Short of actually going out on a limb and publishing their books, is about the best thing McClelland and Stewart could have done for a lot of the writers contained in this departure of an anthology.

Small presses are often remarkably perspicacious, the writing they publish often enormously exciting. But there's a two-fold problem. It's impossible for writers to make a living with the small presses. And for readers, it's often very difficult to keep up with what's what and who's where, and unless you live in an urban centre with book stores like Pages and Book City or a Chapters as well-managed as the one at 110 Bloor West, the latest offering from Anvil, Coteau or Mercury Press is likely to slide right by you. And if it slides by you, it's probably sliding by most everybody. And if these books are sliding by most everybody, there's little chance the writer, no matter how attuned or original or insightful, will go anywhere.

And so, in an entirely laudable publishing move, McClelland & Stewart decided to do for the small presses what its been doing for the past nine years for journal fiction with its annual Journey Prize Anthology. And with the exception of the look of the book (about which more later), they've managed the project pretty successfully, launching it in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver (whisking 27-year-old editor Hal Niedzviecki to all three events). With any luck, a few of the better writers collected here will come to enough people's attention to launch their own careers in earnest.

Now a few - like Michael Turner, Andre Alexis and Cordelia Strube - didn't really need the leg up. Such others as Stuart Ross, Crad Kilodney and Daniel Richler have had plenty of time and opportunity to come to people's attention over the past several decades, and we can presume that anyone who wanted to pay attention has. It's Golda Fried, Derek McCormack, Elise Levine and Richard Van Camp who really stand to benefit most from this book, and who have the most to offer readers in search of both quality and novelty.

Especially Golda Fried. Damn she's good. She's got a way of fitting worlds of personality and perspective in between her clipped and often non-sequiturial sentences that enables the outwardly odd prose to really get under your skin. She manages to stride right up to the edge of sentimentality - with her star imagery, her child-like observations and approaches to narrative life - and not cross over. The fact that she can not only get away with a sentence like ". . . that night in my cosy bed there were stars in my teacup, the kind you get when you think a really cool person might just be your friend," but actually make it shine is truly remarkable. She's just published a book with Gutter Press. It's called Darkness Then A Blown Kiss, and has an excellent cover by a woman named Vesna. We'll see if she can keep up that impressive voice for a whole book.

But Niedzviecki, editor of his own 'zine digest and author of the story collection Smell It (reviewed in these pages a few months ago), did not set out to bolster writers' careers. It was to let readers in on what he perceives to be a distinct form of writing that's not been given its due - Canadian urban fiction. He characterizes the genre he's seeking to establish as "statistics of the soul," writing "still wet in the poured pavement of society's interlocking perplexities." The writers he calls "word sculptors." A little stilted, perhaps, and characteristic of the oddly stumbling prose of his introduction, but when he describes the "chipped language and abbreviated assumptions" that set much of the stuff he's collected apart from the run of the literary mill, he hits it.

At its best, this writing draws on what's become over the past couple of decades our common cultural vocabulary - more often situational and sociological than literary - and crystallizes it. At its less good, we see writers with good to excellent material - like Natasha Waxman and Peter Stinson - simply unable to execute. There's also the question of just why Niedzviecki sees some of the contributions - like the excerpt of Michael Turner's novel Hard Core Logo, or Leo McKay Jr.'s story "The Name Everybody Calls Me" - as particularly urban (the explanations he provides in his introduction are slippery).

The most disappointing aspect of the book is its presentation. From a literary point of view it's a small thing to be sure, but it is the face of the book, after all. One gets the feeling designer Sari Ginsberg has given us what she thinks an alternative and gritty sort of book ought to look like, sort of a generic advertiser's take on alternative rather than something born of any real feeling for or understanding of the ethos. A problem, but a quibbling one.

With its mix of writers young and middle-aged, fledgling and modestly established, but none that well-known to anyone who does not pay very close attention to this country's literary comings and goings, Concrete Forest, whatever its shortcomings, offers an excellent opportunity for more widespread reading of writers who may not ever be as generally available as they are for us here.

Toronto literary journalist Bert Archer writes a monthly small press column for these pages.

Urban literature? What's the point?
Gilbert A. Bouchard
Edmonton Journal
August 23, 1998

Urbanism is a new development for Canada, barely a thin veneer upon our nation's body politic. At the start of this century our nation was largely rural and proud of that reality. We were a happy nation of hewers of wood an drawers of water and our fiction reflected that. From Anne of Green Gables to Jake and the Kid, from Susanna Moodie's meditations on life in the bush to the earnest rural introspection of Canadian playwrights and poets in the 1960s and '70s (popularly known as "prairie shit-kicking literature"), wordsmiths of both official languages minutely mined the hinterlands for all that they are worth.

For the better part of this century, the vast majority of non-immigrant Canadian writers would have been raised on a farm or have relatives who were farmers still. But at the tail end of the century, that movement is rapidly losing its venerable hold upon our literary consciousness, especially among younger writers.

Now the new generation of Canadian authors emerging into the limelight are of an age and demographic (in large part the TV generation born after 1965, weaned on visions of hyper-urban America) who have been raised deep within suburban Canada and are innocent of all things rural and are artistically concerned with trying to map the complicated topography of a nascent Canuck urbanism.

Hence, it was a delightful assignment to be able to review Concrete Forest, Hal Niedzviecki's ambitious survey of new Canadian writing around urban themes.

The writers assembled in this collection are an ambitious and daring lot and represent the future of Canada's literary scene. Most have cut their teeth in 'zines and small magazines and two have survived by selling their poems on the streets of Toronto.

The more familiar names include: Michael Turner (author of the novel Hard Core Logo, the source text of Bruce Macdonald movie of the same name), Dany Laferriere (author of the award-winning How to Make Love to a Negro), Julie Doucet (fast-rising cartoonist) and Daniel Richler (media personality and novelist).

This is a book rich with vibrant, edgy prose, full of modern anxiety and virtually humming with the background noise of an overstimulated technological culture. And for a collection of stories with a very tight theme, the works are as diverse in subject matter and style as is Canada's own urban topography.

From the surreal magic realism of Andre Alexis (whose Letters details the trials of an Ottawa civil servant convinced that his co-workers are being turned into zombies by a particularly malicious book) to the gritty hyper-realism of Richard Van Camp (whose Bash is set on an Indian reserve in the far north, at once terribly isolated and yet deeply colonized by the taint of the urban), Concrete Forest encompasses an almost dizzying variety of imaginary Canadian cityscapes.

My favourite story of the lot is Natasha Waxman's Topographies, which centres on the tortured love affair of a compulsive older academic and his twinky same-sex lover.

This is an almost textbook example of a perfectly balanced literary work: equal parts theory, psychology, literary and cultural reference, Waxman's story is unabashedly urban and unselfconsciously sophisticated. In her words, even dowdy Toronto becomes an erotically charged metropolis dripping in heightened sexual and psychic tensions.

So imagine my horror when I started reading a similar American collection, The Urban Muse: Stories on the American City, and discovered that virtually all the stories were decades dead and members of America's canonical literary all-star team (James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Herman Melville).

What gives?

Don't get me wrong.

I love all of these writers and many of the stories in the volume are worth reading (and re-reading) in any context, but I didn't see the point of this book. Why bother collecting together this collection of "urban" stories into a volume when they neither mesh particularly well together (there being far too many years separating many of the texts), nor do they come together as some anthropological examination of the evolution of the American urban condition.

Only after reading the introduction did I realize what was happening. Editor Ilan Stavans is an immigrant to America, drawn from childhood to the bright lights and immortal splendour of the American city, "immortal" being the key word.

For Stavans, American urbanism is a fait accompli that one simply accepts and enters into in a state of reverential awe. The vision of American urbanism in this volume (unlike Concrete Forest) is static, fixed and ultimately as dead as most of its contributors.

Gilbert A. Bouchard is a freelance reviewer

Urban Canada emerges in compelling collection
Rick Jagodzinski
Calgary Herald
June 13, 1998

On examining Hal Niedzviecki's anthology Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada, my first thoughts were of the overused simplifications of generational demographics. Within two stories all such concerns about hype had left me -- for those who hate being labelled and packaged as one generation or another, this collection offers a refreshingly real look at urban life across Canada.

One of the most compelling aspects of this collection is its portrayal of a real, imaginative and complex view of urban Canada. Concrete Forest is an anthology of Canadian writers' tales of the true North -- not forests and pristine lakes but endless highways and cinder-block wastelands.

The land has not disappeared but becomes secondary to the characters' thoughts, hopes and occasionally ugly lives. There is an excitement and raw vitality in this collection that is reminiscent of the current spate of streetwise Scottish and English writings of the disenchanted youth and disenfranchised working class.

Editor Niedzviecki has assembled an excellent cadre of writings pointing at an exciting direction that most traditional Canadian literature has ignored. Much to his credit, he has included unsung hero(ine)s of northern writing -- most notably, Toronto street poet and literary troublemaker Crad Kilodney.

The 26 stories in this collection range across the experience of Canada in the '80s and '90s. M.A.C. Farrant's contribution, Altered Statements, offers a collection of memoes from a government bent on ensuring our well-being -- at any cost. Dany Laferriere's Haitian immigrant's loneliness drives him to invite people he meets back to his apartment for Pigeon in Lemon Sauce.

Richard Van Camp's Bash gives the technical dirt on hot knifing while pretending to babysit. Peter Stinson's Taxi cruises a full shift around Calgary, while Julie Doucet's Missing, a short graphic adventure, provides a Kafkaesque voyage through the Metro subway.

These stories are chock full of the idiosyncrasies of Canadian life at the end of the millennium -- and here, at least, that life is decidedly urban.

(Jagodzinski is the editor of Dandelion magazine)

Sounds like a new Canada
Bruce Serafin
Vancouver Sun
May 9, 1998

This collection makes it official: a revolution has taken place in Canadian fiction. How to describe this revolution? Let me start by listing a few of the things I didn't find in the stories Hal Niedzviecki has collected: The smell of popcorn and new shoes in Woolworth's outlets. House dresses. Poems in newspapers. Pictures of Queen Elizabeth hanging in the gym. Musing portrayals of family. Wistful or comic looks at our mighty neighbours down south.

Most important, I found practically no trace of the classic Canadian sentence, which is cool in tone, complicated in its syntax, and untouched by vulgarity. The revolution has tossed that sentence out and a new kind of writing has taken its place. I offer here examples of this new writing at work, taken from different stories in Concrete Forest:

From Robin's donuts, to the Huntington Esso ... it's raining again, guy, bicycle, and poor wet skinny little black dog named Ralph ... "Named after the Jackie Gleason character ..." Tips me with a cherry stick donut ... I see this guy with the little dog outside Pints a couple o' nights later ... I shut my eyes. I spoke about kissing Gary Cooper's lips and nipples and stomach and Dr. Vine shocked me.

Back in my room I cupped my balls in my palm. Legs cramped. Horst hauls him up. They head toward the waterfront because it's easier walking downhill. They're halfway there when Horst thinks - Shit! Why didn't I just call that ambulance?

Hear the difference? More than anything else, what makes the stories in this book revolutionary is that they reflect how Canadians really do speak. The sentences are blunt and quick. They use the same Dick and Jane syntax many of us use. And if a lot of the stories contain dirty words, well, that's because Canadian males in particular talk like that.

Yet amazingly, talk of this kind has rarely appeared in the work of our best-known writers. Where the speech of Canadian men should have been there has just been a hole.

Now that hole is being filled. In the terrific prose of Michael Turner's piece from Hard Core Logo the world his rock'n'rollers inhabit becomes clear right down to its East Hastings sidewalks littered with smashed whisky bottles and soggy pieces of hot dogs.

As I read this book I thought again and again how middle class the popular Canadian literature has tended to be. If I had to describe the writers here in a word, it would be poor. They live in apartments. They never wear suits. They ride buses or take cabs.

For them the world of the well-off - world of nice cars, houses, families, good jobs - seems like something for Martians.

These writers have been to school, and most of them probably came from middle-class homes. But the downward mobility of our time has given them the viewpoint of the dispossessed.

And this is true even at the level of form. Most of the stories in this book are memoirs in one shape or another, often written in the first person. They're reactions, in other words, to the enormously powerful "primary level" of consumer culture that in particular includes movies and TV shows.

The narratives produced at this level - narratives that make huge amounts of money and reach people worldwide - are carefully constructed stories in which plot and pacing are crucial. But they aren't stories that are personal or have an author's "signature." Do we care about the numerous writers who produce episodes of Seinfeld? Would we even watch a "personal" episode?

Immersed in this primary culture like the rest of us, writers who exist on the other level - the level that makes almost no money and reaches hardly anyone - don't feel the impetus to cunningly plot their fiction. They're surrounded, after all, by film and video stories that have a power to entertain that the printed word increasingly can't match.

And so in reaction, our new writers are trying to do what TV and the movies can't: show the individual at his or her most personal. That's the other revolutionary thing about this collection. It tells us that "the story" has gravitated to the screen; what fiction gives us now is the sound of the human voice.

Canada's changing landscape
Andrew Pyper
Ottawa Citizen
May 17, 1998

If one were to judge Canadian fiction solely by the way it's been taught in high school over the last 30 years, it would be clear that the primary theme has been Man vs. Nature. Mention the struggle of the lone individual against our inhospitable, unforgiving landscape and you'd get at least a B plus on the exam.

But as the anthology Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada attests, there is something happening in our writing that, at least on the surface, has decidedly nothing at all to do with farms, spruce trees or small-town life. It tends to be written by those under 40 whose influences are more likely to be pop cultural than literary. Experiment is preferred to convention, the surreal and fractured over the realistic and linear.

Hal Niedzviecki, the editor of Concrete Forest, has selected pieces that advance what he calls a "distinctly urban sensibility." They are not all set in cities (in fact many take place in what appear to be small and isolated communities) but convey a combined spirit of irony, self-consciousness, dark comedy and moral detachment that, while differing widely in subject and approach, unites them as something that may well constitute a full-blown Literary Movement.

The selections in this anthology suggest an underlying motive: to demonstrate that urban writing is not determined by "self-contained regions and ethnic groupings" but by shared aesthetics. To this end, Niedzviecki must be congratulated for taking on the challenge of choosing pieces on the basis of their artistic intentions, a tricky and debatable business. The result is a collection that is unavoidably uneven in quality but always provocative, and one that deserves to take its place as a flag plunged into new turf, if any can still be found in our cities.

The best of the 26 contributions in Concrete Forest are those that (perhaps ironically for a collection of "new" writing) employ more or less conventional short-story structures. Particularly successful is Grant Buday's "Horst and Werner," a visceral tale of the reluctant intimacy between two apartment-block bachelors and the traces of compassion still alive in even the most isolated, morally indifferent circumstances. The late Daniel Jones's "In Various Restaurants" is another standout, offering perhaps the paradigm of the "new urban writing": autobiographical, knowingly self-obsessed, but with a depth beneath the matter-of-fact prose that bears surprising emotional impact. Other noteworthy pieces include Diane Warren's creepy "The Wednesday Flower Man," Derek McCormack's precise "Stargaze" and Andre Alexis's Kafka-inspired "Letters."

Other contributions, however, feel as though they owe their presence solely to the trickiness or novelty of their form, and not to the narrative satisfactions they provide. The Orwellian bureaucratic paranoia of M.A.C. Farrant's "Altered Statements" slips into bloated rant and political theorizing worthy of sci-fi comic books. And Michael Turner's "Hello, Saskatoon!" -- a collage of Hard Core Logo punk song lyrics, fictional band interviews and song title lists -- is less clever in its reading than the concept may at first suggest.

Despite its few low points, Concrete Forest is a significant anthology. It identifies an undeniable aesthetic shift in Canadian fiction and provides what are for the most part thoughtful, representative examples. For those who wonder what the future may hold in the way of literary innovation in this country, it's an essential book.

Andrew Pyper is the author of Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. Lost Girls, his first novel, is to be published by HarperFlamingo in Spring 1999.