Alistair MacLeod

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of his generation, he had to leave his island to make a living, but unlike his peers, he didn't go into the world's mines, a service position in Toronto, or the Alberta oil fields. Instead, he became an English teacher and ended up just a few miles away from us at the University of Windsor — close enough that we in Ann Arbor have had a couple of occasions to hear him read his work here. He has a quiet and dignified bearing, a shock of white hair above a very ruddy face, and an accent that sounds neither Canadian nor Scots.

Michael Ondaatje has called MacLeod "one of the great undiscovered writers of our time," but MacLeod has been completely content to let his literary career take shape quietly, off center stage. For some thirty years he has published an occasional story in the literary journals, and in the 1990s he published one novel, No Great Mischief, an unforgettable chronicle of one Cape Breton mining family.

Island, his complete short stories, is his only other book. The sixteen longish stories here are quiet, informed by history and shaped by their physical landscape, but they also have the tone and feel of folklore. Magical things happen on MacLeod's Cape Breton: history is never in the past; spirits rise out of the ocean and take old people off in small boats.

Even dogs — and there are always dogs in MacLeod's stories — carry their inescapable family curses. The exquisite "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun" begins this way: