Description
Ice and Fire is a collection of nonfiction narratives from award-winning writer Stephen Osborne, who retains an abiding sense that the places and the people he encounters are still to be discovered.
Negotiating the Trans-Canada Highway near Moncton during a whiteout, visiting Timothy Eaton's grave in Toronto, leaving offerings of tobacco at a Nez Perce battleground, drinking with his Japanese mentor in a revolving bar in Vancouver while debating Buddhism vs. class struggle--for Osborne, all of these are occasions to conjure our time and our place.
Ice and fire are extremes of a Canadian North, from which several of these dispatches are written. But Osborne's special insight is that Kamloops, New Glasgow and even Toronto are as unknowable as Pangnirtung. We live in a country that can claim the world's only souvenir police force, and whose analogue is a department store; a country that believes itself to be part of a New World, even though people have lived here for ten thousand years.
Smart, funny, moving, and full of wonder and surprise, the dispatches in Ice and Fire illuminate a very old world striving to make itself new.
About the author
Stephen Osborne was born in Pangnirtung in 1947. In 2004 he was a recipient of the CBC Literary Award, the Vancouver Arts Award for Writing and Publishing, and the National Magazine Foundation Special Achievement Award. He won the first Event Creative Non-fiction Prize, and is an award-winning columnist for Geist magazine, where many of the pieces in Ice & Fire got their start. He is the founder of Arsenal Pulp Press and editor and founder of Geist magazine. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, and the title story in his collection was translated into Inuktitut and appeared in Inuktitut magazine.
Editorial Reviews
Beautiful and sincere.
-Georgia Straight
Georgia Straight
Other titles by
The Coincidence Problem
Selected Dispatches 1999-2022
The North End Revisited
Photographs by John Paskievich
Anhaga
Pray for Hardship & Other Poems
Fame Us
Celebrity Impersonators and the Cult(ure) of Fame
The North End
Photographs by John Paskievich
The Geist Atlas of Canada
Meat Maps and Other Strange Cartographies
One Ring Circus
Extreme Wrestling in the Minor Leagues
Quotations For A Nation
The Little Book of Canada
The Little Grey Flannel Book
Quotations on Men
The Little Green Book
Quotations on the Environment