As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories: (New Canadian Library)

The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change. His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.

About the Author :
Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and he wrote vividly and sympathetically about such work.      His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. For more than three decades, he taught creative writing at the University of Windsor, Ontario, where he was a professor of English.      MacLeod’s only novel, No Great Mischief, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Trillium Book Award, the CAA-MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction, and at the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, MacLeod won for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year.       He was also the author of two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two previously unpublished stories, were brought together in a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories.      Alistair MacLeod died in April 2014.

Review :
“Alistair MacLeod’s stories are as regional and universal as the work of Faulkner or Chekhov. And they are, I think, as permanent.” —Michael Ondaatje “His writing moved from his heart to the page, and will always leap back from the page and into the heart of the reader.” —Jane Urquhart  “MacLeod published but one novel, No Great Mischief, and two short story collections, yet he was a giant of contemporary Canadian literature, a fact proven by the outpouring of grief, from coast to coast and around the world, in the wake of his death.” —National Post “A consummate storyteller, MacLeod's great gift allowed him to touch readers worldwide with moving stories of the everyday lives of people that resonated with the warmth and the sadness of a universal humanity.” —Halifax Chronicle-Herald