Mark Lisac (Author of Where the Bodies Lie)

Mark Lisac rated a book liked it The Silence on the Shore (Voyageur Classics, 19) by Hugh Garner	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Half a year in the intersecting lives of interesting characters in a declining downtown Toronto rooming house in 1959. The realism and the persuasive slice-of-life study of a moment in the city's past are big drawing cards. A solid 3.5 stars and I ma ...more
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Mark Lisac liked The Master's review of The Silence on the Shore (Voyageur Classics, 19): "Even though this story is set in the early 60s, it feels like a snapshot of a long-gone Toronto. Many of the locations and landmarks of central Toronto are still around, but different. The bandshell in Queen's Park was replaced by the statue of King " Read more of this review »
21 hours, 48 min ago · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Mark Lisac and 3076 other people liked Yun's review of Wild Dark Shore: " I have an urgent need to fix this, but I don't know how. Hmm let's think about this now. Hey, I know! How about you just tell the truth? Ah yes, the dreaded miscommunication trope. You dress it up with some slump-inducing descriptive prose, make e" Read more of this review »
Feb 17, 2026 01:22PM · see review
Mark Lisac and 18 other people liked Trudie's review of Wild Dark Shore: " Wild Dark Shore : broody climate change catastrophe novel or melodramatic sub antarctic romance with some foolish decisions on where to locate a seed bank ? This all started off well, although its does read like National Geographic decided to shrug" Read more of this review »
Feb 17, 2026 01:21PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Mark Lisac rated a book it was ok Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A lot of reviewers love this book. It represents a lot of what I dislike about some newer novels and the current publishing industry. But it's decently well put together for what it is, and I recognize the author's sincere feelings about the subject ...more
Feb 17, 2026 12:53PM · 1 like · like · see review
Mark Lisac rated a book it was amazing Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom / Delta Wedding / The Ponder Heart / Losing Battles / The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I read and reviewed individually Delta Wedding, Losing Battles, and The Optimist's Daughter before seeing this one. The collection as a whole is remarkable. Welty may not be the first name that comes to mind when listing great American writers but sh ...more
Feb 15, 2026 01:56PM · like · see review
Mark Lisac rated a book liked it The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews by Eudora Welty	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Welty's fiction, written from her home in Jackson, Mississippi, is an enjoyable and quite impressive complement to Faulkner's work from about 300 kilometres up the road in Oxford. Hers is naturally written; his is full of thickly vined sentences and ...more
Feb 14, 2026 01:57PM · like · see review
Mark Lisac rated a book it was amazing Just Enough Liebling by A.J. Liebling	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Liebling's work may be something of an arcane enthusiasm these days. He made his reputation writing between 1935 and 1963 for the New Yorker after all, which pretty much guarantees a restricted audience. His world was largely anchored in Paris and Ne ...more
Feb 09, 2026 06:19PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Just Enough Liebling by A.J. Liebling. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Just Enough Liebling by A.J. Liebling <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Mark Lisac rated a book it was ok The Birdwatcher (DS Alexandra Cupidi #0/prequel) by William Shaw (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Started out as a strong 4-star-plus police thriller, then steadily descended into a series of tropes sprinkled here and there with coincidences, at least two of the coincidences being very large. Going all the way down to 2 stars may be a bit harsh b ...more
Feb 01, 2026 01:22PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Birdwatcher by William Shaw. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Birdwatcher by William Shaw <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Mark Lisac rated a book really liked it American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (LOA #321) (Library of America) by Gary K. Wolfe	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Took on this collection because the novel titled The High Crusade sounded entertaining. After reading three of the four entries, I thought that one was indeed entertaining but in a fairly shallow way that made it the weakest of the bunch. The High Cru ...more
Jan 30, 2026 04:29PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of American Science Fiction by Gary K. Wolfe. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — American Science Fiction by Gary K. Wolfe <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Mark Lisac rated a book liked it

The Silence on the Shore (Voyageur Classics, 19)
by Hugh Garner

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Half a year in the intersecting lives of interesting characters in a declining downtown Toronto rooming house in 1959. The realism and the persuasive slice-of-life study of a moment in the city's past are big drawing cards. A solid 3.5 stars and I ma Half a year in the intersecting lives of interesting characters in a declining downtown Toronto rooming house in 1959. The realism and the persuasive slice-of-life study of a moment in the city's past are big drawing cards. A solid 3.5 stars and I may kick myself in a few weeks for not rounding up to 4 stars. However, a few maudlin or too-convenient episodes crop up, and the writing represents a slightly awkward development period in Canadian literature, even if Garner did win a Governor-General's Award for a collection of short stories in 1963, the year after this ambitious novel was published.
He was a drinker, which probably informed the convincing accounts of one of the rooming-house tenant's regular benders. He also seemed to succeed more on knowledge of his subjects and on force of will than on writing talent. A lot of the novel is pretty good. But to appreciate the strengths you have to beat your way through thickets of adjectives, adverbs, a fair bit of exposition, some overdone detail, and occasional unnecessary polysyllables. That list makes it sound worse than it is, but the lack of a strong editor's hand is noticeable. Not that the lack is surprising; Garner was reportedly a tough old bird who was unafraid to tell publishers and editors where to get off.
* A curiosity: Two famous names appear in the story, whether by large coincidence or not. One of the main characters is named Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot, the Canadian musical legend, was just getting noticed in Toronto coffee houses in 1960, when Garner was probably writing the novel. He also had a couple of local hits on Toronto radio in 1961, when Garner may or may not have been finishing work on it. Then there's the episode in which one of the characters is trying to think up names for use in a novel. "Jason. Jason Simon. No, Simon was the fictional name for too many villains, and it wasn't Anglo-Saxon enough. Jason Bancroft? No. Jason Bourne. That was a good name. Jason Bourne." Eighteen years later, Robert Ludlum published his first Jason Bourne novel, The Bourne Identity.
Actually read a 1968 Ryerson Press paperback edition that's not listed on Goodreads. ...more

Mark Lisac liked The Master's review of The Silence on the Shore (Voyageur Classics, 19):

"Even though this story is set in the early 60s, it feels like a snapshot of a long-gone Toronto. Many of the locations and landmarks of central Toronto are still around, but different. The bandshell in Queen's Park was replaced by the statue of King " Read more of this review »

Mark Lisac and 3076 other people liked Yun's review of Wild Dark Shore:

"
I have an urgent need to fix this, but I don't know how.

Hmm let's think about this now. Hey, I know! How about you just tell the truth?

Ah yes, the dreaded miscommunication trope. You dress it up with some slump-inducing descriptive prose, make e" Read more of this review »

Mark Lisac and 18 other people liked Trudie's review of Wild Dark Shore:

" Wild Dark Shore : broody climate change catastrophe novel or melodramatic sub antarctic romance with some foolish decisions on where to locate a seed bank ?
This all started off well, although its does read like National Geographic decided to shrug" Read more of this review »

Mark Lisac rated a book it was ok

Wild Dark Shore
by Charlotte McConaghy (Goodreads Author)

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A lot of reviewers love this book. It represents a lot of what I dislike about some newer novels and the current publishing industry. But it's decently well put together for what it is, and I recognize the author's sincere feelings about the subject ...more

Mark Lisac rated a book it was amazing

Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom / Delta Wedding / The Ponder Heart / Losing Battles / The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I read and reviewed individually Delta Wedding, Losing Battles, and The Optimist's Daughter before seeing this one. The collection as a whole is remarkable. Welty may not be the first name that comes to mind when listing great American writers but sh ...more

Mark Lisac rated a book liked it

The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews
by Eudora Welty

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Welty's fiction, written from her home in Jackson, Mississippi, is an enjoyable and quite impressive complement to Faulkner's work from about 300 kilometres up the road in Oxford. Hers is naturally written; his is full of thickly vined sentences and Welty's fiction, written from her home in Jackson, Mississippi, is an enjoyable and quite impressive complement to Faulkner's work from about 300 kilometres up the road in Oxford. Hers is naturally written; his is full of thickly vined sentences and paragraphs. However, many of the essays in this collection are as dense as anything Faulkner wrote. One gets the impression that she learned a formal academic style at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1920s and stuck with it. What to make of sentences like this: "And as place has functioned between the writer and his material, so it functions between the writer and reader. Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charges out from the story in its course." All these essays taken together seem like a concoction of Robert Browning's poetry and Mathew Arnold's prose. It's also noticeable that Welty clung so firmly to old conventions that as late as the 1970s she was using "he" for the generalized third person even when she was notionally referring to a writer like herself.
The reviews of other writers' works have an up-and-down quality—everything from what sound like fan letters to Jane Austen and Ross Macdonald to discussions that I skipped because they featured writers I'd never heard of or didn't care about.
Things improved considerably in a piece she wrote about the question of whether writers must be crusaders (this was a consideration of the position of Southern writers in the middle of the 1960s civil rights movement). And her essays looking back on her time as a child in Jackson, and later as a young writer for the Works Progress Administration in the early days of the Depression, are generally delightful. She did much better looking at things as an observer rather than commenting from her interior thoughts. Maybe it's possible that her novels usually worked very well because she approached the subject matter much as she viewed the world when she was about eight years old and running errands to the local store for her mother. ...more

Mark Lisac rated a book it was amazing

Just Enough Liebling
by A.J. Liebling

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Liebling's work may be something of an arcane enthusiasm these days. He made his reputation writing between 1935 and 1963 for the New Yorker after all, which pretty much guarantees a restricted audience. His world was largely anchored in Paris and Ne Liebling's work may be something of an arcane enthusiasm these days. He made his reputation writing between 1935 and 1963 for the New Yorker after all, which pretty much guarantees a restricted audience. His world was largely anchored in Paris and New York City. He served up large helpings of humour, the appreciation for which depends on individual taste. I rated this collection at 5 stars rather than a mere 4 because I thoroughly enjoyed and admired his writing, his reporting abilities, and the way he perceived and interpreted the world. All his wit may or may not have been a reaction to an inner melancholy, but that's speculation. A blurb on the back jacket caught his abilities exactly: "He had a raptor's eye, a virtuoso's ear, and an enormous heart."
This sampling offers stories in many tones. He generally relied on subtle humour and references to wide-ranging, often obscure nuggets of knowledge. During his years as a Second World War correspondent he became much more restrained, acknowledging both personal sacrifice and the seriousness of the conflict, while still leaving room for servicemen's own bouts of levity. He's known partly for his writing about boxing but I found those stories at times drifting, as if he wasn't quite sure what to focus on. His stories about food, and about con artists and other colourful characters, including Louisiana governor Earl Long, were much more exuberant.
For my money, the highlight is Westbound Tanker. It's the story of his 42-day crossing of the Atlantic in a Norwegian freighter in December 1941 and January 1942. One Goodreads reviewer found it pointless and a waste of time. I think it was a masterpiece because he took what was essentially a voyage in which nothing happened and made it riveting reading (for my money, anyway). He did that by close observation of the ship itself and especially of the captain and the sailors. Time and again in his work, the writing comes to life because he describes the never-ending variety and energy of the people he has met.
And at rare moments, a glimpse of his innermost serious concerns breaks through. One paragraph lists of few of the people who had a great effect on him, including a university professor who was a philologist specializing in Romance languages.
His account of how newspapers handled the week-long wait for Stalin's death after a stroke begins with just the right tone for writing about a paranoid, essentially mediocre mass murderer; it avoids high drama and suggests casual dismissal of trash, albeit at a huge scale: "Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments."
A similar glint of things close to the heart shines unexpectedly in his account of how "hundreds of young hoodlums in Hawaiian shirts" tried to rush into expensive ringside seats they hadn't paid for at a famous Sugar Ray Robinson fight in New York's Polo Grounds. This took place in 1951, but Liebling still had memories of the tragedies that had wracked Europe until the end of the war in 1945: "The rush, because it was so concerted, did not amuse me; in a previous decade and in other circumstances, the louts might have been wearing black or brown shirts, I thought, and a time might come when they would be again."
Reading this in 2026 makes one wonder if he hadn't felt a tremor rippling through history, worrying accurately that it would never fully dissipate and could grow more intense someday. ...more

Mark Lisac rated a book it was ok

The Birdwatcher (DS Alexandra Cupidi #0/prequel)
by William Shaw (Goodreads Author)

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Started out as a strong 4-star-plus police thriller, then steadily descended into a series of tropes sprinkled here and there with coincidences, at least two of the coincidences being very large. Going all the way down to 2 stars may be a bit harsh b ...more

Mark Lisac rated a book really liked it

American Science Fiction by Gary K. Wolfe

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (LOA #321) (Library of America)
by Gary K. Wolfe

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Took on this collection because the novel titled The High Crusade sounded entertaining. After reading three of the four entries, I thought that one was indeed entertaining but in a fairly shallow way that made it the weakest of the bunch.
The High Cru Took on this collection because the novel titled The High Crusade sounded entertaining. After reading three of the four entries, I thought that one was indeed entertaining but in a fairly shallow way that made it the weakest of the bunch.
The High Crusade: 3 stars. A local English lord gets ready to take his small force of cavalry, infantry and archers to fight for the king in France in 1345 (a date that nicely avoids having to deal with the Black Death that arrived shortly afterward). He and his followers have to change their plans when marauding aliens arrive over their Lincolnshire village in a large space ship. The aliens soon learn they came to the wrong place. The ensuing inter-galactic action reads like a cross between Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and a well known legend. I was underwhelmed by the fantasy and the plot. Even the action scenes felt somewhat truncated and simplified. But it's a fast read that zips along like a tightly edited 85-minute B movie and fills any need to reinforce a belief in doughty survivors overcoming long odds. Contains noticeable whiffs of what may be a certain nostalgia for English imperialism, and certainly of a nostalgia for the image of the type of doughty knights and archers familiar from Crecy and Agincourt.
Flowers for Algernon: 4.5 stars. A good-natured man with an IQ of about 70 gets injected with chemicals (enzymes, I think) that quickly turn him into a genius. He soon surpasses the level of even the Newtons and Einsteins and Leibnizes of the world. The supercharged brain power soon has pluses and minuses. The intellectual growth is silly-level sci-fi because even a transcendent genius probably could not absorb all that information in a few weeks. However, aside from that, the story lingers on the mere fringe of sci-fi territory. It's characterized by close attention to the main character's emotional development under the stress of his intelligence growth, and by a lot of empathy for people with low intellectual capacity and how they perceive the world and their relationships with others. It also resonates loudly as a version of everyone's growth from childhood to adulthood and beyond.
And Call Me Conrad: 4 stars. Maybe 3.5 on a more demanding day. Much more literary ambition in this one than is usual in sci-fi, especially from the mid-1960s. That's its main calling card. The story is well conceived and constructed, but is full of the fantastic flourishes common to much of the genre (hideous beasts, a fairly civilized but post-apocalyptic setting, a main character who is referenced in the book's original title, The Immortal, et cetera). On the other hand, Conrad often speaks amusingly in the wisecracking tough-guy tones of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, and the minor characters Phil and Diane are vivid. Very well executed, but still a fantasy, which has limited appeal for me.
Way Station: Did not read. I saw praise for the book, but also saw that the story is full of the kind of fantasy that tended to drag down And Call Me Conrad. May look at it someday.
The overall impression is that I can like and even admire some of the best sci-fi, but am particularly impressed by the works featuring a low level of stuff beyond the normal world environment. ...more

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	Where the Bodies Lie 3.17 avg rating — 29 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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	Lois Hole Speaks: Words that Matter (University of Alberta Centennial Series) by Lois Hole, Jim Edwards PC (Foreword), Mark Lisac (Goodreads Author) (Editor) it was ok 2.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2004 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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