[It's] evident from the stories in [Hood's] first book, Flying A Red Kite, that he has knocked about a good deal in the world outside the universities…. One of them, "After the Sirens", not the best of the stories but certainly a rigorously imagined and professionally executed vision of nuclear war, made it in the big league of Esquire. It is a tribute to the genuineness of Hood's talent that his work appealed just as much to ordinary educated people as to fellow academics and to more self-consciously literary readers…. The patient accumulation of sensuous detail induces recognition of place as well as of people. Toronto is here ("Recollections of the Works Department"), Montreal is here ("Flying a Red Kite"), and in the magnificent "Three Halves of a House", set on the Canadian shore of the St. Lawrence near Gananoque, there's a continental feeling, a sense of the...