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.

Times change, lives change, and the terms we need to describe our literature or society or condition-what Raymond Williams calls "keywords"-change with them. Perhaps the most significant development in the quarter-century since Eli Mandel edited his anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism has been the growing recognition that not only do different people need different terms, but the same terms have different meanings for different people and in different contexts. Nation, history, culture, art, identity-the positions we take discussing these and other issues can lead to conflict, but also hold the promise of a new sort of community. Speaking of First Nations people and their literature, Beth Brant observes that "Our connections ... are like the threads of a weaving. ... While the colour and beauty of each thread is unique and important, together they make a communal material of strength and durability." New Contexts of Canadian Criticism is designed to be read, to work, in much the same manner.