A celebration of Canada’s most famous group of painters, expertly blending visual artistry with evocative works of short fiction.

Founded in 1920, the Group of Seven has captured the imagination and hearts of Canadians for a century, helping to shape our national identity with their stunning landscape paintings representing every region of the country. In honour of the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Group’s formation, The Group of Seven Reimagined takes a fresh look at twenty-one paintings from the Group’s vast oeuvre, extracting narrative from landscape and uniting Canada’s most beloved works of art with some of its most distinguished names in contemporary literary fiction.

This gorgeous full-colour art book includes works by the original Group of Seven—Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Frederick H. Varley—as well as later members A.J. Casson, L.L. FitzGerald, and Edwin Holgate, plus their contemporaries Tom Thomson and Emily Carr. Each painting is accompanied by a short narrative—or “flash fiction” piece—written by critically acclaimed, award-winning authors, including Carol Bruneau, Waubgeshig Rice, Tamas Dobozy, and JJ Lee. Rather than analyze or interpret the art, these literary masters look deep inside each painting, crafting new layers of plot, setting, and emotion that feel at once entirely fresh and completely at home alongside these early-twentieth-century works. With a foreword by Sue and Jim Waddington, authors of the popular In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven, this innovative take on the Group of Seven is sure to inspire and delight Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

Born and raised in Montreal, Karen Schauber has called Vancouver home for the past three decades. Schauber cultivated a lifelong passion for the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven during her many visits to the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, while she was a university student living in Toronto in the early ’80s. Now, coupled with her obsession for flash fiction, her work appearing extensively in international literary journals and anthologies, including Brilliant Flash Fiction, Bending Genres, CarpeArte, The Ekphrastic Review, and Fiction Southeast, she has brought this inspired artistic and literary project to life as The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings.

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"A lovely book - and an invitation to take a moment and indulge in a little reimagination of your own." - The Star

"The stories all compel the reader to dive beneath their surface and linger long after the reading is complete." - Ottawa Review of Books

"Balance is found in The Group of Seven Reimagined both as an intelligent coffee table book and tangible source of meditation." - Cottage Life

"As a disciple of the Group of Seven and an aficionado of Canadian wilderness, every page gives me a little leap of pleasure." - Robert Bateman

"The writers bring the paintings to life with new insights into the human heart and our beautiful, fragile land." - David Wistow, author of Meet the Group of Seven; educator emeritus, Art Gallery of Ontario

"These sharp, imaginative evocations of the world of the Group of Seven are both a joy in themselves and a welcome prompt to make us look at the paintings again. It's refreshing to find that, a century later, they still speak to us about our lives and our country." - Ross King, author of Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven

"A most attractive book that any lover of art and literature would enjoy." - The Miramichi Reader