National Network for Equitable Library Service

A treasure chest of exceptional stories by one of Canadas classic authorsall now available in one volume. Ernest Buckler, best known as the author of the Canadian classic, The Mountain and the Valley, never achieved the lasting fame he deserved. His first story was published in Esquire, a significant American literary magazine known for publishing leading writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis. Over the years, nearly forty more of Buckler’s short stories were published in several popular magazines, including Maclean’s where his story “The Quarrel” won first prize for fiction. In Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler, Marta Dvořák gathers together many of those stories as well as some previously unpublished pieces. At times she has chosen to include the fuller, original versions, and has reinstated some of the lost passages that were cut from stories to fit popular magazine requirements. Ernest Buckler’s writing is rooted in the magic of the ordinary. He celebrates the land and its community, and sensuously recreates a paradise — almost a Garden of Eden. Buckler’s American editors were right in believing that no one evoked the lost world of North Americas agrarian past better than Ernest Buckler.