George Ryga is best known for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, one of the most successful plays written in Canada. It established that an English-Canadian play could address serious social issues in vernacular language and nonrealistic style and still be...

NFL Notes George, Redskins have deal Four years, $18.25 million as a backup to Johnson Associated Press Tuesday, April 11, 2000 The Washington Redskins reached agreement Monday with free-agent quarterback Jeff George on a four-year, $18.25 million contract, George's...

Kalil Bottling Co., Tucson, Ariz., celebrates its 50th year in business this year. George Kalil, son of company founder red Kalil, has been a more than enthusiastic participant in the company since that May of 1948. It makes it all the more fitting...

In my opinion, [The Ecstasy of Rita Joe] establishes Ryga as the most exciting talent writing for the stage in Canada today…. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe has been more widely seen and heard than many new Canadian plays and … is closely related to his published work, especially his novels Hungry Hills (1963) and Ballad of a Stonepicker (1966)…. (p. 155)

[Hungry Hills] tells of the efforts of the young Snit Mandolin to find his roots and re-establish a home in the barren farmlands of northern Alberta, to which he returns after an absence of several years. The period covered is one hot, dry summer during which the protagonist discovers his incestuous origins and learns a kind of stoical integrity from his aunt, the one figure who seems to have survived the tortures of life in the hills with any dignity…. [The] novel shows Ryga's interest in the...

Romeo Kuchmir is a character who has found an author who has failed to find a proper place for Romeo. Kuchmir is literally all there is to George Ryga's new novel, Night Desk. He is not simply a narrator, as was Snit in Ryga's earlier Hungry Hills. Romeo is a soliloquist who has seized a stage no one else seems particularly interested in, and swells roundly enough to fill it with anecdote. The stage he has seized is the strip of floor space before the clerk's desk of a third-rate hotel ...