Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews
by Jeff Bursey

Neglected and obscure writers are at the fore in this incisive collection of critical essays.

Centring the Margins is a collection of reviews and essays written between 2001 and 2014 of writers from Canada, the United States, the UK, and Europe. Most are neglected, obscure, or considered difficult, and include Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, S.D. Chrostowska, Blaise Cendrars and Joseph McElroy, among others.

Reviews:
Jan 16, 2018: Daniel Green | http://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/2018/01/unruly.html edit | delete

In Praise of the Unruly

Collections of book reviews are inherently difficult to present as sufficiently unified to warrant republication as a book. Whatever unity of theme, style, or approach the reviews possess first of all reflect such unifying qualities as they manifest themselves in the reviews to begin with, which of course requires a critic who pursues particular themes or maintains a particular approach. Books like John Domini's The Sea-God's Herb and David Winters's Infinite Fictions illustrate how a well-chosen and well-arranged compilation of reviews can reinforce the insights provided by skilled and perceptive critics.

Often the critical perspective a reviewer offers is given its most characteristic expression when considering certain kinds of writers or a particular literary mode or genre (as is the case with both Domini and Winters). Jeff Bursey's Centring the Margins: Essays and Review exemplifies this tendency, which is signaled clearly in the book's title. Bursey generally examines works of fiction outside the mainstream (outside the U.S. mainstream, at least), including works of formally transgressive fiction, translated fiction, and lesser-known Canadian books, and certainly to the extent the book succeeds in calling attention to this work it is a worthwhile effort for that reason alone.

Bursey makes his purpose quite clear in the book's prefatory essay: "Where Margaret Atwood and other brand names are granted much leeway in sentiment and space in the press no matter if what comes out is average or bad, novels that don't adhere to some perceived notion of normal writing are received in a less friendly way. They are sometimes considered not art but an affront." Further:

I don't deny the mainstream authors their audience. However, others will seek to create new work in new forms, and if they're viewed as rude threats, that's not a bad thing. These reviews were often written with the explorers and the unruly in mind.

In collecting the reviews, Bursey expresses the hope that they might help in "bringing less popular works into the centre of the conversation" about books. However, I'm not sure that this is an altogether realistic, or desirable, goal if it means achieving an easy, automatic acceptance of such works in the "mainstream." Better that adventurous and iconoclastic works remain an "affront," as threats to established practice lest they become reflexively amalgamated into a bland and uncritical literary culture. Such works should remain unruly, even if that means some very good writers might not get the immediate recognition they deserve. Such a book as Centring the Margins is valuable because it provides access to readers who might be interested in exploring the margin, discovering it can be quite an interesting place.

If there is a drawback to emphasizing reviews that in effect seek to champion the writers and works surveyed it would be that eventually the tone of consistent approbation can become somewhat wearing, and I would have to say that Centring the Margins doesn't always avoid this problem. Bursey is certainly willing to point out flaws and missteps in the books he considers, but in most cases it is in the context of coming to an ultimately appreciative conclusion. As well, I found myself occasionally looking for more detailed analysis of the writing strategies and their effects in the works considered, somewhat less reliance on longer quotation. (In the review of Gaddis's Agape Agape, for example, we are told at the end that the book is filled with "jagged rhythms and darting wit," and that Gaddis is a "superb stylist," but there isn't much critical commentary in the review that explicates these qualities.) On the other hand, the pieces on Blaise Cendrars and the Estonian writer Mati Unt introduce me to writers about whom I know little and definitely make me want to get better acquainted with their work.

I can't say I always agree with Bursey's estimations of the writers under review (I can't bring myself to admire either William Vollmann or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as much as he does), but of course this is an inevitable reaction to the views of any critic (especially when they are expressed in such a relatively large number of reviews). The breadth of his reading is impressive, however, lending credibility and authority to his reviews, both individual reviews of books he has clearly carefully considered (both text and context) and the assembled reviews as a whole, which collectively leave the impression that their author reads comprehensively across formal and linguistic boundaries, and against the grain of entrenched assumptions about what books are worthy of our attention. Certainly readers will conclude from these reviews that Jeff Bursey has given the books his engaged attention, and those who would like to expand their own reading horizons beyond the books reflexively covered in the high-profile book review sections would be making a good start by consulting Centring the Margins. ~ Daniel Green, http://www.thereadingexperience.net/tre/2018/01/unruly.html
4 star review

Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews

by Jeff Bursey (Goodreads Author)

Michelle Hallett's review Feb 03, 2017

These thoughtful and meaty essays introduced me to many writers and got me thinking, sometimes in new ways, about how fiction can work. Bursey is a careful and thorough reader, and his passion and intelligence shine in this collection. Like others, I wish he'd reviewed more obscure women writers, not because I feel we need to fill a quota, but because, as VIDA and CWILA numbers show, women writers still have trouble getting reviewed at all, and I would expect women who write exploratory fiction have an even harder time.

Bursey's review of my first novel, Double-blind, is reproduced in Centring the Margins. While I don't agree with everything he writes about my fiction, particularly how I employed realism in that novel, I do want to acknowledge how his writing gets me thinking. Reading a Bursey essay is never a passive experience, never one of simple consumption.

Whatever I think of a book discussed by Bursey, or of the discussion itself, Bursey's vigorous and intelligent prose is a delight to read. ~ Michelle Butler Hallett, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1886680100
Broken Pencil Magazine; Issue 74, News, Norman Feliks, Saturday, January 14th, 2017

Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews, Jeff Bursey, 189 Pages, Zero Books, zero-books.net

As Jeff Bursey contends, we are endlessly taught that, “[l]iterature contains singular imagery, the perfect word lodged in its perfect spot, rounded characters, believable settings, a confident narrative (if not a confident narrator).” The stuffy English Lit cannon morphed into a similarly narrow mainstream publishing consensus. As a result, alternative styles of writing, which are for Bursey innovative, are tarred with the warning term, “experimental.”

Bursey’s crusade can be a smidge too present, yet often it is framed in an eye-opening way, such as when he notes that for typical critical writing, “[t]he excitement will be intellectual, but won’t commit someone’s blood and soul to the works, which [William] Vollmann, with Steinbeck in mind, has written from the fibre of his being, as used to be said before the author supposedly disappeared.” Here Bursey reminds us that there isn’t only one way to write and that readers may be rewarded for delving into the unfamiliar. The strength of this collection is that it drives us to seek out neglected voices, even if it means having to read an occasional paragraph twice before we get it. Bursey inspires us to seek out important writing instead of settling for the typical and easy to digest.

If there is a weakness, aside from some unclear sentences, it is that a wide variety of works are looked at through a personal lens informed by an ironically narrow spectrum of writers. For instance, Bursey compares all sorts of people to Henry Miller, Miller representing his literary awakening. Other favoured reference points are Pynchon, the Powys’, Dos Passos – and all sorts of stories are referred to as Oulipian. On the other hand, the wide variety of matter covered made a consistent measuring stick a welcome tool. (Norman Feliks) ~ Norman Feliks, http://www.brokenpencil.com/news/book-review-centring-the-margins
John's Reviews > Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews

5 stars

Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews

by Jeff Bursey (Goodreads Author)

reviewed by John Domini

Jan 07, 2017

Read from November 01 to December 01, 2016

By any fair standard, Bursey's selection of reviews & criticism must be counted insightful, wide-ranging, & humane -- a winner, really. Still, I suppose I must own up to being the recipient of his enlightened reading myself. My own SEA-GOD'S HERB is one of the books he considers here. So, there's full disclosure, and it doesn't in any way lessen Bursey's accomplishment. The first word in the book's title alone, CENTRING, conveys something of the book's special qualities: idiosyncratic & yet entirely correct. For example, the long & brainy essay on William Vollman, nothing less than an essential overview, has a scope few critics would risk, looking over a wide of work in prose, perhaps twenty titles all told, & yet it never loses sight of Vollman's bedrock values: his commitment to "important human problems" & to writing that does more than merely make him famous. The same sense of how literature can matter infuses Bursey's series pf briefer reviews of fiction out of his own homeland, Canada. I've never read Chris Eaton, for instance, but Bursey's treatment of his BIOGRAPHY has prompted me to seek out the man's "much-needed light on the lighthearted North." As for writers out of cultures far different, see, especially, his perspicacious review of César Aria. In claiming "our complacency is rebutted" in Aria, actually Bursey might be speaking of his own sharp yet sensitive interpretations -- booting us out of comfy mindsets, waking us to more challenging pleasures of the text. ~ John Domini, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1870644807
Dec 12, 2016:

Jeff Bursey’s Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews

by Alex Good

Many years ago, as a graduate student of English, I was told something about where the discipline was headed by one professionally minded (but not cynical) academic. “You have to be on the margins,” he said. “That’s where the action is. If you’re not on the margins, you’re nowhere.”

By the margins he meant the space that was becoming exclusively occupied by identity politics. The Dead White Men of the unholy patriarchy were the centre, so being on the margins was the result of having been forcibly marginalized or oppressed. The “action” was all about identifying with minorities and victim groups.

Jeff Bursey is a survivor of a graduate English program but the title of this collection of critical writings, Centring the Margins, indicates something very different than a rush to where the action is. For Bursey, the marginal is associated more with aesthetics than politics. At university he was subjected to a conservative curriculum that “reflected staid, English, or with-it taste that would never really upset anyone or anything.” This is what constituted (and perhaps to a large extent still constitutes) the core, the canon, the centre. After an awakening brought about through exposure to the writings of Henry Miller, what Bursey as essayist and reviewer wants to talk about are obscure or neglected figures, writers who seek to innovate, explore, experiment, and challenge readers by daring to be unruly and difficult.

A clear statement of Bursey’s own marginal aesthetic credo, and its rejection of what we might paradoxically refer to as orthodox marginalism (not the same thing as political correctness, but bearing some relation to that label), is laid out in his review of Herb Wyile’s Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature.

When it comes to aesthetics, this book resolutely shies away from declaring that a novel is good or bad or inferior. The roaring of those “political, social, and economic” engines largely has drowned out the poetry and the craft of the writers Wyile has chosen. He does a good job elucidating novels and plays (a welcome aspect) on the topics that concern him, but do these books have intrinsic properties that make them Art? The books chosen, or at least some of them, took effort on the part of the writer as he or she fashioned a sentence. By leaving out the aesthetic qualities of the books under consideration, and concentrating on class, race, gender issues, and consumerism, Wyile leaves untouched a pertinent question: If the books aren’t artful, how will they do whatever he wants them to do? They might as well be tracts left to molder on a doorstep. Wyile’s earnestness, coupled with his thesis, tells the reader little about the literary aspect of literature.

Bursey’s preferred approach is, in relation to our dominant modes of critical discourse, marginal: it’s basically in line with what John Metcalf dubbed the “aesthetic underground.” This is a method that enjoys no favour in academia or the media today, such practices as close reading and value judgments being now viewed as archaic, misguided, and unworkable. The “literary aspect of literature” is no longer the province of the professional critic.

This critical marginality is, in turn, addressed to what are – and I say this without prejudice – a number of marginal authors. The titles Bursey reviews here are, for the most part, well outside the mainstream. They are not award winners or books by established, canonical names but more often works in translation and/or the products of small presses. As already noted, Bursey prefers books that challenge, experiment, and take chances rather than those with mass appeal and genial charm. A more poetic approach is commended over the verities of staid realism. Steven Galloway’s Ascension is finally damned for being written in a style of “earnest fidelity” and “flat verbal photographs” that is “all net, no wire,” while Michelle Butler Hallett’s “particular kind of realism” in Double-Blind “is objectionable because it clearly overlooks the more tender aspects of life, and relegates much of the world’s artwork to the ashbin.” Of course realism is a difficult term to pin down, but in insisting on an expansive definition that includes spiritual values, Bursey does no harm.

Many of the names surveyed I freely admit to never having heard of. This isn’t a problem, indeed it might even be considered a good thing, but if Centring the Margins comes up a bit short in anything it’s in not making me want to seek more of them out. While Bursey’s championing of obscure titles performs a valuable critical service, and he is always an insightful and well-expressed advocate, I came away unconvinced that the conceptual author Davis Schneiderman really needs my attention, or that Marja-Liisa Vartio’s The Parson’s Widow would be worth the hard slog Bursey admits it to be. But to each their own. Though often constrained by the limits of the review form (his longer pieces are the best), Bursey does make a respectable case for and against the objects of his attention.

Another point – that’s again more of a personal response – is that Bursey doesn’t spend more time dealing with Canadian writers and the Canadian literary landscape, and examining the question of where and why Canadian literature rates in his scale of values vis-à-vis the rest of the world. To be fair, Centring the Margins doesn’t attempt an overview of contemporary Canadian writing, so I don’t want to take it to task for being something it never intended to be. That said, Bursey is, as his introductory remarks lay out, very much a product of (in the sense of a reaction against) our home and native cultural environment and its conservative values. Which, I think, is something both ironic and germane to his thesis.

Canadian culture has always had a special relationship with the margins. It begins with the fact that Canada is a marginal country, literally appearing as such on the map: a ribbon of population stretched out along the border with our imperial neighbour. Our cultural productions have been almost by definition marginal, at least in terms of audience and influence, to what has been the dominance of British and then American literature, music, and film both in this country and globally.

Within Canada, however, we have the phenomenon I’ve already mentioned, orthodox marginalism, with its own critical and cultural establishments. Bursey is, in Canada, a marginal critic. His aesthetic approach is marginal to the identity politics of the academic-media mainstream and his reading interests are marginal, bordering on invisible, to the public taste. It is precisely this that makes him essential. The centre of Canadian culture is a hole being dug to nowhere. Bursey’s criticism isn’t another shovel but a rope.

—A CNQ Web Exclusive, December 2016 ~ Canadian Notes and Queries, http://notesandqueries.ca/reviews/jeff-burseys-centring-the-marginsby-alex-good/
‘Centring The Margins: Essays and Reviews’ by Jeff Bursey

Posted: DECEMBER 5, 2016

Reviewed by Spencer Gordon

Book reviews in Canada are, like most literary events in this country, the cause of much conflict and anxiety amongst Canadian writers. Of course, they enjoy the status of “non-events” for just about everyone else.

To the wider public—readers and non-readers alike—the review is almost never the site of what one might call political or aesthetic urgency. To most folk, books are consumer objects, showcased on Amazon or Indigo, Goodreads or Walmart; they receive colourful reviews from buyers—savage dismissals, glowing endorsements, and everything in between—that help guide happy purchases.

This sort of ‘review’ has utility: it helps clarify genre, characterize tone and setting, set up expectations. And if you consume only a handful of books per year, your reading time is precious; you want to maximize your chance at satisfaction. One might therefore argue that a bad book (or a misleading book, a challenging or disappointing book, or however else one might define ‘bad’) is even more egregious to the non-engaged than to the active critic, who might learn from its errors, or at least be entertained by its failure. Truly bad books are painful and hilarious—but not if you’re reading only five titles per year.

For the rest of us, here in our drippy dungeon of critics and writers and publishers, the review as criticism is perennially considered to be in a delicate, if not parlous, state—if books mean everything to us, then so too do reviews, even as none of us can make a career from reviewing, and even as reviews have a doubtful correlation with book sales or publishing contracts or “reality.”

Ultimately, we review for each other. We write for, or against, our friends and adversaries, imagined and otherwise. We write to be heard; we write for ourselves. Even if arguments about cultural service and public integrity grow ever more meaningless, we want our own homes in order. So we draw up battle lines and take to the field with our own flag—and sometimes several at once.

For groups like CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, quite legitimately, reviews are emblematic of wider problems of stark gender and racial imbalance in North American publishing (i.e., straight white cisgender males dominate the scant column spaces of our magazines, more predominantly review the works of other straight white cisgender males, and thereby exclude, intentionally or not, a huge swath of books produced in this country). Everything is political, after all. There is no pure space for reviews—and whom we choose to write about can have enormous consequences for the equity and agency of our writers.

For others, book reviews are too often instances of glad-handing or back-scratching (or whatever grody word best sums up the act). The gist being: the Canadian literary community is so enclosed that impartiality is pretty much impossible. We put one another over—to use a term lifted from pro-wrestling—in order to receive the same benefit down the road. A negative review means a torched bridge, a lost opportunity, even a severed friendship—and these acts can have real social and financial fallouts (though let’s be honest: nobody’s banking any real money unless your name is Atwood or Boyden).

This very common critique bemoans the over-the-top positivity of book reviews and the bland puff-pastry that tries to pass as a negative take. In response, advocates argue, we should cultivate more rigorous analytic vocabularies, and expect the highest from our writers; we should have pure critics who are not, in fact, also small press poets and fiction-writers with stakes in the game; and we should treat dishonesty as betrayal.

Still others insist that the negative review harms more than it heals. A glowing review is so much more empowered by passion, wit, and gusto than a negative or half-hearted summation. As there are no pure spaces, and as there is no objectivity in criticism, the negative review reveals so much more about the critic than it does the work: it brings forward what they feel, not what the writer did or didn’t do.

An endorsement—passionate engagement—is like the light and melodious sound of genuine dialogue, these advocates insist. Besides, the stakes are so pitifully low in publishing that savaging a book of poetry that, say, sells a few hundred copies at most is akin to picking on the runt of the litter. It’s unsocial, unbecoming. Books that may appear popular are still at the bottom of the food chain in terms of cultural power. Why fill our dwindling and marginal spaces with even more vitriol and disgust? Why not bring to bear the higher powers of our intellect and celebrate the shinier exemplars of our craft? Ultimately, negativity is boring. As LMFAO once quipped, “Hate is bad.”

Another routine complaint, easily backed up, is that book reviews are given far too little space in magazines and newspapers to offer meaningful commentary. A 400-word review does next to nothing—especially when it’s obligated to digest and report 400 pages of plot (it does something, of course; it might serve as a blurb, an ego-stroke, a publishing credit, or a middle finger—but it’s just not criticism). Digital publishing should have solved this dilemma, as online magazines don’t have the page and column restrictions of print publications. But even on the web, it’s rare to encounter involved, long-form reviews—lack of remuneration for the reviewer, a lack of interest on the part of editors, a fear of dwindling attention spans, and other sundry forces conspire to make online reviews often as short and futile as their print-only counterparts.

There are more complaints, surely—the cliché “praise-criticism-praise” formula (a kind of digestible sandwich that can accommodate any book); the frequent barb against Canadian critics that we’re just too damn navel-gazing to reflect upon global trends and patterns. But let’s set these aside for now. Let’s turn to the issue that’s most vital and personal to Jeff Bursey, author at hand, whose collection Centring the Margins sets its scope on another persistent problem—with not so much how or who, but what we choose to review.

***

And that is: the books that receive the lion’s share of critical attention in Canada—negative, positive, or otherwise—are all part of a generic and aesthetic majority that few of us accept as total and fewer know how to combat. These works of fiction (we can’t talk about poetry the same way, though some have tried) are what you might call works of conventional narrative, wherein storytelling, linearity, recognizable structures, and other conservative devices are used to denote “realism” (‘realistic’ characters, with convincing dialogue, relatable motivations, and familiar backgrounds). And they fit into the average reader’s expectations of plot and revelation without too many hiccups along the way.

Conventional realism, applied in a literary context, or to science fiction or romance or horror or whatever, is the sole genre that makes money—that should be obvious. But literary realism also dominates the longlists of all our major awards. Every Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning book, and almost every book on each year’s shortlist, has been a “tale well told.” Some have been genuinely fantastic novels, of course. But regardless of their narrative power, theme, tonal register or emotional terrain, they have been works of conventional realism. The same goes for the Governor General’s Awards, the Man Booker, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Awards, smaller prizes like Ontario’s Trillium, and our annual media blitz, CBC Canada Reads. And prizes generate publicity and income—limited as it all is—so periodicals aren’t foolish enough to pass up running reviews and features of these books in their pages.

But the implicit suggestion, from all that money and prestige, and all those awards, and all that column space, is that conventional, late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century storytelling is the only underlying denominator for quality in literature, according to the agents who bestow power. Prizes and reviews go to realism, because works of realism “supposedly matter more,” to quote Jeff Bursey; it’s the only worthwhile, the only serious genre. Period.

For Bursey, this mostly unspoken preference for one kind of writing is devastating: to students, to readers, and to writers of all stripes. His reflections on the topic are peppered throughout the 30 reviews found in Centring the Margins—all published between 2001 and 2014, in places like American Book Review, Books in Canada, Literary Review, and here, The Winnipeg Review—but are most eloquently stated in an introduction that both foregrounds the pieces and articulates his critical philosophy.

This ten page preface is the most inspiring and memorable part of the collection—not to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the reviews themselves, or Bursey’s candour and sophistication. It is, I suppose, simply invigorating to read about a topic that so few of us can meaningfully grapple with. How can we discover, let alone champion or emulate, books that are ignored—even by the meager spheres of power that deign to engage with literature? These are works ignored within a cultural sphere that’s already ignored by the wider world. So what of books that receive little to zero attention in print or online; books that never appear on radio or television, and hardly ever appear in Chapters or Indigo? Books that, as Bursey writes, “have a hard time getting published” to begin with? How to promote on behalf of the overlooked and crooked, the unread and underrated—weirder and more challenging, more aesthetically daunting stories and novels? Books that defy classification within one genre—books that attempt to further the dialogue about where art is and where it’s come from?

Centring the Margins is Bursey’s attempt to do so, at any rate. As a reviewer, he sets to his task “with the explorers and the unruly in mind.” While wary of critical apparati, political projects, and other organizational tools, he does “take on the role of the advocate” for texts he feels “require defending”—the works that “deserve to be brought to the attention of others” because “they would not be featured in the national newspapers or even in specialized publications when they had every right to be there.”

In other words, Bursey focuses on innovative texts, which he calls “exploratory”—a word with a wonderful freshness to it, and stripped of the negative connotations of the term “experimental.” And he does so for two principle reasons: to share works that might otherwise go unnoticed, and to counter a prevailing, condescending attitude amongst the writers and agents who directly benefit from the fact that only conservative approaches will ever receive admiration and power.

For the first cause, Bursey is a commendable campaigner, driven by “an erratic compulsion to educate the public, as well as to counter the forests of press devoted to the Dan Browns and Alice Munros who are always with us.” He embodies the role of the devoted, the evangelical, often with reference to personal discoveries and life-altering encounters with literature: chance meetings with figures like Henry Miller, who seemed to have swept in and rescued his ho-hum existence as a student at a conservative institution. “We need more pamphleteers for writers we believe in who are not seen much by the general audience to bring them into visibility,” he writes, “not because these authors need us (though they might) but because we need these authors who explore new terrain with equipment of their own devising.”

Let’s be clear: it’s not that we should force readers into appreciating divergent literature—all purveyors and writers of such work know, quite intimately, that no money or prestige can come from it. Bursey is worldly enough to understand that foisting challenging material upon a casual reader, or one with clearly defined tastes, is never going to work. “For those who want good manners there’s no shortage of books to choose from,” he writes. “I don’t deny the mainstream authors their audience.” And no—it’s also not to have weirder books start eating up prizes, or climbing bestseller lists, as if that were ever possible. These constructions were made to perpetuate power, as bluntly as ever.

What it is all about is offering alternatives, opening doors, and changing lives—or at least creating opportunities to do so. And so, who does Bursey feature? He goes far afield, aesthetically, in his assessment of works from beyond our borders—books like Davis Schneiderman’s [SIC], William T. Vollmann’s Expelled from Eden, Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Abyss of Human Illusion, Alexandra Chasin’s Kissed By, César Aire’s Shantytown, or William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape. Indeed, it’s his self-described “panorama” of texts from global writers that really seems to have something urgent to say: a refreshing counterpoint to our renowned insularity, a crusading effort to bring more Canadian eyes to international, and truly innovative, texts. Most Canadian writers, I would imagine, are not familiar with Blaise Cendrars, Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, and other names—and bringing these to our attention in 2016 can only mean unique pathways and opened avenues for new, potentially life-long readers and artists.

From Canada, Bursey turns to Chris Eaton’s Chris Eaton: A Biography, S.D. Chrostowska’s Permission, Michelle Butler Hallet’s Double-Blind, Chris Benjamin’s Drive-By Saviours, Jessica Westhead’s And Also Sharks, Steven Galloway’s Ascension, and Rebecca Rosenblum’s The Big Dream. Here, the engaged reader will note a considerable pivot from Bursey’s international cohort. Not all of these books line up with his stated mission to illuminate the exploratory—Permission and Chris Eaton: A Biography, surely, but the rest?

A major missed opportunity, I think, to engage with genuinely experimental texts, as difficult to find here in the north as they are. This might not be totally Bursey’s fault, though—as Russell Smith and many others have argued, there’s little debate about experimental fiction in Canada. (Like, is ‘experimental’ even a word anymore?) All major conversations about fiction are constrained to the boundaries of conservative realism—they’re just divided along the lines of tone, content and theme, or to biographical reference to the author (i.e., is your realist novel about the prairies, the immigrant experience? Is your realist novel kind of, like, poverty porn, or is it about big city dwellers on their smartphones? How much money did your family make, growing up? Did you go to school? Are you writing a realist novel as a person of colour, trying to translate your individual experience, or are you just another white guy from an MFA?). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a Canadian Padgett Powell, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace, Eimear McBride, Ben Marcus, Giannina Braschi, or even George Saunders. As Christian Bök has argued, post-modernism barely happened here—the 60s, 70s and 80s novelists we tend to associate with the term are actually modernists, and our real post-modern writers have been systematically buried by academics and the mainstream press.

So, we’re impoverished, sure. But where was Lynn Crosbie or Tony Burgess in Bursey’s survey? How about Lance Blomgren or Ken Sparling? Barry Webster, rob mclennan, Sheila Heti, Derek McCormack, Tim Conley, Joey Comeau, or Nathaniel G. Moore? Nelly Arcan, Michael Blouin, Ian Williams, Tamara Faith Berger, or Jacob Wren? Even Zsuzsi Gartner and Douglas Glover seem to offer more variety, more elasticity of form and voice, than most of the CanLit Bursey actually reviews.

Throughout Centring the Margins, the word “overlooked” thus also applies to out-of-the-way, mostly ignored titles, with relatively limited print runs—not merely the books that attempt ambitious feats with prose. But this distinction is kind of confusing, too. Westhead’s And Also Sharks was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award, listed as a Globe and Mail best book, one of Kobo’s best e-books, and, from what I can tell, received praise in all of our major newspapers and outlets. It’s a good book—but overlooked? Steven Galloway is, I believe, a semi-household name (now more than ever for his disturbing tenure at the UBC)—so why include a review of Ascension? Though Bursey eviscerates it—a precise and well-deserved take-down for a bad book—adding to the word-hoard heaped at Galloway’s feet doesn’t seem to solve the problems the author ostensibly set out to solve.

On another note of discord, I’m not sure I agree with Bursey on the notion that weirder materials “have every right to be” featured in newspapers and magazines (or ceremonies, for that matter); this assertion seems simplistic, and unaware of the reasons why the books were rejected in the first place. And no—I don’t believe the sterling, representative author of exploratory texts “deserves a wider audience,” as he states. We as authors deserve the audiences we find ourselves coupled with: if they are tiny and devoted, ignored by capital, then a sudden visit from money and mass appeal isn’t what we deserve out of some ethical reparation. We deserve, in the end, the people who like us, and that’s all. I think a mass audience for an experimental writer might be their doom. And I think Bursey knows this, too, and falls into the “deserves a wider audience” line as we all invariably fall into cliché now and then. In fact, he quotes Gilbert Sorrentino as saying, quite rightly, that “Essentially, the novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience”—which is a much healthier perspective for anyone in the process of banging their head on the altar of praise.

* * *

Let’s move on to Bursey’s second campaign, tied intimately to the first—a more polemical rebuttal to dismissals of exploratory writing, stemming not from your average “Heather’s Picks” reader, but from those in positions of authorial and critical responsibility. And this, far from setting me up for disappointment by failing to engage with what’s truly rotten in Canada, manages to bracket my full attention.

Bursey begins his argument by quoting Writers’ Trust judge and award-winning writer Rabindranath Maharaj, whose description of the 2011 shortlist is included below:

… what these writers have done and what they’re doing is they’re very quietly innovative without drawing attention to their innovation. And they’re innovative in the sense that their books are more accessible—it’s more reader-friendly in many ways … The elements of good storytelling are still there.

Given the imprecise foolishness of the quotation, it’s fun to watch Bursey launch into a very entertaining and almost painfully true rebuttal—against a lazy, half-baked connection between quality in literature and the all-redeeming factor of “good storytelling.” Innovation, as Maharaj seems to be saying, should come second, and only second, to “more accessible” and more “reader-friendly” stories. Innovation, if it must be employed at all, should go quietly; it should bow its head meekly, and submit to what all discerning readers (and juries) actually want, don’t you know—a tale well told, with all the hallmarks of the old-fashioned yarn, or the “old, preserved cherry,” as Bursey puts it. “Drawing attention” to innovation is akin to an embarrassing display—a misguided flash of showy, impudent skin. It alienates the gentle and polite reader, and that equals immediate artistic (and commercial) failure—even exile. Given this prescription, it’s a wonder why you’d seek out ‘innovation’ at all. When it’s “sometimes considered not art but an affront,” why would anyone bother?

Bursey illuminates the unthinking elitism on display—the subtle appeal to populism that writers of prestige often employ to justify their success. The preference for reader-friendly, unchallenging narratives—for Maharaj, for awards jurists, and for others—“can be interpreted as a chiding dismissal of those who aim to write something unusual,” Bursey writes. “He [Maharaj] is saying that innovative (Canadian) writers who are too upfront and pushy about their work should dial it down, on the way to knocking it off entirely.” The insinuation is there, too, that exploratory writers are simply failed realists, “as if the style and structure got in the way of the only important thing: the story.”

The sentiment shouldn’t be too alien to us—we’ve heard it before in debates (the classic Marcus vs. Franzen fracas comes to mind), witnessed the eye-rolls, and watched the writers granted a measure of mainstream success gather round one another at the wine-breath ceremonies, at the dress-up galas, on the big box bookshelves, as well as in open letters. And Bursey finds enough support from other writers who’ve intuited the same. He invokes Josipovici’s jest that “reviewers view experimental writing as ‘a sub-branch of fiction, rather like teenage romances or science fiction,’” and Gilbert Sorrentino’s jibe that, to most mainstream reviewers, the word ‘experimental’ is a “euphemism for that work which cannot be called serious.” Much like comedy, experimentalism is the greasy, mutant, fish-head-eating brother in the attic of lit.

So what to do to counteract this bias? For critics, it’s again to spotlight neglected work—but here invigorated with the mission of creating a world for others to inhabit. To say, yes: other worlds do exist, reserved and waiting for those who might bristle against cookie-cutter, consumable, pleasing artifacts—the shit that makes all the money. And authors should own their own exile, rather than get angry and jelly; they should turn their sense of inferiority into a weapon they can wield without mercy, with jouissance and gaiety (or as much jouissance and gaiety as your average Canadian writer can muster—I mean, really). In an exhortation and encouragement to artists, Bursey quotes the critic Warren Mott, who states that we “can take the notion that we inhabit the margins of things and turn it to our advantage.” We can imagine exile as something that “frees us and expands our horizon of possibility.”

This impassioned opening gives the reviews throughout Centring the Margins a more electric imperative—a reason for being, and an importance beyond the joys of writing criticism in an imagined vacuum. It should make all of us pause, at least, and re-assess how we imagine our fields of power and hierarchies to be arranged. Bursey puts it best, though, so I’ll leave the last word on the subject to him:

“Stepping away from the regular formulas alarms those who think that this act means a writer is not being realistic (as if we could all agree on what’s real). If writers are encouraged to create versions of the world in whatever fashion they choose—and some versions may take work to decipher—then there can only be anarchy, in their minds. To write against the order—against corporatism, bland politeness, and muted approaches—is now to be reader-unfriendly.”

* * *

As for the reviews themselves—they are quite good. Bursey can put on a clinic for aspiring writers looking to balance plot summary (a necessary evil when reviewing prose) with substantive evaluation. He translates his empathies and hesitations in clear language, imparts the historic context of authors and their texts, and often relates the conflicts inherent in fiction to our real-world political and cultural climate. His love for writers like Solzhenitsyn or Sorrentino is glowing, obvious—it is, like all good critical writing, affecting. He is an excellent teacher—he makes fiction sound like the most important thing.

Most gratifying is Bursey’s impulse to look at syntax: words and sentences themselves. It’s a surprise to me to read so many reviews of fiction that skip past sentence structure—after all, words and punctuation are the medium, the LEGO blocks of our prose castles. Beyond subject matter, it’s what separates a Madeleine Thien from a Cormac McCarthy, an Amy Hempel from a Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yet so many reviewers, working for high-profile publications, overlook the nuts and bolts of sentences—as if pausing to savour or critique a mellifluous or deadening line were a dilettante’s distractions, mere obstacles to getting to the only thing that matters.

And what’s that supposed to be again? The story? What happens, and in what order? It seems like ignoring how prose sounds and is structured, in the wake of Bursey’s introductory jousts, seems all the more an act of unconscious complicity with that elite preference (masquerading as simplicity) for story alone. Looking closely at the prose—whether “fluid” or in “magazine speak,” “lecturing” or with a “tin ear,” “measured in tone” or, as almost no prose reviewer today dares to write, demonstrating “fluid breath control,” thank you Mr. Bursey!—is crucial to knowing if, and how, a book works. All great fiction needs to “succeed at the level of the line,” he writes—and it’s with great admiration that I read his enthusiastic tackling of that indispensible element.

Not all reviews and reviewers can please everyone, though—and perhaps we should return to our earlier list, by no means exhaustive, of common complaints with reviews to see how Bursey may or may not live up to expectations.

His pieces do lean toward the almost unanimously positive—and when he does offer some criticism, it’s usually fairly gentle. I don’t begrudge him this; balance and caution are often signs of acumen. And he does include some extremely short—nearly ‘hot’—takes on books: reviews so truncated as to offer little more than a cursory plot recap and some elementary criticism. Why these couldn’t be expanded in a full-length collection goes unanswered. These snapshots seem even more inadequate when placed beside his longer essays on Solzhenitsyn, Vollmann, or Wyile, which manage to breathe and range, seem like self-contained works of art themselves, and even allow several opportunities for self-reflection and personal anecdote. A more engaged editor would have helped Bursey come to this conclusion— I’m looking at you, Zero Books!

Bursey would also fail a CWILA count, flat-out. Out of the 30 reviews included, only eight are dedicated to women. Furthermore, only César Aire, Argentinean, might be considered a person of colour—the rest are “white” Canadians, Americans, and Europeans. For a book to emerge in 2015 so blissfully unaware of what we need from collections of criticism is kind of mind boggling, to be honest. I’m not trying to throw stones from glass houses—my own record is poor, and here I am reviewing the work of another white dude. But I don’t call myself a critic, won’t be publishing a collection of reviews dedicated to “neglected, obscure, or … difficult” writers. And it’s up to all of us to try to do better, even if that means taking someone else to task.

“In a sense,” Bursey writes, “these reviews incorporate my failures, and hopefully a fruitful kind that encourages other critics to be more successful.” We can’t hold any critic up as a paragon for everyone. We should also feel fortunate enough to have as sensitive, erudite, and caring a critic as we do in Jeff Bursey. I was not aware of his work as a reviewer or novelist before reading Centring the Margins, but in doing so, I feel as though I’ve been gifted the discovery of another compelling voice—and another key. Reading this book has opened another doorway into my own practice. And for that I am grateful, emboldened, and buoyed: to write reviews no one will care about; to be ignored, if necessary; and to make art with no fucks given.

Zero Books | 200 pages | $29.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1785354007 ~ Spencer Gordon, The Winnipeg Review
Published on November 12, 2016

Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews

By Jeff Bursey

Zero Books

190 pages; $22.95

“Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews” is another non-fiction collection, and again a highly specialized selection. Jeff Bursey is a deft and engaged critic, and these reviews cross genres and span a decade or more.

They include “John Domini, The Sea-Gods’ Herb: Essays and Criticism, 1975–2014” and “Ornela Vorspi, The Country Where No One Ever Dies.”

The somewhat esoteric material is written by a reader with a sharply observant eye and wry voice: “In 1986 (British literary theorist) Terry Eagleton gave what was called the Pratt lecture at MUN. Dressed in a loose-fitting, or possibly sagging, cardigan seemingly made from oatmeal or at least that colour, Eagleton spoke at length, in dry tones, no affectation of style or vocal modulation permitted, on ‘the End of English.’”

Bursey to Eagleton: not so fast.

Joan Sullivan is editor of Newfoundland Quarterly magazine. She reviews both fiction and non-fiction for The Telegram. ~ Joan Sullivan, http://www.thetelegram.com/living/2016/11/11/almanac-records-womens-voices-stories-4684452.html
Sep 28, 2016

flowerville rated it really liked it

disclaimer 1.: i’m a continental academic foreigner not primarily operating in english, who is almost all the time well baffled by the stuff that goes on in the anglosaxian literary world; & as someone who’s always indiscriminately read everything i have a hard time getting my head round all those positions, genres and things. those books like bursey’s are written in a culturally different background and as an outsider to those debates the literary crusades going on in there aren’t mine. re the great modernism vs third person omniscient divide bursey is firmly on the josipovici kind of side.

that said, i got something out of the book, i like the stuff underneath the crusades.

problem/bafflement 1.: where’s the obscure stuff? book is announced as containing crazy difficult and obscure writers with the goal of bringing the margins/marginalized writers to the centre. yet none of the writers reviewed was unknown to me (as in i heard the name before) and i’ve probably read about 2 thirds of them.

that said, the principle of the insights coming from the margins is one i heartily agree with.

problem 2.: the number of books by female writers (not quite a third) reviewed is nothing to write home about.

the book is embraced by a preface and postface outlining the ! author’s intentions ! - methodically the book is in the szondi tradition (although szondi is not invoked by bursey), immanent criticism, in bursey’s very own words:

“There is no theoretical apparatus underlying the approach taken herein, as each book, to my way of thinking, requires its own approach, if you want to view them as artworks and not treat them as exemplars of this or that critical discourse.”

in the postface bursey writes the following: "The opinions expressed may be agreed with or termed uninteresting or rebarbative, but in any event they are meant to spark discussion as to what the author meant, what he or she achieved, and what transpired within me on first reading. Never perceived as the final word, they invite a long and wide-ranging conversation. Nor were the reviews written with the daft notion of capturing everything that resides in a work of art. As Eric Ormsby wrote, “if the work is truly good, something will always elude our analysis.” In a sense, these reviews incorporate my failures, and hopefully a fruitful kind that encourages other critics to be more successful.”

i entirely concur with those reviewing principles outlined by bursey, i’ve always thought this is how it should be done and this is also how it is done by bursey, the book is in the foreground, it is looked at according to its own merits, there is lots close reading of the book (within whatever space allows), accompanied by ‘secondary literature’, a good mixture of detail and ‘grand overview’ - balanced viewpoints, calm reasoning, the books are read in good faith and discussed fairly.

there’s always stuff that escapes, some due to space constraints, some due to the very nature of art itself and that means that the conversation is never finished. bursey’s insistence on there being no final word in those reviews is a sign of theoretical humbleness, and also necessary humbleness that is at the same time a kind of generosity. one could say there are two worldviews, one assumes to know everything and that everything can be known and another worldview that allows some space for something else, whatever that is. this openness is the thing, for the books to come alive again in reading, in reviewing and in escaping again, just for it, the book (and bursey’s reviews, in this case), to welcome you on a different page all the same.

bursey’s reviews are nice to read, friendly, sincere, engaging and make one think. his reviews approachable not in the sense as in cringy, but as in: hang on, i need to look this up and there one goes, starts reading and is immediately drawn into the longlong unending conversation of literature. approaching as in looking: what is this book really, what is it about. like, walking round it and looking at it from all angles with wonder and depth, and the aim to do justice to it, to its failings and achievements, approaching them in equal measure. in this sense, the last paragraph of the last review (aira) is very apt.

all in all i prefer the longer reviews, especially the one about the letters between cowper powys & dorothy richardson.

disclaimer 2.: mr bursey positively reviewed a book (mr mitchelmore’s this space of writing) to which i supplied the coverimage. ~ flowerville, Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1575026258?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

+ + + +

Read from July 04 to 06, 2016

My reading choices don't so much go against the popular taste as pass it by. --Jeff Bursey

So immediately you see the affinity.

Jeff Bursey is a gr=Friend of mine and I've read both his two novels and loved them*. So everything that follows, you'll know, is a lie.

What's convenient here is that if any little thing interests you in even the slightest regarding what I say about Bursey and his book reviewing and book commentatoring, you can head off into the vast range of the internetz, via this link :: Jeff Bursey ;; and click into his gr=reviews where you'll likely be linked to the on-line publication of some of his thoughts on books. And there's good reason to do so ; you've never even heard of most of these things he reviews. [I had fun these past few days Liking his Reviews into your Feeds, so you know you'll have seen these titles and names at least once in your life].

Just listen (I mean to say, this is the kind of issue Bursey's reviews are likely to address ; it's not about some nit's feelings being hurt when a critic disparages her favorite YA novel, but rather addresses the question of a POVERTY OF LITERARY KNOWLEDGE) ::

But there is a bottomless chasm . . . no, that's not a very nice image . . . An endless horizon? A galaxy of literary stars? All these influential books and writers I've not only never read, I've NEVER HEARD OF. And when I do learn of someone, I'm all WHY has no one mentioned him/her before? Was I just not listening? --an innocent=anonymous gr'r

Because really who needs to "debate" whether the latest breast=seller, noble=winner, N=Basketcase=A winner is good or not and whether 'good' is subjective or not when we are faced with the very real and very objective question whether Reader X has even had the opportunity to have heard the name Rikki Ducornet (my example) even once in her life? Frankly, Donna Tartt and her ilk can continue to take flying=friggin' leaps so long as millions of voracious readers have not even once in their lifetime even had the chance to have heard the names Marguerite Young and Dorothy Richardson (again, my examples).

So then this is where Bursey comes in. He's doing what I think any serious book reviewer ought to do. Talk about books that deserve to be spoken of, to be read, to be dissemination but which are ignored almost entirely by the machine. Today, right now on gr among this little Corner Collective of readers of the experimental and exploratory (Bursey's better term) it sounds out=right damn'd silly to speak of no one never having heard the names William T. Vollmann or William Gaddis or Joseph McElroy or Blaise Cendrars or Gilbert Sorrentino or Cesar Aira. But truly folks, in the spirit of Bearing Honest Witness, this was my state a mere ten years ago ; and I came from a literary education, from a clique that read books, serious books, and literary books. What any serious book reviewer ought to do is WIELD that mighty SPADE in the name of righteous indignation that so many longing and lovely readers are being denied the knowledge of the existence of books they're gunna fall in love with and spend their life with. And, folks, I've seen it happen again and again and again and again.

At any rate, let's do the list -- I challenge you to look at the numbers and you'll see what I'm talking about. [Bursey doesn't advocate on behalf of each and every author/book listed below because too he's astute and evenhanded of a reviewer for that ;; but when he does advocate you'll want to pay attention because his aesthetics=dar is well tuned as witness those names in the previous paragraph] ::

Davis Schneiderman

John Domini (he's here around these gr=parts)

Herb Wyile

Bill

Solzhenitsyn (the only name here I'd expect a general readership to have acquaintance with)

[followed by some Canadian names that are not Munro or Atwood because Canada's bigger than that]

Rebecca Rosenblum

Steven Galloway

Jessica Westhead

Chris Benjamin

Michelle Butler Hallett

S.D. Chrostowska (again in the spirit of Bearing Honest Witness I can Testify to the value and accuracy of Bursey's recommendations. Permission should not be missed and I'm looking forward to Matches: A Light Book)

Chris Easton

[some more stuff follows the ToC heading "Realism and Suffering"]

Marja-Liisa Vartio

Robert Newman

Larry Fondation

Hans Erich Nossack

Joseph Roth

Ornela Vorpsi

Sam Savage

Michelle Latiolais

[and the last section where it really kicks into Pay=Attention=Bursey=Is=Speaking territory ;; ie, "Outliers, Innovators, and Explorers"]

Blaise Cendrars (a Bursey staple)

William Gaddis (I think this is where Bursey and I first met due to an amazon rec that went from Gaddis ---> Verbatim: A Novel)

John Cowper Powys & Dorothy Richardson, their letters

Gilbert Sorrentino (seeing this name in a context like this means that the person speaking/etc is serious)

Mat Unt -- Estonian stuff, if you can believe it.

Joseph McElroy (should be named every time you make a list like Joyce, Proust, Woolf)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Alexandra Chasin

Marek Waldorf

Cesar Aira

For your pleasure ::

Bursey's interview with Steven Moore

http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...

Lots more Bursey at http://www.jeffbursey.com/ which provides, among however many more reviews, a youtube of a reading that'll bind-your-spell.

And here's where to get the book presently under consideration ::

http://www.zero-books.net/books/centr...

* He's about as good as Evan Dara and even twice as obscure/unread. Hell, he's Gaddis=good! ~ Nathan 'N.R." Gaddis, Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1943696742

5-star review

Addressing widespread resistance to William Gaddis’s books, to his so-called difficult fiction, Jeff Bursey writes: “[A]ll that’s required is patience and an active participation of a reader.” Bursey is just such a patient and actively participating reader, repeatedly demonstrating these qualities to marvelous effect in his criticism. Centring the Margins is the perfect title for this smart, generous, empathetic book, Bursey privileging writers writing against convention, against the mainstream, writers like César Aira, Alexandra Chasin, Joseph McElroy, Sam Savage, Davis Schneiderman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Mati Unt, William T. Vollmann, and many more besides. Bursey also engages a number of fellow critics, like Marcelo Ballvé, John Domini, and Scott Esposito, whose thoughts largely align with his own, as well as critics with whom he disagrees, that is, disparate voices, not to mention the voice of the author of whichever text or texts are under scrutiny, all of which makes for an expansive, almost democratic conversation. That said, Bursey’s analyses and conclusions set him apart, distinguish him as a singular critic, one who balances aesthetics and politics, one as equally enamored of artful sentences as of playful disruptions of narrative form. Over and over again, Bursey succeeds in bringing deserving but largely unknown writers to greater visibility, effectively demonstrating that, as he writes, “we need these authors who explore new terrain with equipment of their own devising.” Concomitantly, we need critics like Jeff Bursey, who seek out and engagingly write about writers outside of the margins: writers from small presses, writers-in-translation, the many un- and under-recognized “Outliers, Innovators, and Explorers” (the title of one of the book’s sections). ~ John Madera, Goodreads
2 May 2017

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1930796343

I love the way Bursey reviews these books. There are many writers he expresses a certain reverence for, even as he points out the occasional flaw. William T. Vollmann stands out in my mind, what with Bursey's in-depth review of a Vollmann reader.

But what is even more resonant with me than Bursey's passion, is that much of his analysis hones in, intentionally or not, on theme, on the ideas a work raises or deals with, the very things that make the stories matter. To me, it's less the obscurity or even originality of a work that gets me, it's what it says. And to say something, anything, a book has to have a good way with words. Its structure may be unusual, daring and innovative. But it succeeds most when it has some insight on the world, perhaps an ability to instill in me sympathy for those I hadn't considered before.

Bursey's criticism covers that thematic ground very well, to the point I feel I've read some of the books I actually haven't. The downside: my already cumbersome to-read list has gotten considerably longer. But whether I ever get to them all or not (surely I won't, because it always grows), this kind of review and analysis of books is in itself a pleasurable read, itself saturated with ideas and perspectives about the world we live in, the people who inhabit it, and the way we have been, are and may be in the future. It is an homage to reading itself, and why it is such a privilege and delight to have this power.

And I should note that there are other kinds of literary criticism that don't accomplish this. They either move too quickly to conclusions, remain mired in plot summary, or obsess over details of technique without moving to the bigger picture. I found CtM nicely balanced discussions of technique without forgetting why technique (and a willingness to break formula) matters. ~ Chris Benjamin, Goodreads
For years I've been reading Jeff Bursey's well-informed, well-written reviews whenever I see them, and I welcome the opportunity to catch up on all of the ones I've missed, and to see my favorites preserved in permanent form. Bursey brings to each review or essay a wide background in modern literature, an honest effort to understand an author's intentions and aesthetics, and a generosity of judgment, always finding more to praise in an author than to censure. I've picked up several books he has recommended over the years, for I've learned to trust his taste, and even those I passed over left me better informed, for he often focuses not on the big authors that are reviewed everywhere, but on the fascinating innovators who are reviewed hardly anywhere. Bursey's collection is a first-rate guide to some of the most interesting fiction and criticism written in the 21st century. ~ Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History
Jeff Bursey is a writer’s reviewer. He comprehends the mechanics of fiction and the artistry of the novel, and his reviews reflect this understanding and this fascination. Bursey highlights why a book matters, why a reader should read it (or not), and elucidates how the author was able to craft the book – giving readers more than a critique but also a reason to read. ~ Christopher WunderLee, author of Moore's Mythopoeia and The Loony
In Jeff Bursey’s reviews, not only do we learn about books and meet authors we might not normally come across, but we are given a unique perspective on the work itself. Bursey’s penchant for subversive literature that blazes its own path heralds a fresh voice in the world of literary criticism, one that champions in-depth analysis and erudite commentary. More than mere reviews, these are signposts for those who want to be challenged in their reading material.

~ Steven Mayoff, author of Our Lady Of Steerage and Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the PEI Book Award for Fiction
Nobody would accuse Jeff Bursey of being lax in his demands on literature. In much of his book reviewing and other literary criticism … Bursey argues vehemently against a prescriptive approach to fiction. He trumpets the elasticity of form; he challenges his fellow novelists to eschew tried-and-true strictures on structure; he shames those who take a paint-by-colours approach to characterization; he begs us to embrace experimentation in the truest sense of the term. ~ Mark Sampson, author of Sad Peninsula and The Secrets Men Keep, http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/08/14/small-city-chatter-review-of-jeff-burseys-mirrors-on-which-dust-has-fallen-mark-sampson/
As an essayist and book reviewer, Jeff Bursey travels the intellectual globe of fiction and comes back with original, even exotic observations. He is not a me-too commentator for experimental work, nor does he dress up the latest historical romance as literature. Instead he celebrates the genuine, the artists who don’t even see the box that others try to think outside. ~ Maurice Mierau, author of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir
Insightful, yes, but also inciting: Bursey's reviews make me think. The reader is no passive consumer as Bursey brings together diverse ideas and nuanced criticism in a singular voice. ~ Michelle Butler Hallett, author of The shadow side of grace, Double-blind, Sky Waves, deluded your sailors, and the forthcoming This Marlowe
Jeff Bursey is a highly astute literary critic. What I particularly appreciate about his reviews is the marriage of lucid thought, careful attention to detail and genuine heartfelt vision that goes into his work. Here's someone who is passionate about literature - what it can do for us and how it should be. ~ Victoria Best, author of An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature and co-editor of Shiny New Books
Jeff Bursey has distinguished himself for reading books deeply, trying to figure out what makes them tick and then telling this story to the reader. In an age of superficial criticism, it's a lesson many critics could learn from. ~ Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation and co-author of The End of Oulipo?
I think of Bursey to be one of the most active and knowledgeable fiction critics going when it comes to what I’ll call here, for reasons of brevity, the “postmodern novel.” He has a huge repository of very strong (and in some cases, quite lengthy) pieces on the world’s best modern writers and has published them in respected venues. I’m not sure his criticism is appreciated at a level commensurate with his talent, and I’d recommend his Offshore Drilling column on TWR as a quick primer on both his talent, appetite, and taste. That he usually looks abroad is perhaps part of his lack of renown in Canada, but for me it’s a great recommendation. So few Canadian critics are doing the work that he does so well. ~ Shane Neilson, author of Will: Stories and On Shaving Off His Face: Poems, http://winnipegreview.com/2015/12/difficult-narratives-an-interview-with-jeff-bursey/
There may be only a handful of Canadian authors with as rigorous an approach to fiction as Jeff Bursey. ~ Lee D. Thompson, editor, short fiction writer, and author of S., a novel in [xxx] dreams, http://winnipegreview.com/2015/12/difficult-narratives-an-interview-with-jeff-bursey/