Streets of Attitude: Toronto Stories

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

Streets of Attitude is the second anthology of short fictions with
Toronto settings. (The first, Toronto Short Stories, appeared in 1977.)
For this volume, editors Fagan and MacDonald have chosen one Toronto
tale each from 14 authors; these writers include Neil Bissoondath,
Dionne Brand, Barry Callaghan, Matt Cohen, Cynthia Flood, Katherine
Govier, Norman Levine, and Rohinton Mistry.

Like its predecessor, this book is part of the rising river of Canadian
regional anthologies. Literary regionalism should be held in suspicion,
for two reasons: it can lower standards—being one of the 20 finest
Cape Breton writers is not difficult—and it encourages us to view
literature as a regional identity map. In Streets of Attitude, poor
quality is not a major problem: most of the selections from
Callaghan’s haunting “The Black Queen” to Levine’s compassionate
“Because of the War,” are striking and memorable. (Govier’s breezy
“Brunswick Avenue,” Brand’s didactic “At the Lisbon Plate,”
and Flood’s clumsily written “Beatrice” are the only notably poor
choices.)

Literary readers are drawn to good writers not because of subject
matter, but because such authors are experts in the effective
manipulation of language: we may learn some Nigerian history from Things
Fall Apart, but it is Achebe’s sculpted prose that makes the novel
remarkable. In fact, a reader could learn more about Toronto from one
chapter of any nonfiction study of the city than from 224 pages of
Streets of Attitude.