Sinclair Ross’ 1941 novel As For Me and My House is a masterpiece of Canadian literature, a stunning evocation of the Prairies and their inhabitants during the Depression of the Thirties. With The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, an original New Canadian Library collection, Ross reveals further dimensions of his fictional universe. A woman’s impulsive infidelity leads to tragedy. A sudden hailstorm destroys hope. A boy learns to conquer a beautiful wild horse. A little girl dreams about a circus. Against the isolated, haunting landscapes of summer droughts and winter blizzards, the men and women of Ross’ stories grapple with fate against almost impossible odds. Marked by a legacy of pride that will not suffer defeat, Ross’ unyielding characters are cut off from their loved ones by obstinacy and defiance. Their tragedy is not that they suffer, but that they suffer alone. The sensitivity, compassion, and subtlety with which Ross portrays human aspirations and failings remain to this day unequalled in Canadian fiction.

Sinclair Ross’ 1941 novel As For Me and My House is a masterpiece of Canadian literature, a stunning evocation of the Prairies and their inhabitants during the Depression of the Thirties. With The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, an original New Canadian Library collection, Ross reveals further dimensions of his fictional universe. A woman’s impulsive infidelity leads to tragedy. A sudden hailstorm destroys hope. A boy learns to conquer a beautiful wild horse. A little girl dreams about a circus. Against the isolated, haunting landscapes of summer droughts and winter blizzards, the men and women of Ross’ stories grapple with fate against almost impossible odds. Marked by a legacy of pride that will not suffer defeat, Ross’ unyielding characters are cut off from their loved ones by obstinacy and defiance. Their tragedy is not that they suffer, but that they suffer alone. The sensitivity, compassion, and subtlety with which Ross portrays human aspirations and failings remain to this day unequalled in Canadian fiction.

As For Me and My House is an essential Canadian work--a precise and compelling portrait of our culture, our psyche, and the nature of contemporary art itself, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In the windswept town of Horizon, an unamed diarist paints a vivid and enthralling picture of prairie life in the Depression era. Atmospheric, intimate, and richly observed, As For Me and My House is a moving meditation on the bittersweet nature of human relationships, on the bonds that tie people together and the undercurrents of feeling that can tear them apart. It is one of Canada's great novels and a landmark in modern fiction.

Beginning in the 1890s, reaching its first full realization by modernist writers in the 1920s, and brought to its heyday during the Canadian Renaissance starting in the 1960s, the short story has become Canada's flagship genre. It continues to attract the country's most accomplished and innovative writers today, among them Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and many others. Yet in contrast to the stature and popularity of the genre and the writers who partake in it, surprisingly little literary criticism and theory has been devoted to the Canadian short story. This collection redresses that imbalance by providing the first collection of critical interpretations of a range of thirty well-known and often-anthologized Canadian short stories from the genre's beginnings through the twentieth century. A historical survey of the genre introduces the volume and a timeline comparing the genre's development in Canada, the US, and Great Britain via representative examples completes it. The collection is geared both to specialists in and to students of Canadian literature. For the latter it is of particular benefit that the volume provides not only a collection of interpretations, but a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Canadian short story. Reingard M. Nischik is professor and chair of American Literature at the University of Constance, Germany.

Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), best known for his canonical novel As for Me and My House (1941), and for such familiar short stories as "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door," is an elusive figure in Canadian literature. A master at portraying the hardships and harsh beauty of the Prairies during the Great Depression, Ross nevertheless received only modest attention from the public during his lifetime. His reluctance to give readings or interviews further contributed to this faint public perception of the man. In As for Sinclair Ross, David Stouck tells the story of a lonely childhood in rural Saskatchewan, of a long and unrewarding career in a bank, and of many failed attempts to be published and to find an audience. The book also tells the story of a man who fell in love with both men and women and who wrote from a position outside any single definition of gender and sexuality. Stouck's biography draws on archival records and on insights gathered during an acquaintance late in Ross's life to illuminate this difficult author, describing in detail the struggles of a gifted artist living in an inhospitable time and place. Stouck argues that when Ross was writing about prairie farmers and small towns, he wanted his readers to see the kind of society they were creating, to feel uncomfortable with religion as coercive rhetoric, prejudices based on race and ethnicity, and rigid notions of gender. As for Sinclair Ross is the story of a remarkable writer whose works continue to challenge us and are rightly considered classics of Canadian literature.

Heralded as a prairie writer and best known for As For Me and My House and for his stories of the bleak dust bowl Prairies of the Great Depression, Sinclair Ross has also written of urban life and, briefly, of army life, as the stories in this collection demonstrate. The Race and Other Stories includes previously uncollected short stories and a chapter from Whir of Gold, here title "The Race," which stands on its own as a short story. Furthermore, "Spike," published in French in Liberté in 1969, appears here for the first time in English. Ross's taut, economical, rhythmic prose reflects the bleak, spare landscape of the prairie. The concerns of his novels are equally evident in his stories: loneliness and alienation, the sense of entrapment, the imaginative and artistic struggle. This collection of stories will be of interest to those who wish to better understand one of Canada's most respected writers and the diversity that can be found in his writings.

This volume gathers together authors and critics to reappraise the legacy of Sinclair Ross. Beyond Ross' major novel As For Me and My House, the contributors reestablish the value of his other writings in their literary and historical contexts. Published in English.