The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust

Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives

Kristjana Gunnars Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction Combines the genres of fiction and memoir-a narrative strategy for which Gunnars has become widely respected. Focusing on a woman whose life has become a curious mix of reality and fiction, the novel responds to the issue of language and one''s place in culture, provoking the essential question of what role literature plays in our lives.

Kristjana Gunnars is the author of five cross?generic prose books from Red Deer Press, including The Prowler and The Substance of Forgetting. She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Exiles Among You and Silence of the Country. Her books of short stories are The Axe''s Edge and The Guest House. Gunnars has been a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Alberta since 1990, and is no living on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.