Joseph Pivato, ed. Watson: Essays on Her Works. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2015. Pp. 245. US$20. There is a rare modesty to Joseph Pivato's introduction to Watson: Essays on Her Works, the first of essays devoted to the authors output as a novelist, a pioneer of literary modernism in Canada, and a mentor to emerging writers in Edmonton's art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Sheila Watson would not have approved of some of the essays in this collection (7), Pivato writes, framing his mandate to situate some of the major critical appraisals of her short stories and novels, including her masterpiece The Double (1959), against Watson's scarce comments on her writing. Famously reticent about discussing her personal life and skeptical of the value of authorial intent, Watson might well have balked at the collection's refusal to separate Watson the figure from Watson the clipped, elliptical prose stylist who adapted the aesthetic tenets of international modernism to Western Canada. At its most rewarding, though, Pivato's selection makes the case for seeing Watson's public life as a teacher and her public comments about her work not as distractions from but as fruitful outcroppings of her writing. One of the collection's goals is to offer an assortment of the most compelling analyses of Watson's work beyond The Double Hook (18), the text with which she is inextricably linked. That is not to say that Watson's second novel is underrepresented. The volume appropriately charts a number of major and frequently cited critical trajectories into the text, from Margot Northey's thematic approach to Watson's employment of the grotesque, to the poet E. D. Blodgett's comparative study of Watsons and Laure Conan's idiosyncratic discourses, through to Margaret Morriss' exhaustive account of the novel's thorny revision process, which saw it reshaped from a regionally specific novel to one anchored in a more amorphous universal and archetypal pattern of action (96). While The Double is understandably the focal point of the collection's critical pieces, Pivato also presents Glenn Wilmott's absorbing work on the embodied modernism of Watson's first novel Deep Hollow Creek (written in the 1930s but first published in 1992) and, in an exclusive to the collection, Sergiy Yakovenko's lively take on silence and speech in Watson's lesser-known short story Rough Answer. Taken together, these chapters delineate Watson's ties to cosmopolitan modernism and the work of Marshall McLuhan, Watson's graduate supervisor at the University of Toronto, among other affinities. There are nevertheless some omissions that keep the book from offering a fully representative overview of Watson's work, perhaps owing in part to the volume's illuminating but limiting focus on the author's ties to Alberta. Multiple articles gesture to the curious position The Double holds with respect to its international modernist aesthetic--its setting resembling T. S. Eliot's mythical landscapes more than Lawren Harris's abstract paintings of specific landmarks like Lake Superior--and its specific landscape, the Cariboo country where Watson worked as a schoolteacher. …