Raccoon

(Essential Prose)

9781771837828

320 pages | May 1, 2023

Prepare to be transported. Sean Kane’s RACCOON, like the animals at the heart of his story, is curious, mischievous, lovable, and fierce. A tale that uses the foundations of a children’s fable but builds upon it a fiction for all ages, and decidedly for our time

ANDREW PYPER, bestselling author of The Residence and The Demonologist

How can we live without Sean Kane’s inspired madness? His loopy intelligence, and the amplitude of his heart, provide necessary medicine for all creatures working for a collective swerve away from ecological catastrophe and finding themselves wounded by the battle. Kane’s cure-all goes by the name of laughter

RACCOON feels real and has bite. It has Sean Kane’s — but how does he do it? — grasp of where the imaginative and real meet. Everything in his story sparkles with that and because of that.

GORDON TESKEY, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

Wonderful in the full sense of the word, RACCOON is an extraordinary work of fiction. Alive with incident, madcap excitement, quirky humour, and many poetic turns of phrase, it is at once a satire, a wondertale, and a thoughtful work of ecological commentary.

DON LEPAN, Founder and CEO of Broadview Press and author of three novels, most recently Lucy and Bonbon

RACCOON will be recognized as a classic of its genre. It joins all those currents of thought that see the creative imagination as the ultimate force that can reshape and somehow, some way, redeem the planet

EUGENE BENSON, novelist, literary historian, and playwright. As Professor of English at the University of Guelph, he co-edited the Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English

This account of a quest for an ideal Commonwealth is in the tradition of some of the finest animal adventure stories ever written. Sean Kane’s clear-eyed, beautifully written tale offers a critique of society as it is and a model of what it could be.

STAN DRAGLAND, C.M., novelist, poet, critic, founding editor of Brick Books, and Emeritus Professor of Canadian and Children’s Literature at Western University