{"product_id":"9780889225015","title":"George Ryga","description":"James Hoffman, George Ryga’s biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga’s fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here—\u003ci\u003eHungry Hills\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBallad of a Stonepicker\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNight Desk\u003c\/i\u003e—draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era Alberta. They have similar stark prairie settings and a recognizable array of colourful, cantankerous homesteader and dirt farmer characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, both historical and mythopoetic. This was a period of obstinate survival farming and boisterous, ethnically diverse community building, redolent with the more questionable aspects of colonial ‘settling’ and ‘breaking’ of the land, in a place that was never unsettled or unclaimed to begin with.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTold in a homey vernacular, each of these three tales evokes a time and place that is as ironically as it is emphatically post-colonial. Ryga offers the reader (and re-reader) characters with a rough-hewn energy for survival and self-determination, and finds in them the beginnings of an authentic prairie culture defined by the anti-colonial struggle that so powerfully marks his work.","brand":"Talonbooks, Limited","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47022735655152,"sku":"9780889225015","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780889225015_p0.jpg?v=1763865842","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780889225015","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}