Ice and Fire: Dispatches from the New World, 1988-1998

By Stephen Osborne

Ice and Fire is a collection of nonfiction narratives from award-winning writer Stephen Osborne, who retains an abiding sense that the places and the people he encounters are still to be discovered. Negotiating the Trans-Canada Highway near Moncton during a whiteout, visiting Timothy Eaton's grave in Toronto, leaving offerings of tobacco at a Nez Perce battleground, drinking with his Japanese mentor in a revolving bar in Vancouver while debating Buddhism vs. class struggle--for Osborne, all of these are occasions to conjure our time and our place. Ice and fire are extremes of a Canadian North, from which several of these dispatches are written. But Osborne's special insight is that Kamloops, New Glasgow and even Toronto are as unknowable as Pangnirtung. We live in a country that can claim the world's only souvenir police force, and whose analogue is a department store; a country that believes itself to be part of a New World, even though people have lived here for ten thousand years. Smart, funny, moving, and full of wonder and surprise, the dispatches in Ice and Fire illuminate a very old world striving to make itself new.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551520613
• ISBN13: 9781551520612
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 8.9"