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The Starlight Tour
BY SUSANNE REBER AND ROBERT RENAUD
Early on the frigid morning of January 9, 1964, a curious four-year-old wandered about his new house, scouting his surroundings. The plain one-storey stucco bungalow at 922 Avenue J North, Saskatoon, consisted of just two bedrooms, a bathroom, front room, kitchen and basement, but after the cramped rental suite where the boy and his family used to stay, it seemed enormous.

Ingrid and the Wolf
BY ANDRE ALEXIS
There was once a girl named Ingrid Balazs. Ingrid lived with her parents, Sandor and Krysztina, in a neighborhood called Parkdale. They lived in a small flat in a house on Cowan and, because they were poor, they were very frugal.

Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives
BY ROBERT THACKER
Recalling her university years, Munro says that she loved her time there, "being in that atmosphere, having all those books, not having to do any housework. Those are the only two years of my life without housework." Not that she has greatly minded such work, either before university or after, but those two years at Western stand singular in her memory: "to have that concentration of your life, that something else was the thing you got up in the morning to do, and it was all reading and writing, studying."

Confessions of an Innocent Man
BY WILLIAM SAMPSON
At 7:00 a.m. my alarm clocks began ringing at their allotted intervals, dragging me to consciousness. I felt tired and unrefreshed. The previous weeks had been tense and stressful, leaving little time for relaxation and making what rest I had fitful and inadequate. When I finally roused myself, I was running late. It was Sunday, December 17, 2000.

Bedside Book of Birds
BY GRAEME GIBSON
I came to the birds relatively late in life. For almost thirty-seven years I didn't understand birdwatching. I remember how eccentric, how curious — even mysterious — I found the activity. Who were these tens of thousands of people with sensible shoes, a predilection for paramilitary raingear, and an almost risible devotion to birds?

The Big Red Machine
BY STEPHEN CLARKSON
Our fascination is chronic. Nothing captures Canadians' political attention more predictably and compellingly than an election campaign. During these frantic weeks every few years, when the entire federal stage is handed over to electioneering, the governing process goes into temporary hibernation, and Canada's political culture enters a special mode.

Arthur & George
BY JULIAN BARNES
A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see. He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked. There was nobody to observe him; he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him.

Afterlands
BY STEVEN HEIGHTON
An Esquimau playing Mendelssohn is a tremendous novelty. The local gentry fill the seats of the Main Street Memorial Hall, whiskery gentlemen in frock coats and wing collars, the ladies in gowns and layer-cake hats trimmed with ribbon and mock flora. Their elegant figures are shored up by trusses or corsets — synthetic exoskeletons fortified with whalebone.

A Perfect Pledge
BY RABINDRANATH MAHARAJ
On the evening the baby was delivered by Mullai, the village midwife, a chain-smoking dwarf who smelled of roasted almonds, cumin, and cucumber stems, Narpat, who was fifty-five years old and had given up the idea of fathering a son, was sitting cross-legged in the kitchen methodically compiling one of his lists: ginger, saffron, sapodilla, pineapple, avocado, coconut jelly, and sikya fig, a small banana found in all the birdcages in the village.

A Time in Between
BY DAVID BERGEN
The typhoon arrived that night. Ada woke to the sound of rain driving against the windows. Above them, on the rooftop, chairs fell and banged against the washstand. The corrugated tin on the stairwell roof worked loose and flapped for an hour before it broke free and fell like a whirling blade down onto the street. Ada was standing at the window watching the palm trees bend in the wind and she saw the tin roofing fly by and land on the tennis courts in the distance. The power went out and then flickered on and finally cut out completely. Ada woke Jon, her brother, who had returned while she was sleeping, and she held his hand and said, "I'm frightened."

A Map of Glass
BY JANE URQUHART
In a small town thirty miles down the lakeshore, a woman woke early. There was no sound coming from the street below. Darkness was still pressed against her bedroom windows.

With the Boys
BY JAKE MacDONALD
The stories in this book cover a period of approximately forty years. Some of the early events took place before I became a writer, so these are recollections, and I couldn't testify in court as to their factuality. It's a trick of memory that we tend to revise the details of our past. And it's a trick of the eye that when we're trying to spot something, like a faint star, we can see it more clearly when we look o€ to one side. So these are sidelong dispatches, field notes taken during my travels with fathers and sons, relatives and buddies. If the stories reveal anything about men's lives, I'm pleased. But they're intended to be stories, not lessons. If they seem to have a moral, I'm afraid it's purely accidental.

Pierre
BY NANCY SOUTHAM
The only written reference made by Mr. Trudeau about his religious views that I have been able to find was a short interview he gave to the United Church Observer. In it he was pressed to speak about whether he was "a devout Catholic." After initial parrying and dialectical probing, he gave more than the interviewer asked, by declaring, "I am a believer." Then he virtually recited, for the benefit of the United Church, the substance of the Apostle's Creed.

Our Story
(Various contributors)
Inspired by history, Our Story is a collection of original stories from some of Canada's most celebrated Aboriginal writers. Asked to explore seminal moments in Canadian history from an Aboriginal perspective, ten acclaimed authors travelled through our country's past to discover the moments that shaped our nation and its people. Our Story brings together an impressive array of voices — Inuk, Cherokee, Ojibway, Cree, and Salish to name just a few — from across the country and across the spectrum of First Nations.

I am a Red Dress
BY ANNA CAMILLIERI
My mother often said, "When your grandfather dies, I'm going to the funeral in a red dress." Sometimes this declaration was preceded by a long string of curses, sometimes it emerged as a single thought bubble that evaporated as quickly as it came.

Let There be Rock
BY DAVID BIDINI
I'm forty years old as I write this. I hope that sounds old. If it doesn't sound old to you, then you're my peer, my equal, my generational brother or sister. If that's the case, you have no right reading this book. It isn't for you. It's for those who wouldn't be caught dead sitting next to you on the bus. So, if you don't mind? There. Now go busy yourself with some shuffleboard or something

Shack: The Cutland Junction Stories
BY KENNETH J. HARVY
A man from the government stood in the doorway of Ace Winslow's one-room shack. He had arrived on a silver snowmobile and wore a silver helmet and silver zip-up snowsuit that was peculiar to the area. After introducing himself, he stood silent for a few moments, awaiting conversation that was not forthcoming, then said: "We'll be building you a new house in the spring." He explained that Ace need not live in "this place" any longer, that the government had initiated programs to ensure that the people in Cutland Junction lived better lives. Ace had never seen the man before. He nodded regardless and grinned and asked the man in for a mug of tea, but the man said he was busy and had better get going. Many more stops to make before the day was out.

Shades of Black
BY RICHARD SIKLOS
For a man with Conrad Black's sense of place and history, an AT&T teleconference may not have been his choice of venue for his own corporate beheading. Black was at his Park Avenue apartment at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, January 20, 2004, when he phoned into a board meeting of Hollinger International, the Chicago-based newspaper company he had founded, which owned the Telegraph news-paper group in London, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Jerusalem Post.

Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw
BY WILL FERGUSON
It's rare to remember exactly where you were when an idea first occurred to you—or at least, it's rare for me. I usually wander through life gathering notions and hunches the way trouser pockets gather bits of lint; I'm not really sure how they got there, but there they are. In this case, though, I can recall vividly where I was when it dawned on me that Canada is not a country but a collection of outposts: it was while I drove through a night of heavy rain, into the realm of a legendary republic, a sleeping child and drowsy spouse beside me.

There is a Season
BY PATRICK LANE
I stood alone among yellow glacier lilies and the windflowers of spring, the western anemone, their petals frail disks of trembling clotted cream.

Life Mask
BY EMMA DONOGHUE
The Thames was loosening, its thin skin of ice cracked open by thousands of small boats, as if spring were on its way. The carriage with the Derby arms gilded on the side forced its way down Whitehall through a tangle of vehicles and pedestrians. 'The traffic, these days.' The Earl of Derby sighed.

Segue
BY CAROL SHIELDS
Something is always saying to me: Be plain. Be clear. But then something else interferes and unjoints my good intentions.

Standing Stones
BY JOHN METCALF
After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father's obstinately polite grip and after he'd bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn't lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.

My Life
BY BILL CLINTON
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.

Inside the Olympics
BY DICK POUND

Arriving in Greece is a delight. As the plane circles for its approach into the Athens airport, the view is stupendous—a rocky, convoluted coast jutting out into the Mediterranean. A beautiful airport, built by German construction experts, adds to the impression of modern Greece as a country that has arrived.

Dark Age Ahead
BY JANE JACOBS

This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book. The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.

Down to This
BY SHAUGHNESSY BISHOP-STALL

Tent City is not a city and we don't live in tents. We live in shacks and shanties on the edge of Canada's largest metropolis where the river meets the lake. There's a fence dividing these 27 acres from the rest of Toronto, and on this side we've built what dwellings we can with the rubble of a scrapyard, a no-man's landfill caught in confusion between the city and private business. Sometimes it seems like a community and sometimes like chaos. Junk Town would be a better name.

A Complicated Kindness
BY MIRIAM TOEWS

I live with my father, Ray Nickel, in that low brick bungalow out on highway number twelve. Blue shutters, brown door, one shattered window. Nothing great. The furniture keeps disappearing, though. That keeps things interesting.

Paper Fan
BY TERRY GOULD

There is no marker where the Paper Fan's ashes are buried. The Schlipfs, Kosakas, and Holts are remembered with bronze plaques, but the Triad official has only an empty square of fescue to show for his life. "You're sure this is his plot?" I ask Kein Battistone, the Forest Lawn Cemetery's family service counselor.

Air Monopoly
BY KEITH McARTHUR

Watching developments south of the border, Claude Taylor could see that deregulation of the Canadian airline industry was also inevitable. Taylor had started as a passenger ticket agent with Trans-Canada Air Lines in 1949 and worked his way through the ranks until he was appointed president of Air Canada in 1974.

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
BY ESI EDUGYAN

The house had always had a famished look to it. At least in Samuel's imagination, for he had never once seen it. It sat on the outskirts of Aster, a town whose most noted relic was the fellowship between its men. Driving through, one might see a solemn group, patient and thoughtful, sharing a complicit cigarette as the sun set behind the houses. And for a man like Samuel, whose life lacked intimacy, the town seemed the return to the honest era he longed for. But he knew Maud would never move there, and the twins, for the sake of siding with her, would object in their quiet way.

Doctor Bloom's Story
BY DON COLES
There's an image I often have of myself, my ur-self before I began to elaborate and embellish it, an image I retain from the last seconds of sleep or recover in a reliable daydream. I'm sitting in a corner of a remote upper room, casting brief glances about me and then tilting my face downwards as though to meditate on what I've just seen. In fact I have seen nothing because no one else is in the room and there is no furniture. It may be, it can hardly be anywhere else, the unused attic room of my childhood home in Amsterdam, that tall narrow Leidsegracht house -- the attic room where I would go in late March when the weather turned a little warmer, to check on the dead flies at the window ledges. They meant, that random spatter, another winter gone, and in my rudimentary way I was taking note of this sort of thing even then.

Suddenly They Heard Footsteps: Storytelling for the 21st Century
BY DAN YASHINSKY
II was once telling stories at a downtown arts centre when a restless group of kids stomped in. They were ten-year-olds from a Catholic school in a new housing development, and they came in munching potato chips and blowing bubble gum. One big boy with a cast on his arm had a well-practised burp. I could tell they weren't in a listening mood. Since it was close to Halloween, I lit a candle, turned off the lights and started telling ghost stories.

Midnight At The Dragon Café
BY JUDY FONG BATES
I have kept only three possessions from my childhood. Each one is a book. The first is a coil-bound sketch pad with a cover made of heavy cardboard, a muted olive green. The pages are filled with drawings — of trees and flowers, of animals and soft nudes, but also of fantastic creatures, some beautiful, some hideous, entwined and growing out of one another, out of eyes, bellies, tongues, mouths. As a child I found the drawings magical, yet they unsettled me, pulling me into a world I did not understand. When I look at them now, many years later, they disturb me in a different way; I am left feeling hollow and haunted.

Emma's Hands
BY MARY SWAN
Now that you've been dead for weeks instead of days, I find I'm scanning headlines at the checkout once again. Cures for cancer in every issue and Siamese twins delivering each other's babies. A caveman's skull bears an uncanny resemblance to Elvis, who has recently been spotted in Jessup, Georgia.

The Urge to Splurge
BY LAURA BYRNE PAQUET
Before I dig into the meat of this book — shopping — I'd like to digress briefly into the wonderful world of global exploration, conquest, and warfare. After all, the demands of the marketplace have fueled empires and revolutions for thousands of years. Just consider the Romans.

Playing House
BY PATRICIA PEARSON
New life announces itself as a mystery that a mother cannot solve. Something happens, a certain gear-shifting in the body that she notes, but makes no sense of. Especially if she isn't planning to be pregnant. I shall offer myself as an example. I did not have a basal thermometer handy on my bureau, or any recall as to when I last had my period. I was not expecting to read What to Expect When You're Expecting.

If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories
BY J. EDWARD CHAMBERLAIN
Ted Chamberlin grew up, as he says, near a rain forest haunted by memories of human slavery, near a river that carried twice as much water as the Nile, draining a region whose government had outlawed dancing.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
BY M.G. VASSANJI
My name is Vikram Lall. I have the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning. To me has been attributed the emptying of a large part of my troubled country's treasury in recent years. I head my country's List of Shame. These and other descriptions actually flatter my intelligence, if not my moral sensibility. But I do not intend here to defend myself or even seek redemption through confession; I simply crave to tell my story.

Understanding Me
BY STEPHANIE MCLUHAN and DAVID STAINES
On March 3, 1959, Marshall McLuhan addressed a gathering of more than a thousand educators in Chicago sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education. The theme of the conference was "The Race Against Time: New Perspectives and Imperatives in Higher Education," and McLuhan's talk was titled "Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media."

The Player
By GEOFFREY STEVENS
First Baptist Church in Oakland, California, was filled to capacity on that August day in 1937. Even the galleries were jammed, and many mourners were forced to stand at the rear. The well of the church, beneath the pulpit, was a wall of flowers. The second son of the great Protestant preacher Harold Brainard Camp — the man who would come to be thought of as the Billy Graham of his day — could smell the heavy scent of the blooms.

The Way the Crow Flies
By ANN-MARIE MACDONALD
The birds saw the murder. Down below in the new grass, the tiny white bell-heads of the lily of the valley. It was a sunny day. Twig-crackling, early spring stirrings, spring soil smell. April. A stream through the nearby woods, so refreshing to the ear — it would be dry by the end of summer, but for now it rippled through the shade. High in the branches of an elm, that is where the birds were, perched among the many buds set to pleat like fresh hankies.

The Island Walkers
By JOHN BEMROSE
One Saturday in the summer of 1965, Joe and Alf Walker climbed onto the roof and spent the better part of the morning stripping the old shingles. By eleven they were busy nailing down the new ones. Joe, who had turned eighteen that July, worked on the slope overlooking the backyard. He sat shirtless, on his duff, and hammered sullenly between his legs, aware of the sun-­baked expanse of tarpaper stretching up the slope behind him. From beyond the peak, his father's hammer thundered without rest. It seemed crazy to try to keep up.

Deafening
By FRANCES ITANI
"Go to my room." Mamo is pointing to the floor above. "Bring the package on my bureau." Grania watches her grandmother's lips. She understands, pushes aside the heavy tapestry curtain that keeps the draught from blowing up the stairs, and runs up to the landing. She pauses long enough to glance through the only window in the house that is shaped like a porthole, even though it's at the back of the house and looks over land, not water.

The Continuation of Love by Other Means
By CLAUDIA CASPER
A seven-year-old boy sat on a roof feeling momentarily safe. He was skinny, all knees and elbows, and his short brown hair smelled like woodsmoke, dirt and sweat. His grey-green eyes were like a stream running over limestone—fresh, lively and cool. A Love Supreme
By KENT NUSSEY
Late in the morning, as Omar sat hunched over his typewriter, the telephone rang. He looked up, uncomprehending, from the page that sprouted from the carriage; the phone chirped again and he turned to stare at it, just out of reach on a small table beneath the window. On the fourth ring he bolted from his chair and snatched up the receiver. Hey Nostradamus
By DOUGLAS COUPLAND
I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world -- spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley -- is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. The Kite Runner
By KHALED HOSSEINI
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture: Collected Works, Vol. 13
By NORTHROP FRYE
If one translates the terms of conventional theologies into psychological terms, one gets some interesting results. Deism is psychologically the low water-mark of the religious life, with God sound asleep in the soul and the soul carrying on automatically. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By MARK HADDON
It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women
By MARILYN FRENCH
The nineteenth century roiled with contradiction. It was the lowest point in women's history: a male historian has pointed out that nineteenth-century British women had fewer rights than Babylonian women possessed when Hammurabi's Code was written. From Free Trade to Force Trade
By PETER URMETZER
Why trade? At one level, there are many obvious benefits to be gleaned from this activity. In Canada, a sometimes harsh climate means that food production is interrupted for a significant portion of the year. Only because of imports are we able to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables all year.