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...

Over sixty years of amateur boatbuilding lie behind every page. It is for readers with some woodwork experience, who have never built a boat, but would like to attempt one. It focuses on modern materials and methods; they give us boats which are stronger, longer-lasting, and far lighter than their traditionally-buiIt ancestors. And many readers will simply enjoy reading about how quality wooden boats are built.

In his latest book, One Big Box of 'Paranormal Tricks'? From Ghosts to Poltergeists to the Theory of Just One Paranormal Power, John Fraser reflects on his motivations for involvement in paranormal research from an early age, recalling his experiences to date, the people who have influenced him, and the conclusions he's come to. Whilst Fraser refers to events in his life, this book is not a memoir or 'life story' in any conventional sense. It's presented as a meditation on what the paranor...

The death of the Queen was only the beginning for the men and women behind the Crown.On September 8, 2022, an announcement was posted on the gates of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Buckingham Palace in London that Queen Elizabeth II, the longest serving monarch in British history, had died. That set in motion a remarkable ten days of official mourning and ceremony unlike anything seen in any nation for decades.Members of the royal family gathered—the new K...

There are few factual books written about poltergeist phenomena, John's Fraser's Poltergeist! A New Investigation Into Destructive Haunting fills that void, advancing and updating Colin Wilson's work Poltergeist!, this study's namesake from over 38 years ago. Fraser takes readers on a journey from the Borley Rectory to the Isle of Man, and grounds his readers in an historical overview of 'Poltergeist phenomena'. He examines where such events overlap with other paranormal investigations of ...

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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...