Clark Blaise is a North American treasure, one of a handful of the truly important short-story writers in the last 50 years. His "Selected Essays" bring together for the first time another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre, belles-lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadian heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers as Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor. His essays on literary craft and technique are essential reading for aspiring writers and for readers eager for knowledge of literature's nuts-and-bolts. Always elegant, profound, thought-provoking and contrarian, Blaise's essays grapple with the themes and preoccupations that have animated his fiction, and give us a more intimate understanding of the work of this most modern of North American writers.

"Blaise is probably the greatest living Canadian writer most Canadians have never heard of." -Quill & Quire "If you want to understand something about what life was like in the restless, peripatetic, striving, anxiety-ridden, shimmer cultural soup of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries," writes Margaret Atwood, "read the stories of Clark Blaise." This Time, That Place draws together twenty-four stories that span the entirety of Blaise's career, including one never previously published. Moving swiftly across place and time, through and between languages-from Florida's Confederate swamps, to working-class Pittsburgh, to Montreal and abroad-they demonstrate Blaise's profound mastery of the short story and reveal the range of his lifelong preoccupation with identity as fallacy, fable, and dream. This Time, That Place: Selected Stories confirms Clark Blaise as one of the best and most enduring masters of the form-on either side of our shared borders.

It is difficult today to imagine life before standard time was established in 1884. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, there were 144 official time zones in North America alone. The confusion that ensued, especially among the burgeoning railroad companies, was an hourly comedy of errors that ultimately threatened to impede progress. The creation of standard time, with its two dozen global time zones, is one of the great inventions of the Victorian Era, yet it has been largely taken for granted.

In Time Lord, Clark Blaise re-creates the life of Sanford Fleming, who struggled to convince the world to accept standard time. It’s a fascinating story of science, politics, nationalism, and the determined vision of one man who changed the world. Set in a time marked by substantial technological and cultural transformation, Time Lord is also an erudite exploration of art, literature, consciousness, and our changing relationship to time