[.ca] Write turns: New directions in Canadian fiction (ISBN 1551924021)

Amazon.ca:
Giving the anthology Write Turns the subtitle New Directions in Canadian Fiction might seem a bit of a reach when it only includes the work of recent graduates of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. But a look at the list of high-profile contributors, including Madeleine Thien, Eden Robinson, Andrew Gray, Aislinn Hunter, Terence Young, Murray Logan, and Zsuzsi Gartner, shows that there is indeed something of national interest happening in Vancouver. Creative writing workshops are often accused of creating legions of clones, all writing short stories that sound like either Raymond Carver or Alice Munro. Write Turns instantly refutes this charge, but it fails to shake off the conservatism all too often associated with workshop fiction. Though none of these stories could be described as experimental, a few of them take significant risks. The contributions of Annabel Lyon ("Black," a strange, oblique tale of adoption and death), Eden Robinson ("Dogs of Winter," the autobiography of the daughter of a female serial killer, a story which has no right to work and yet succeeds brilliantly), and Adam Lewis Schroeder ("Seven Years with Wallace," an account of an English explorer's farewell to his Dyak "boy") are the gutsiest of the lot, but they aren't the work of startling, blazingly original voices in the wilderness. This isn't to say that the stories included in Write Turns aren't good, for most of them are polished and engaging--but are they really "new directions"? --Jack Illingworth