Big Bird In the Bush : Stories and Sketches

“The grand old man of Canadian literature…has started compiling his short stories, essays and other prose pieces. The ten of them here make delightful light reading.”
– Ottawa Citizen

“Spanning three decades these short pieces will be essential reading for Birney devotees and, in most instances, delight for anyone who reads at all…The settings are a travelogue of the western hemisphere. Earl Birney’s prose offers delights for any reader.”
– Toronto Star

“…binding the contents together is Birney’s great ear for accent and dialogue and his kinetic qualities of language. Never far from the centre, is his concern for the human spirit.”
–The Globe & Mail

“This is a first collection of my prose narratives and essays. The ten pieces roam about the BC coast to the Peruvian Andes, and include such characters as a Kootenay phoenix-hunter, some Bannf schoolboys sixty years back, a Curacaon cabbie, a nogoonik Utah teacher, assorted duellists, a one-man fire brigard, some of my dumbest students, a group of London pubsters about to be blitzed, and a Canadian solider already dead.”
– Earle Birney on Big Bird in the Bush

Earle Birney is one of Canada’s most distinguished poets and writers. Born in Calgary, he became a professor at the University of British Columbia, where he spent twenty years traveling, writing, and teaching. Birney won the Governor General’s Award for poetry twice (David [1942], Now Is Time[1945]). His WWII novel Turvey won the Stephen Leacock Medal in 1949. He received the Lorne Pierce Medal for Literature in 1953. His final collection, Last Markings (1991), was published after a disabling heart attack in 1987.