Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee

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Christian Bök (ed.), Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee, introduced by Margaret Atwood (Toronto: Anansi, 2002), xv + 236pp. Paper: $22.95. ISBN 0-8878-4691-2.

Ground Works is a stimulating anthology of Canadian experimental prose writing from the 1960s to the 1980s. The earliest of the anthologised texts, Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, was published in 1966. The most recent work is an excerpt from Steve McCaffery's 1984 novel Panopticon. Christian Bök's project is to revitalise study of authors whose prose breaks with the well-established tradition of Canadian realism. In recent years, the flow of Canadian experimental fiction seems to have dried up. This is an issue to which …