ECW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Elsewhere in this edition of CBRA, I review George Woodcock’s
introductions to Canadian fiction and poetry from ECW Press’s Canadian
Writers and Their Works series. I argued there that more than mere
recycling was involved. The same cannot be said of these gatherings.
Each of the contributors to the series was required to produce a short
biographical section about the writers under discussion. These have now
been brought together, without (so far as I can see) any notable
alterations—except, sadly, for the insertion of death dates in some
cases.

These volumes, then, are offered as biographical reference guides, and
as such have a certain usefulness in school and even university
libraries. But in the original context, this information was provided as
preliminary to the more important process of discussing the works of the
writers concerned. Alone, the entries are like modest hors d’oeuvres
without any hint of a main course. All right in a way, I suppose, but my
advice to any librarians or serious readers would be: pay more, buy the
original and generally excellent Canadian Writers and Their Works
volumes, and ignore these.