The Prairie Novels
No Customer Reviews
James Hoffman, George Ryga's biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga's fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here-- Hungry Hills , Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk --draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era Alberta. They have similar stark prairie settings and a recognizable array of colourful, cantankerous homesteader and dirt farmer characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, both historical and mythopoetic. This was a period of obstinate survival farming and boisterous, ethnically diverse community building, redolent with the more questionable aspects of colonial 'settling' and 'breaking' of the land, in a place that was never unsettled or unclaimed to begin with. Told in a homey vernacular, each of these three tales evokes a time and place that is as ironically as it is emphatically post-colonial. Ryga offers the reader (and re-reader) characters with a rough-hewn energy for survival and self-determination, and finds in them the beginnings of an authentic prairie culture defined by the anti-colonial struggle that so powerfully marks his work.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:088922501X
ISBN13:9780889225015
Release Date:April 2004
Publisher:Talonbooks
Length:320 Pages
Weight:0.81 lbs.
Dimensions:0.5" x 6.8" x 9.8"
Customer Reviews
0 rating
Copyright © 2025 Thriftbooks.com
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information | Cookie Policy | Cookie Preferences | Accessibility Statement
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
