Often misunderstood or even unrecognized, Canada's governors general are not merely heads of state; they are amongst the great constitutional curiosities of our age.In this delightful and often whimsical account of the Canadians who have held this post since 1952, journalist and author John Fraser explains the successful, if illogical, evolution of the institution and engages readers with the hilarious foibles, moving triumphs, and sombre tragedies of the men and w...

Nihilism, Modernism, and Value consists of three jargon-free lectures addressed to the general reader. It explores a variety of ways in which writers responded to the phenomenon of nihilism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, By "nihilism" here is meant a sense, at times paralyzing, of the instability and perhaps groundlessness of all values. The book goes into some of the factors— psychological, sociological, philosophical—involved in that destabilizing. But its principal focus is on re...

With 50mm lenses and available light, John Fraser took these classic humanist photos in Minneapolis, New York, London, Nova Scotia, Provence, starting in 1957.In the tradition of Cartier-Bresson, there's no cropping. What you see is what was there—street interactions caught lightning fast, informal portraits, oldsters, kids, a Blues group, a campaigning JFK within arms-length, and always the impeccable composition and feel for the symbolic.The images are arranged in poem-li...

A devoted and powerful champion of Canadian arts and culture, David Silcox has a life story that dazzles with tales beyond the easel and canvas.“An affectionate portrait of a man who — through enthusiasm, charm and an unparalleled network — had an extraordinary impact of Canada’s cultural evolution.” — Charlotte Gray, author of The Massey MurderSon of a Prairie Dust Bowl preacher, David Silcox rose through the ranks of the Canadian...

John Fraser, Desires: Sixty-five French poems and one small but famous German one, translated and introduced by John Fraser.The core of Desires is a mini-anthology of sixty-five French poems translated by John Fraser and described in the foreword by scholar-translator Benoit Tadié as "beautiful" and "intensely empathetic." Taken from Fraser's major online anthology A New Book of Verse, they belong in an emergent re-seeing of French poetic history.Part I consists largely of...

After years of intellectual nourishment from thrillers, along with the delights of suspense, Fraser explores the thought-processes of representative thriller characters coping with high-tension situations that require intelligent problem-solving and bring their values into a sharper focus.With alert empathy, he follows Jack Carter as he hunts down his brother's killers in Ted Lewis's masterpiece Jack's Return Home ("a kind of dark English Gatsby") ; suffers along with violence-aver...

Pushing Back pushes back against GBTs (Great Big Theories) that confine literary discourse, especially poems, to zones where realworld truth-testing and value-judgments are told, "Keep Out; This Means You." Fraser steers between the Scylla of transcendent insights obtained courtesy of Metaphor, Image, and Symbol, Inc., and the Charybdis of literary language sucking its own pretensions down into the Void. A disrespecter of fixed categories and dichotomies himself, he shows by a variety of m...

Faces faces faces–thirty-four, if you count a delightful movie-crew group. Fascinating faces, those major elements in movies, photography, art. Mostly one-shots, taken spontaneously in a human-scale North Atlantic city-by-the-sea in the 1990s. No predatory irony or condescension, but strong reactions– surprise, wariness, delight, self-theatricalizing, etc.Interesting individuals, including a couple of poets, two photographers, an artist, a movie-maker, a scholar, a peace activist, ...

A major revision, the merely documentary gone, the symbolist-poetic intensified. Past and present, nature raw and cooked, imagistic juxtapositions, sunlit urn with cypresses, flames glowing as the ground thaws for a midwinter Minnesota grave. Enigmatic mannequin, pensive boys, racing girls, sentinel in the sky.You don't need specific locations. This is all about possibilities, emblems, icons, moods, never settling down into a single mode, a single statement. Everything is in motion...

A reviewer of JOHN FRASER'S widely praised Violence in the Arts (1973) spoke of encountering in it "an extremely agile and incessantly active mind that illuminates almost every subject that he touches." As a reader of poetry he is in search of felt life and expressive form. He feels his way forward through poems as speech acts, rather than latching onto whatever Big Poetic Truths they are presumed to be disclosing, or treating them as raw material to be given significance by Theory. And he...

Carol Hoorn Fraser, MFA, RCA (1930-1991) was a beautiful and unique American-born artist, who received a humanistic art education at the University of Minnesota, took first prizes in shows at the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and lived for thirty years in Nova Scotia with her husband John, with stays in Provence and Mexico.Like Sinatra, she did it her way, radically rethinking her popular expressionist style in the mid-Sixties and developing a decisive org...

Carol Hoorn Fraser, MFA, RCA (1930-1991) was a beautiful and unique American-born artist, who received a humanistic art education at the University of Minnesota, took first prizes in shows at the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and lived for thirty years in Nova Scotia with her husband John, with stays in Provence and Mexico.Like Sinatra, she did it her way, radically rethinking her popular expressionist style in the mid-Sixties and developing a decisive org...