Medals and Prizes brings together eight of the best stories and novellas by John Metcalf, a virtuosic champion of the short form. Metcalf was born in Carlisle and emigrated to Canada as a young man, where both his innovations as a prose stylist and his talent as an editor are legendary. Until now, he has never been published in Britain. Spanning more than fifty years, and ranging from some of his earliest published stories to the astonishing late-career 'Medals and Prizes', the work gathered here shows us a writer whose voice, at every stage, is unmistakeable. Entertaining and moving and mischievous, these elegant fictions are a homecoming for a writer ready to assume his rank among Britain's great short fiction masters.

Paving Our Ways covers the international history of road paving in an interesting, readable and technically accurate way. It provides an overview of the associated technologies in a historical context. It examines the earliest pavements in Egypt and Mesopotamia and then moves to North Africa, Crete, Greece and Italy, before a review of pavements used by the Romans in their magnificent road system. After its empire collapsed, Roman pavements fell into ruin. The slow recovery of pavements in Europe began in France and then in England. The work of Tresaguet, Telford and McAdam is examined. Asphalt and concrete slowly improved as paving materials in the second part of the 19th century. Major advances occurred in the 20th century with the availability of powerful machinery, pneumatic tyres and bitumen. The advances needed to bring pavements to their current development are explored, as are the tools for financing, constructing, managing and maintaining pavements. The book should appeal to those interested in road paving, and in the history of engineering and transport. It can also serve as a text for courses in engineering history.

Paving Our Ways covers the international history of road paving in an interesting, readable and technically accurate way. It provides an overview of the associated technologies in a historical context. It examines the earliest pavements in Egypt and Mesopotamia and then moves to North Africa, Crete, Greece and Italy, before a review of pavements used by the Romans in their magnificent road system. After its empire collapsed, Roman pavements fell into ruin. The slow recovery of pavements in Europe began in France and then in England. The work of Trésaguet, Telford and McAdam is examined. Asphalt and concrete slowly improved as paving materials in the second part of the 19th century. Major advances occurred in the 20th century with the availability of powerful machinery, pneumatic tyres and bitumen. The advances needed to bring pavements to their current development are explored, as are the tools for financing, constructing, managing and maintaining pavements. The book should appeal to those interested in road paving, and in the history of engineering and transport. It can also serve as a text for courses in engineering history.

A collection of stories and essays gathered by literary critic, writer, and editor John Metcalf. Featuring six Canadian fiction writers, among them the winners of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, The Butler Book Prize, and the Marian Engel Award, these collected works offer an in-depth look at the processes and inspiration behind their stories.

Blinded by smallpox at the age of six, John Metcalf (1717-1810) led a life that might have featured in an eighteenth-century novel. Popularly known as 'Blind Jack of Knaresborough', Metcalf had many and varied careers, including musician, horse trader, fish supplier, textile merchant and stage-wagon operator. Developing a method for building roads on marshy ground, using heather and gorse as a foundation, he eventually became one of the eighteenth century's great road builders, laying over 120 miles of high-quality roads in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Cheshire. Published in 1795 and based on conversations with Metcalf, this book recounts his life in a series of anecdotes. Metcalf starts with his boyhood escapades, and his becoming an accomplished swimmer, climber and gambler. Among the later episodes recounted are his services in raising troops to fight Jacobite rebels, during which he was present at the battles of Falkirk Muir and Culloden.

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.

"[Metcalf's] talent is generous, hectoring, huge, and remarkable."-Washington Post In Temerity & Gall, Metcalf looks back on a lifetime spent in letters; surveys, with no punches pulled, the current state of CanLit; and offers a passionate defense of the promise and potential of Canadian writing. In a 1983 editorial letter to the Globe and Mail, celebrated Canadian novelist W.P. Kinsella railed that "Mr. Metcalf-an immigrant-continually and in the most galling manner has the temerity to preach to Canadians about their own literature." Forty years later, in spite of Kinsella's effort to discredit him in the name of a misguided nationalism both embarrassing and familiar, John Metcalf still has the temerity and gall to preach, to teach, and to write passionately (and uproariously) about literature in Canada. Part memoir, meditation, and apologia, part criticism and pure Metcalf, the present volume distills a lifetime of reading and writing, thinking and collecting, and continues his necessary work kicking against the ever-present pricks. As is the case with all of his critical work, Temerity & Gall will challenge, delight, anger, and inspire in equal measure, and is essential reading for anyone interested in literature in Canada and its place within the wider tradition of writing in English. Temerity & Gall is printed in a limited paperback edition of 750 copies signed and numbered by the author.

It's always easy to trace the breadcrumb trail backwards and note the causes retrospectively, but what if you could see the signs beforehand? What if you could filter out the noise? Could you tune into weak signals and know the future? Lee believed you could. What's more he was proving it could be done in some of the most unpredictable environments. Praesagium follows three strangers who are preoccupied with their own futures. But when their paths cross in Mexico none of them had foreseen the outcome...

In this much-anticipated memoir, Metcalf takes us on a personal journey through his life and those influences that inform his own literary aesthetic. Here is a fascinating story peopled with the likes of Alice Munro, Norman Levine, Ernest Hemingway, John Newlove, Hugh Hood, Keath Fraser, Irving Layton, Mavis Gallant, and many other literary luminaries. By turns humorous and iconoclastic and brimming with intelligence and brio, this highly readable memoir provides much-needed perspective on the art of editing, literary values, and the current state of Canadian literary publishing.

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