Clark Blaise is more than just a local colourist who ferrets out the curious details of ‘marginal’ communities in order to delight cosmopolitan readers. Rather, if we consider the full arc of his work, we see that for nearly fifty years he has been challenging the way that we understand the concept of place in contemporary Canadian and American literature.
World Body is the fourth and final volume of the new and selected stories of Clark Blaise. The first three volumes are celebrations of variant lives within the familiar outline of a not-quite Clark Blaise whom Clark Blaise would nevertheless recognize. In World Body it is evident that Blaise’s fiction and its autobiographical sources have drifted further apart; the stories here explode the easy identification of a writer with his own life-experience. Blaise weaves an intricate tapestry of terror and desire.