Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

Born to Canadian parents in North Dakota in 1940, Clark Blaise grew up with an outsider’s view of America and a romanticized exile’s view of Canada. The author of nine story collections, three novels and four previous works of non-fiction, he currently lives in both New York and San Francisco with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.