The Present book is critical study of the novels of Robert Kroetsch. Kroetsch often bases his novels on myths while exploring such themes as exile, loss, gender roles and selfhood. He is considered one of Canada’s foremost practitioners and theoreticians of postmodern literature. He engages with the idea of technological modernization, indicating that this version of progress conceals the loss of an organic relationship between humanity and the world. Quests in modern literature do not always lead to one answer, be they in Eliot’s Wastleand or in Kroetsch’s Alibi.

The Hornbooks of Rita K, Robert Kroetsch's first volume of new poetry in more than a decade, is a brilliant collection of mysterious fragments. Where has Rita gone and who is reconstructing her oeuvre? Written with wit and playfulness, Hornbooks is a welcome new work from one of Canada's best writers.

This book brings together twenty of Kroetsch's long poems, spanning some of 15 years of creative activity. Remarkably versatile in both form and content, these extended meditations bear witness to Kroetsch's modernist inheritance and his well-known commitment to post-modern jouissance.

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A smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course. This compact tour de force affirms Dionne Brand's place as one of Canada's most dazzling and influential artists. Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics—a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavour: first, there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally, spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant. By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender—and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves. A gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

These essays span the period of Kroetsch's writing. Included are previously published and new essays that cover (some of) his novels, (some of) his poetry, and even (some of) his critical writing. The contributors include writers who knew Kroetsch well and those who only met him on the page; critics at the beginning of their careers and those well established in the Canadian literary field; men and women, writers and poets and critics and damn fine thinkers. The contributors featured are: Robert Archambeau, Catherine Bates, George Bowering, Jenna Butler, Pauline Butling, Dennis Cooley, Tom Dilworth, Nathan Dueck, Jasmine Elliott, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Jon R. Flieger, Jay Gamble, Gary Geddes, Susan Holbrook, Christine Jackman, Brian Jensen, Wiktor Kulinski, Michael Laverty, John Lent, Ann Mandel, Nicole Markotic, John Matias, Roy Miki, John Moss, Brianne O'Grady, Jeff Pardy, and Aritha van Herk.