M.T. KELLY
“The great northern myth is a ménage à trois linking in holy matrimony - Holy - an uncontrollable nature, a native people who have come to terms with that nature’s uncontrollability, and the southerners gone north who are alternately accepting and defiant. M.T. Kelly is one of the very few who can consummate the full holy myth.”
John Ralston Saul
“. . . unfolds with the hallucinatory inevitability of a dream. M.T. Kelly recreates the North with miraculous grace. Such a tension seems a form of prayer.”
Carole Corbeil
“I Do Remember the Fall is an important book.”
John Cheever
“Kelly’s writing strength is his lack of pretension and his skill with small moments in the lives of characters.”
Barbara Amiel, Maclean’s
“ . . . a book to be commended for both literary and narrative power like Voltaire’s Candide, the handling of the language is the source of the biting, ruthless humour that exposes the victimization of goodness in the best of all possible Canadian settings . . . ”
Ed Jewinski, The English Quarterly
“Grey Owl is a ghost that will not rest. He walks again in M.T. Kelly’s taut and disturbing story ‘Case History,’ as a phony-minded Englishman playing Noble Savage Dress-ups, ‘a violent sociopath only concerned with himself.’ The beauty of the story is that everyone in it ultimately succumbs to his malign spell, and becomes unable to experience to wilderness as itself.”
Margaret Atwood, “The Grey Owl Syndrome,”
Clarendon Lectures, 1991
“M.T. Kelly’s writing is so vivid, so accurate, so damned daring that he is impossible to read without laughing out loud, blushing in forgotten shame, shouting with remembered delight and - best of all - raging wildlu with him against the madness of modern life.”
Roy MacGregor
I DO REMEMBER THE FALL
BREATH DANCES BETWEEN THEM
“ . . . is intensely vivid and very ambitions in its attempt to weave together the psychological, the historical, and the mythical into a parable of White-Indian relations in the Canadian north. Remarkably enough, considering the scope of its ambition, I think it succeeds.”
Northrop Frye
“A white man ventures into the awesome and terrifying landscapte of the Indian’s spirit world - the real, unexplored country which lies within the country we think we have conquered. It is brutal and beautiful - a gash in the flesh cauterized by fire, a dark wound in the mind which nothing will ever heal. Once opened, this book is almost impossible to close until completed. The dream is real.”
Gwendolyn MacEwen
A DREAM LIKE MINE
“Kelly writes sentences that sing and sting like a bottle-neck guitar . . . Save Me, Joe Louis is an urban blues of a very high order.”
Globe and Mail
“Breathtaking . . . a small masterpiece . . . a story of such poignancy it opens a wound of recognition . . . the best book about boxing and its milieu . . . ”
Maclean’s
SAVE ME, JOE LOUIS
OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND
“M.T. Kelly . . . never writes a boring sentence. He is . . . the country’s most distinctive prose stylist.”
Vancouver Sun
