Robert Kroetsch

Hazard Lepage, the last of the studhorse men, sets out to breed his rare blue stallion, Poseidon. A lusty trickster and a wayward knight, Hazard's outrageous adventures are narrated by Demeter Proudfoot, his secret rival, who writes this story while sitting naked in an empty bathtub. In his quest to save his stallion's bloodline from extinction, Hazard leaves a trail of anarchy and confusion. Everything he touches erupts into chaos necessitating frequent convalescences in the arms of a few good women-excepting those of Martha, his long-suffering intended. Told with the ribald zeal of a Prairie beer parlor tall tale and the mythic magnitude of a Greek odyssey, The Studhorse Man is Robert Kroetsch's celebration of unbridled character set against the backdrop of a rough-and-ready Alberta emerging after the war. Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction.

The Studhorse Man

The Crow Journals

A Likely Story recounts the writing life of Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada's foremost writers and literary theorists. With incisive wit, humor and penetrating insight, Robert Kroetsch follows the events of his life, both real and literary, that have moved him from the bareness of desk and computer into the secret places at the heart of the writing experience. Throughout this chronicle, he toys ironically with the notion that he ceases to be himself when he writes, that writing allows him to escape from the confines of self into exciting varieties of the essay, story and poem. A Likely Story records in loving detail that escape. It is a remarkable assemblage of confessional personal essays, one of the principal elegiac poems of out time, a cowboy poem and speculative pieces that defy literary classification. Through them all Robert Kroetsch enters the landscape of recollection, discovery, delight, self-deception, play, grief and revelation, and through them all he insists with customary boldness: I am attempting to write an autobiography in which I do not appear.

The Writing Life

A Likely Story

"Overcome by his curious academic and sexual inadequacies, professional graduate student Jeremy Sadness lights out from his cramped office at a New York state university for the wilds of the Canadian northwest. He inadvertently exchanges suitcases - and identities - with Roger Dorck, the comatose victim of a snowmobiling accident, and becomes hopelessly embroiled in the comic Bacchanalia of the Notikeewin winter festival, during which he is arrested and compelled to judge a beauty contest in which all the contestants look exactly alike. This satire of the "quest novel" is one of the most hilarious works in Canadian literature."--Back cover

Gone Indian

Robert Wilson

Shirley C. Neuman

Conversations with Robert Kroetsch

Labyrinths of Voice

The Hornbooks of Rita K, Robert Kroetsch's first volume of new poetry in more than a decade, is a brilliant collection of mysterious fragments. Where has Rita gone and who is reconstructing her oeuvre? Written with wit and playfulness, Hornbooks is a welcome new work from one of Canada's best writers.

The Hornbooks of Rita K

Along the way, Big Indian emerges as a place simultaneously in the past and the present, the real and the imaginary, where a game of cards might last forever and a defeated farmer can freeze on his snowbound plow in June.

What the Crow Said

This book brings together twenty of Kroetsch's long poems, spanning some of 15 years of creative activity. Remarkably versatile in both form and content, these extended meditations bear witness to Kroetsch's modernist inheritance and his well-known commitment to post-modern jouissance. Whether it be in an evocation of an Australian beach or in an account of the stone hammer used by the poet's father, we find again and again the delight, elusiveness and mastery of everyday language that have become trademarks of the author's oeuvre.

The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch

Completed Field Notes

Wie ein Lauffeuer verbreitet sich 1897 die Nachricht von den ungeheuren Goldfunden am Klondike River. Tausende verkaufen Hab und Gut, um die gefahrvolle Reise nach Norden zu wagen. Auch der vierzehnjährige Zack und seine Mutter Lou schlagen sich nach Alaska durch, zunächst als blinde Passagiere, später tun sie sich zusammen mit Ben, der statt einer Goldgräberausrüstung genug Whiskey durch die Tundra schleppt, um halb Klondike aufzukaufen - denn Whiskey wird in den Saloons mit Gold aufgewogen. Während sich zwischen der respektlosen, praktisch veranlagten Lou und dem ritterlichen Ben ein Verhältnis anbahnt, bleibt Zack sich selbst überlassen. Auf der Reise trotzen sie Schnee, Eis und wilden Flüssen , wüsten Schießereien, Menschen, die die Gier nach Gold in Bestien verwandelt hat. Doch erst in Dawson City begegnen sie der größten Gefahr von allen: Dangerous Dan, dem unangefochtenen König der Saloons. >Kroetschs Roman glänzt wie ein Nugget im subarktischen Strom. January Magazine Kroetsch verleiht seinem Anti-Helden einen sympathisch-ironischen Erzählstil, nichts beschönigend, nichts übertreibend, einfühlsam, ohne larmoyant zu sein. Darmstädter Echo Ein plastisches Bild jener Zeit, das nicht nur die Atmosphäre des Goldrausches widerspiegelt, sondern auch die Lebensbedingungen der Menschen glaubhaft darstellt. Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten Robert Kroetsch erweist sich als der legitime Nachfahre Jack Londons.

Robert Kroetsch

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