Penguin is embarking on a new series of classics featuring Canadian writers. Choosing great Canadian literature is problematic. Who gets in? What is a classic? “The irony is that while Penguin Classics attempts to show that some of our authors, torn and bleeding, have indeed climbed up the rocks where excellence dwells, academic critics have been in a lather over the very notion of “classics.” How is it, they ask for one thing, that almost all the writers who, up to this time, have climbed up on the rocks have been Dead White European Males?”