Later that year, publisher McLelland & Stewart issued a brand-new print run - with new cover art. It received more than a million views, reviving interest in the book. 'You have some explaining to do, Canada,' the poster wrote incredulously. (Bear by Marian Engel, Seal Books)A user posted a picture of the Bantam Seal edition of the book, which features a topless woman being embraced from behind by a large brown bear, as well as excerpts of the book's steamier scenes. The cover of the Seal Bantam edition of Bear, which sparked a heated reaction online in 2014. 'It teaches the reader … to re-examine their own preconceptions about women, about nature, and about Canada itself.… And that means, I think, it will last for hundreds and hundreds of years.' But that is not why it has enduring value,' said Aritha van Herk, a novelist and English professor at the University of Calgary. 'Every once in a while, it seems to rise to the surface and then they read it as if it were smutty or erotic or shocking. One expert says it also touches on the issue of Western appropriation of Indigenous stories. Marian Engel's 1976 novel Bear, which tells the story of a relationship between a woman and her ursine lover, has been called one of the most controversial books in the history of Canadian literature.īut experts say the Governor General Award-winning book is also one of the most daring and relevant examples in the Canadian canon, deftly mixing comedic scenes with important themes such as colonialism and our relationship to the wilderness. Includes a reading group guide.*Originally published on January 4, 2021.

As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. What she discovers will change her life forever.

Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship.

Bear by marian engel pages