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Penguin Australia launched this year with a post urging, “Make 2019 the Year of the Book!”

It’s Penguin, so “year of the book” is an evergreen phrase. Same can be said for Atlantic Books Today. Our MO for the past quarter century has been to proudly trumpet the merits of local literature, a field in which we punch well above our weight and the rest of the country mostly doesn’t know it.

With our first issue of 2019, we heeded Penguin’s advice and went whole hog (it’s also the year of the pig by the by), celebrating some of our region’s most powerful books, new and old.

In our cover story, Norma Jean MacPhee considers books with the power to shape our worldview, what we aspire to be, what kind of world we’re willing to fight for.

I convinced Trevor J Adams, who 10 years ago co-authored Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, to break his vow of never again making such a list. He came up with the 10 best local books since the 100 best books. Readers are sure to have bones to pick; send your thoughts on social media, our website or

Rather than rely exclusively on Trevor (reliable though he is), we asked six book experts—two academics, a cartoonist, a librarian, and two writer/editors—to each recommend one Atlantic book that everyone, everywhere, should read.

You probably won’t agree with them either. The reality is, and I hope you’ll agree with this much, the wealth of high-quality Atlantic Canadian books to choose from is vast. I’ve tried to do my “year of the book” part too, and doubled the usual number of editor’s picks for this issue. Like every issue, the stories about books herein highlight more options than one person could read. As the title of Lisa Moore’s recent short story collection goes, I hope there’s a little something for everyone.

And on a last note, I’d like to say a temporary good-bye. I’ll be spending the next year as writer-in-residence at Lunenburg Library. Karalee Clerk will be Editor in my stead. Back to you in 2020!

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Jeff Bursey

Good literary criticism spurs discussions about books — and that benefits everyone

For many years I’ve not read a book without paper and pen at hand. Notes are taken down in a pseudo-doctor’s script in many inks (blue and black, also red, green and yellow) on hotel stationery, monogrammed remnants of defunct enterprises, plain and coloured paper (rarely lined), and when I start writing a review, those leaves and the book are set near the computer.

For me, writing literary criticism began in London, England, in the late 1980s but lasted only a year, for I realized I didn’t always treat the books with enough respect, so why continue? Since the early 1980s, while researching for my master’s thesis on Henry Miller, works of criticism led me to other writers worth knowing about. I appreciated well-written and enthusiastic commentary; apart from its merits, however, such writing showed the inadequacy of my own attempts. Best to stop.

In 2001, an invitation came from someone connected to an American publication to return to the critical side of the writing life. Interested in improving that side of myself, I accepted.

Since then I’ve written on new and familiar figures such as Alexandra Chasin, William Gaddis, Joseph McElroy and Gilbert Sorrentino. They were called difficult or obscure, when not neglected due to time (meaning fashion) allegedly passing them by (Blaise Cendrars, John Cowper Powys).

Many lie at the core of my own writing interests. In his book of essays, Freedom from Culture, John Metcalf states: “A literature is a relationship between books and readers … A literature is those books which readers hold in their hearts and minds.” Critical writing contributes to nurturing that relationship.

Centring the Margins Jeff Bursey literary criticismMy new book, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews, is a selection of critical writing from 2003-2014, and in it are considerations of some writers whose works matter to me, yet who might live on the margins for others.

I’ve been made aware that the book comes out in a kind of vacuum. Carmine Starnino, Zach Wells, Eric Ormsby and Mary Dalton explore the art of fellow practitioners, but there are, seemingly, few Canadian fiction writers regularly analyzing novels and short stories.

Are they writing for the increasingly fragmented worlds of journals and small publications? Or do they regard criticism as inferior and a waste of time?

Perhaps some avoid making public statements, especially negative ones, about their colleagues because they figure that funding from a local or national arts council may be dependent on that writer’s positive vote. (In Canada’s relatively small literary community the chances are fair someone you’ve brushed up against, in real life or in print, will be judging your work.) Still others might feel that the best comment on a book is the book itself.

Our poets are shameless, braver or more positive about the virtue of literary criticism. In his book of essays and reviews, Career Limiting Moves, Wells says: “I prefer to write reviews as if they might actually matter to people other than poets.”

We can forget that people everywhere can read about a book that might play a significant part in their lives. For my part, I take some effort in trying to get across the salient features of a novel or short story collection to an audience who might not hear of it while paying respect to the creator of that work.

To be an advocate for the underappreciated or the misunderstood requires a certain kind of passionate engagement and a desire to seize the chance to talk with others about writing that, to me, has importance. Good critics can’t be blind advocates. They must explain not the intention of an author (impossible to determine), but discuss the finished work’s positive and negative aspects so that the readers are given enough context and material to determine if the book might interest them.

Hopefully Centring the Margins will be a useful spur to further conversations. Surely fiction writers owe more to our hardworking fellow writers than silence, a Facebook like or ephemeral blog posts and blurbs. In our heart of hearts we writers want to have our ideas and our language taken seriously. Review writing can be one way of showing that a book has had an impact.