mingling new pieces written especially for each collection with several older, classic' stories, the series is an unprecedented event in the history of Canadian literature. Never before has such a large body of work been re-collected in such a way. Never has a writer been so quickly and so completely re-presented'' to us. The strength of the project is its ability to foreground the complexity of Blaise's geographical imagination. [ ... The series illustrates, more clearly than ever before, that there is something remarkably original about Blaise's work. Blaise is more than just a local colourist who ferrets out the curious details of marginal'' communities in order to delight cosmopolitan readers. Rather, if we consider the full arc of his work, we see that for nearly fifty years he has been challenging the way that we understand the concept of place in contemporary Canadian and American literature.'--Alexander Macleod "Essays on Canadian Writing "

Here gathered together are the Montreal-set stories which made Clark Blaise famous -- such stories as `A Class of New Canadians', `Eyes', and `I'm Dreaming of Rocket Richard' -- alongside two new and unpublished Montreal stories, `The Belle of Shediac' and `Life Could Be a Dream (sh-boom, sh-boom)'.