Newly released, and in stores today, the press release reads:
Wascana is from the Cree word Oscana, meaning “pile of bones.” But The New Wascana Anthology: Poetry, Short Fiction, and Critical Prose is far from being a literary mausoleum; it is a book that puts canonical masterpieces in conversation with works by new writers, poet laureates, and Nobel Prize winners. It features human ventures ranging from the medieval pilgrimage to the frontiers of contemporary science. In the pages of this anthology, faithful realism meets the fantastic and the most gothic casts of mind. Ascetic minimalism meets lavish figurative excess. Traditional literary forms meet the avant-garde. The collection leans westward in its latter pages, featuring new writing from the Canadian prairie, foregrounding works by Aboriginal writers and expressing emerging philosophies about the relationship between people and the environment.
The New Wascana Anthology builds upon the bones of the literary canon (including Canada’s Booker Prize winners and our newest Nobel laureate) to include novelists, poets, and essayists such as George Elliott Clarke, Marie Annharte Baker, Thomas King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Trevor Herriot, Flannery O’Connor, Carmine Starnino, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and many more.
