Afterlife of George Cartwright

Literature & Fiction

Steffler, John

Literary

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

The Grey Islands

Poetry

MCCLELLAND STEWART

The Wreckage of Play: Poems

The Afterlife of George Cartwright

Contemporary

For George Cartwright - soldier, explorer, naturalist, entrepreneur, gentleman, adventurer - time stopped on May 19, 1819, the day of his death. In the 170 years since, his spirit has wandered the byways of his youth, his mind returning always to the voluminous journals he once kept. He is searching for something. Perhaps a final resting place. Perhaps the meaning of the life he led. A work of extraordinary imaginative power and rich historical detail, The Afterlife of George Cartwright is the invented life of the eighteenth-century explorer who was among the first to push into the wilderness of Labrador. Buoyantly self-confident, fearless in the face of harrowing perils and constant hardship, full of inexhaustible energy, and with a passionate love for the land and its people, Cartwright epitomizes the best of the European encounter with the New World. But he also epitomizes the worst, for the very qualities that fueled him also guaranteed disaster: brash self-confidence meant ruthless ego, consuming appetite led to senseless destruction, and even love proved lethal. In the hands of a lesser winter, George Cartwright's life would be the stuff of melodrama. In the hands of John Steffler, this protean clay is given such shape, color, and texture that we are transported, coming to understand - even as Cartwright's spirit does by book's end - the full meaning of the man, the full intensity of the life. Steffler's miracle is to make George Cartwright, for all his flaws, move us to compassion and to a deeper appreciation of how easy it is to do harm even when one wants only to do good.

A beautiful new edition of the award-winning collection from Canada’s new Poet Laureate. Newfoundland-born poet John Steffler is one of this country’s most accomplished writers. Recently named Canada’s national poet, he is the author of The Grey Islands (poems) and the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, both of which have become classics in our time. That Night We Were Ravenous is Steffler’s most recent book of new poetry. In this extraordinary gathering of poems, he follows the trajectory of some of his earlier work with poems situated in Newfoundland’s coves, on trails, and in communities that testify to the pure bite and edge of this terrain. Other poems in the later sections of the book, more intimate, are set in Southern Ontario and Greece. This is poetry that captures the imagination and activates the heart. Simply by looking through Steffler’s eyes, we come away with an enlarged sense of the natural world on the one hand, and of our own humanity on the other.

That Night We Were Ravenous

Genre Fiction

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada’s most respected poets The poems in John Steffler’s new collection are enlivened by the same muscular acts of attention that characterize his earlier books. As always, his poems inhabit experience fully, senses on high alert, transmitting the abundance and turbulence of physical existence; they are charged with the raw Eros of being. Nowhere is there a more complete nature poet: attuned, robust, honest, fully informal, and emotionally candid, brimming with energy and animal spirits. Many of the poems in Lookout explore and evoke specific landscapes: the limestone barrens of Newfoundland; the Blomidon and Lewis Hills; the Greek Islands. Others dwell on personal relationships: lover, pregnant daughter, and a touching, finely tuned sequence on a family coping with a mother’s Alzheimer’s. There is also a wonderful set of meditations on photographs from the archives in Newfoundland. Canadian literature is blessed – and animated – by John Steffler’s contributions to it.

Lookout

In this stunning and original novel, John Steffler has recreated a lost time and place, and has given life to an enigmatic figure from Canada’s 18th-century past. Described quietly by historians as “soldier, diarist, entrepreneur,” George Cartwright emerges in Steffler’s tale as a character of overwhelming appetite and ambition. Until this time Cartwright’s greatest legacy has been the place in Labrador named after him and the journal he wrote during his years there, when he lived amongst Native people and ran a successful trading post. Now his legacy becomes our own: a telling portrait of our past; a warning.

New Canadian Library

The Afterlife of George Cartwright: A Novel

United States

Henry Holt Co.

The world has taken notice. From Alistair MacLeod's recent IMPAC literary award, through movies based on the work of David Adams Richards and Sheldon Currie, to the epic television series based on the work of Bernice Morgan, the international community has soundly acknowledged the critical and commercial success of Atlantic writers. Atlantica is the first major anthology of Atlantic fiction since Best Maritime Short Stories was published in 1988 and showcases stories by some of Canada's most exciting authors — established, newly popular, and emerging. Given the regional penchant for storytelling, it's not surprising that the Maritimes and Newfoundland produce a continuous stream of spellbinding writers. Among the stories in Atlantica are Anne Simpson's Journey Prize-winning "Dreaming Snow," Carol Bruneau's "The Tarot Reader," "Batter My Heart" by Lynn Coady, Bernice Morgan's "Poems in a Cold Climate" "The Train Family" by Joan Clark, "Missing Notes" by David Helwig, "The Party" by Herb Curtis and "Clearances" by Alistair MacLeod. Readers from "away" will recognize Sheldon Currie's hilariously gothic tale "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum" as the basis of Helena Bonham Carter's acclaimed movie Margaret's Museum. Some stories have been excerpted from novels, including David Adams Richards's The Bay of Love and Sorrows, Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright, and Donna Morrissey's Kit's Law. Remarkably diverse in age, style, and cultural identity, the writers in this anthology raise a common voice that defines Atlantic Canada. Each with an individual approach to language and writing, they offer a collective view of the east, conscious of tradition but not confined by it. By turns funny, poignant and pensive, the stories in Atlantica firmly place eastern Canadian culture on the world map of literature.

Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland

Wilson, Budge

JOHNSTON, Wayne

Choyce, Lesley

MacLEOD, Alistair

Bruneau, Carol

Curtis, Wayne

Morrissey, Donna

Morgan, Bernice

Currie, Sheldon

Coady, Lynn

Baxter, Joan

Simpson, Anne

Steinfeld, J.J.

Helwig, David

Curtis, Herb

Hull, Maureen

Fogwill Porter, Helen

Adams Richards, David

Clark, Joan.

Goose Lane Editions

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