Years ago, after reading a warm-hearted review in the Globe and Mail, I bought By a Frozen River, a greatest-hits selection of Norman Levine’s work (Lester & Orpen Dennys). The stories were not disappointing. Tight, pithy, replete with thinly veiled autobiographical details of a childhood in Quebec and an adult life spent as an ex-pat writer in, of all places, Cornwall, the stories were short enough that I could read two or three on a twenty-minute bus ride and feel that I’d accomplished something. Though many of the stories are set in and around Montreal, there is little in the collection—the work of a Jewish Anglophone—that could be considered typically Québé