The Prairie Novels

By James Hoffmann, George Ryga, James Hoffman

James Hoffman, George Ryga's biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga's fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here-- Hungry Hills , Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk --draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era Alberta. They have similar stark prairie settings and a recognizable array of colourful, cantankerous homesteader and dirt farmer characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, both historical and mythopoetic. This was a period of obstinate survival farming and boisterous, ethnically diverse community building, redolent with the more questionable aspects of colonial 'settling' and 'breaking' of the land, in a place that was never unsettled or unclaimed to begin with. Told in a homey vernacular, each of these three tales evokes a time and place that is as ironically as it is emphatically post-colonial. Ryga offers the reader (and re-reader) characters with a rough-hewn energy for survival and self-determination, and finds in them the beginnings of an authentic prairie culture defined by the anti-colonial struggle that so powerfully marks his work.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 088922501X
• ISBN13: 9780889225015
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.8" x 9.8"