WhenOut of Place, one of prairie writer and critic Eli Mandel's outstanding poetry collections, appeared in 1977, Clark Blaise's A North American Education: A Book of Short Fiction had already made an impressive impact on the short-story genre in Canada. Published in 1973, A North American Education comprises three groups of stories (“The Montreal Stories,” “The Keeler Stories,” “The Thibidault Stories”) that, as in Mandel's ambivalent poetic treatment of home and place (see Cooley 1992), explore nomadic lives in North America. They investigate dreams of belonging, question notions of identity, and introduce characters who hanker for a meaningful existence, but are left in limbo — characters who in effect remain “out of place.” Correspondingly, search, loss, and defeat, as well as alienation, dislocation, and a desperate urge for recognition, are recurrent motifs in a body of short-prose works marked by highly poetic features. As writer and critic John Metcalf has argued, the plot of a Blaise story unfolds against the background of an “unobtrusive chain of images much in the manner of poems” (Metcalf 1973, 79).

“A Class of New Canadians” is the first of the three “Montreal Stories” in Blaise's aforementioned first volume of short-prose writings. As the subtitle of the collection suggests, Blaise considers his stories to be “short fictions,” in contrast to “short stories.” Short fictions are “imaginings, reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ ficciones, bound not by logical organization, nor by chronological sequence, nor by cause and motive. They are, in their own way, reflections of the pre-operational sensibility [see Piaget 1959], with the connections made more intuitively than rationally” (Ricou 1987, 41). Set in Quebec's metropolis, the “Montreal Stories” are not so much narratives with plots as they are arrangements of materials held together by a human voice or presence (for Blaise's understanding of the genre, see also Cameron 1982, 10–11). The stories are informed by Blaise's own experiences in this profoundly multicultural city, where he arrived in 1966 and remained until 1978, the longest time he has ever stayed in one place. “The parallels between the characters and events in his stories and the experience of Blaise himself have led some reviewers and critics to describe his fiction as autobiographical. Blaise has disagreed, saying that his writing is more ‘created’ than personal. The personal is, nevertheless, an important element” (Jackel 1990, 59).