Canadian Fiction, Canadian authors, Fiction 

"A North American Education is a collection of polished and disturbing short stories about life and the passage of time. Or, as Margaret Atwood calls it, "a collection of horror stories; and very fine ones." With startling perception, Clark Blaise traces a man's life from the present backwards into the past. He focuses, not on this man's formal education, but on his education into North American life — into the realities of a brutal, unstable world.

The man is a mixture of cultures, the American son of French - and English-Canadian parents who have left Canada in search of the American dream. His name, age, and circumstances vary from one story to another. But whether he is Norman Dyer, a struggling university lecturer in Montreal with a pregnant wife and child, or Paul Keeler, a shy, hesitant young traveller in Europe, or Frankie Thibidault, a fat, clumsy boy in Florida, he remains essentially the same — an outsider, a lonely nomad in the shifting, rootless society of North America.

In A North American Education, Clark Blaise details the painful search for identity, whether national or personal. The result, as Tom McHale notes, "is a whole continent of a book rendered with compassion and a rare gift of insight." -- Back cover. 

230 pages ; 18 cm.