Product Description

Affectionately combining both the idyllic and ironic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock’s most beloved book. Set in fictional Mariposa, an Ontario town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti, these sketches present a remarkable range of characters: some irritating, some exasperating, some foolhardy, but all endearing. Painted with the skilful brushstrokes of a great comic artist, the delightful inhabitants of Mariposa represent the people of small towns everywhere.

As fresh, funny, and insightful today as when it was first published in 1912, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock at his best – colourful, imaginative, and thoroughly entertaining.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61119 in Books
• Published on: 1989-05-01
• Released on: 1989-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 200 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Comedy is hard, and writing comedy that lasts is even harder, as the list of largely forgotten winners of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour will tell you (Pardon My Parka, anyone?). Which is why the continued popularity for nearly a century of Leacock's own Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is so remarkable. What has made it last is less Leacock's famously genial humour than his underlying satirical edge: his affection for his characters is matched by his unease at the unforgiving, materialist world they struggle against.

Amazon.ca
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is one of Canada’s classic works of literature, and perhaps its most complex work of satire. A series of linked stories chronicling life in the fictional community of Mariposa--modelled on Orillia, Ontario--Sunshine Sketches gently mocks Canadian small-town life in a manner that is as dead-on as it is humourous. Whether describing the sinking of the town’s ship, the Mariposa Belle, in a few feet of water in "The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias" or giving an account of an old-fashioned courting that ends disastrously in "The Foreordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin," Leacock's ridiculously earnest narrator presents a community torn between a desire for modernity and a nostalgia for a simpler past. The result is an absurd romp through both our social and literary values.

But Sunshine Sketches is also a highly political book, one that demonstrates Leacock's background as an economist and embodies many social and cultural anxieties still felt in Canada today. The stories reveal an unease about everything from the excesses of capitalism to Canada's identity, and a dark note of pessimism underlies much of the book's humour. While the narrator of Sunshine Sketches is unconcerned about the future of his community, Leacock was clearly worried about the direction Canadian society was taking, and at times the book seems eerily prophetic of today's globalized, American-dominated Canada. Above all, Sunshine Sketches is a damn good read. It's one of those rare books that manage to seamlessly combine social criticism with good storytelling. Like the town of Mariposa itself, Sunshine Sketches is timeless. --Peter Darbyshire

From AudioFile
Long before Lake Wobegon became part of our collective fictional geography, there must've been other lakes on the radio. And there were. Stephen Leacock's Lake Wissanotti, right outside the town of Mariposa, was one of Canada's most popular and endearing fictional places. This reissue of a 1946 CBC Stage Series adaptation of Leacock's comic sketches and observations offers a double layer of nostalgia by taking a fond look back at early twentieth-century small-town Canadian life through the venue of 1940s radio. The voices, acting styles, big-production, and comic use of the well-written musical score are very representative of the best from that "Golden Age" of radio. Being faithfully transported to a gentler, simpler time provides a good introduction to Leacock's bright Canadian spirit. B.P. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine