Heralded as a prairie writer and best known for As For Me and My House and for his stories of the bleak dust bowl Prairies of the Great Depression, Sinclair Ross has also written of urban life and, briefly, of army life, as the stories in this collection demonstrate.
The Race and Other Stories includes previously uncollected short stories and a chapter from Whir of Gold, here title "The Race," which stands on its own as a short story. Furthermore, "Spike," published in French in Liberté in 1969, appears here for the first time in English.
Ross's taut, economical, rhythmic prose reflects the bleak, spare landscape of the prairie. The concerns of his novels are equally evident in his stories: loneliness and alienation, the sense of entrapment, the imaginative and artistic struggle.
This collection of stories will be of interest to those who wish to better understand one of Canada's most respected writers and the diversity that can be found in his writings.

Sinclair Ross' profile page

Lorraine McMullen is professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. She is co-editor of a three-volume anthology of short stories written by Canadian women: Pioneering Women: Beginnings to 1880; Aspiring Women: 1880-1900 and New Women: 1900-1920 (UOP: 1993, 1993 and 1991) and co-author of Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists (1993).

Lorraine McMullen's profile page