In Ballast to the White Sea / Canadian Literature Collection (ePub)

"In recent years, Canadian modernist literature has been the subject of wide-ranging recoveryprojects like Editing Modernism in Canada and the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory, many of which have been facilitated by digital platforms. Part of the Canada and the Spanish Civil War sub-series of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection, Best Stories is the second literary work brought out in print as part of spanishcivilwar.ca, a more holistic digital archival recovery platform. In addition to the context of Canadian modernist recovery projects, Sharpe’s collection engages in the global recovery of leftist literature. (...) Among Sharpe’s most skillful critical moves is a series of readings that contravene book reviews Garner’s self-construction. By evaluating Garner’s self-fashioning as one of the many texts that constitute Garner’s cultural impact, Sharpe allows the persona and the oeuvre to mutually inform one another. (...) Sharpe suggests that this repetition across fictional and nonfictional forms imbues the writingwith a realism based on the intertextuality within Garner’s written works, particularly in the case of the Spanish Civil War stories. The explanatory notes for the three stories on the Spanish Civil War are some of the most extensive in the collection, speaking to the richness of the stories’ historical context and to the linguistic, cultural, and international experience of the combatants they portray. (...) Sharpe’s edition provides a tidy, if implicit, parallel to Garner’s collection. Sharpe’s editionfits into broader digital and print publications, draws together multiple critical contexts, andfeatures a writer whose work appeared primarily in Canadian venues. Thanks to Sharpe’s editorial treatment, Garner’s "multimedia production” across print, film, and radio spans outwards from the print instance of the stories; the multiplicity of international, Canadian, classed, gendered, and radicalized contexts emerge as