FOR EACH OF LEON ROOKE'S NEARLY THREE HUNDRED PUBLISHED STORIES, there are another two unpublished. Those six hundred, Rooke would say, represent the more interesting part. Rooke was born in 1934 in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. He and his wife, Constance, moved to...

The work of Leon Rooke has played a key role in the shift in Canadian fiction from a nationalist paradigm to a postnationalist, multicultural perspective. Rooke was born in North Carolina and came to Canada in 1969. The fictional world he explores is expansive...

Despite Rooke's versatility, there is something about all his fiction that remains identifiable, characteristic, and uniquely personal. Made out of internalized perceptions, his stories are typically ones in which the central character's mind becomes a reflecting pool through which we glimpse the external world. In the course of the story a few stones are dropped in, and as their ripples spread, the images we thought we had recognized reorganize themselves into intriguing new patterns which co...

[There] is a feeling of frustration about [the stories in "Last One Home Sleeps in the Yellow Bed"], as if the writer felt his chosen keyboard were too small, and he was constantly flexing his fingers, eager to modulate from major to minor, throw in a few arpeggios and contrapuntal cross references; in short, as if he wanted to write, not short stories at all, but a novel. Not that it's such a bad fault to have themes which are too big for your medium. Most short-story writers seem to h...

[One] feature of Rooke's fiction has been the way the ordinary lives of ordinary people coexist with the most extravagant and bizarre events and are presented in exuberantly experimental forms…. Rooke's form is his content: that the wildness, the exuberance, the grotesqueness, and the sudden tonal shifts from fantasy to the catching and placing of realistic detail in the context of humdrum existence, are all as relevant thematically as they are dazzling technically. One key to such an a...