Clare Coughlan reviews her experience seeing (and before that, waiting in line to see) The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess.
S.K. Grant
The Joy of Cooking
"Scallions are eaten raw by self-assertive people": Why S.K. Grant was surprised to discover The Joy of Cooking as a literary work.
Jocelyn Kuang
The Jonathans
Two different novels about family dysfunction—This Is Where I Leave you and The Corrections—written by two different Jonathans. Reviewed by Jocelyn Kuang.
Patty Osborne
The Girl Without Anyone
The Girl Without Anyone is a series of linked short stories by Kelli Deeth, dealing with a teenage girl's budding sexuality, self-doubt and confusion. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.
The Eyre Affair
Karen Schendlinger reviews The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, two smart, allegorical crime novels starring a detective named Thursday Next.
Patty Osborne
Hunger
It takes Patty Osborne a month to get halfway through the 462 pages of the Giller Prize-winning novel The Polished Hoe, which is only halfway through the 24 hours during which the story takes place.
Sarah Leavitt
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Sarah Leavitt reviews Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic novel full of vibrantly alive, expressive characters and richly satisfying extras.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Between the Door Posts
Between the Door Posts, by Isa Milman (Ekstasis Editions), begins with this quote from Kafka: “How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?”
Eve Corbel
Bannock, Beans & Black Tea
Bannock, Beans & Black Tea by the writer/comix artist Seth, is a small, beautiful, disturbing and touching book in which Seth has compiled, edited and illustrated his father’s stories of growing up poor—really poor—in St. Charles, P.E.I.
Sam Macklin
Asterix the Gaul
Asterix the Gaul (Orion), a comic book classic recently reprinted, tramples over all sorts of contemporary niceties.
Derek Fairbridge
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, a lovingly detailed account of the creation of John Coltrane’s classic album of the same name, is a cause for celebration.
Jill Boettger
A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends
Just five pages into A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends by Miranda Clarke, I can’t decide whether to go to a hotel with an importer/exporter named Chaz, or ditch Chaz and go dancing at Club Neptune with a woman named Danni.
Derek Fairbridge
Da Capo Best Music Writing
The fourth volume in the Da Capo Best Music Writing pulls together some of the finest music writing published in 2003. It is rife with typos, but the articles are compulsively readable and they cover “rock, pop, jazz, country and more."
Sam Macklin
Complete Peanuts
Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips.
Stephen Osborne
Marie Tyrell
“I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssfft, all the messages going dark one by one."
Jill Boettger
Field Guide to Stains: How to Identify and Remove Virtually Every Stain Known to Man
Did you know that you are more likely to encounter Worcestershire sauce stains in winter and that correction fluid stains are most common in April?
Stephen Osborne
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.
Stephen Osborne
Snow Walker
Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.
Kevin Barefoot
Soccer in Sun and Shadow
Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930.
Stephen Osborne
Weave
Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.
Kris Rothstein
The Nervous Tourist
Bob Gaulke’s description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. This modest chapbook contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.
Norbert Ruebsaat
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.
Lily Gontard
The Cripple and His Talismans
The protagonist of The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani (Raincoast) is a self-centred, self-absorbed, wealthy-but-have-chosen-to-live-among-the-crippled-and-poor-in-Bombay man.
ARLEEN PARÉ
Invisible Lines
In Astrid van der Pol’s poetry collection, Invisible Lines (BuschekBooks), the past is the most hopeful, whereas each new future enters some form of sadness.
“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”
Jordyn Catalano
Goodbye and Good Luck
A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.
David Albahari
The Art of Renaming
Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?
Jill Margo
Getting Textual
How to perform a textual analysis of a Facebook message, while under the influence of red wine.
Stephen Osborne
The Future Is Uncertain Country
As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.
Phoebe Tsang
Be Careful What You Wish For
A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.
Stephen Osborne
Snows of Yesteryear
A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.
David Mitchell
Imaginary City
Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.
Paul DeLorme
Escapist
A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.
Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water
Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving
The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.
Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven
Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.
Edith Iglauer
Perfect Bite
A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.
C. E. COUGHLAN
Three Days in Toronto
A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.
Hàn Fúsēn
Little Trouble in Chinatown
Limits of the language.
Joe Bongiorno
Piledrivin’ Patriots
On parle français icitte!
Joe Bongiorno
Last Laughs
Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.
Lenore Rowntree
Straight, No Chaser
Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.
Margaret Nowaczyk
Room for More
Narrative text, written and spoken, refines a doctor’s ability to hear a patients’ stories.
Michał Kozłowski
Waiting for Trudeau
Pansy shoes and power suits on parliament hill.
Lorna MacKinnon
Weekend with Dorian
Storm prep for a category 2.
Beth Rowntree
7 lbs. 6 oz.
I looked in her purse and found nothing but scraps of paper so covered in writing there was hardly any white left on the pages.
Michał Kozłowski
Road Trip Supreme
Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.
“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"
Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names
Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.
Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House
A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.
David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies
Mastery of the self
Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?
Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage
When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.
Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions
Coming to harbour in a new world.
Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters
Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO
For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.
Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots
"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
Stephen Henighan
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.
Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking
Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.
Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions
Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.
Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time
What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.
Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality
Must artists declare their moral integrity?
Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.
Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes
There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.
That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you.
Steven Heighton
Fireman's Carry
In this excerpt from Steven Heighton's new book, The Dead Are More Visible, a firefighter must decide what lives are worth saving in the heat of a four-alarm fire. The official line is that firefighters save people—but what about reptiles?
VIVEK SHRAYA
First Pluck
A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.
SUE GOYETTE
Fidelity
Three poems by Sue Goyette, excerpted from her book Penelope.
Jill Boettger
Poem For the Barn
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc.
Veronica Gaylie
Old Timer Talkin’
Uncle Tom lies in St. Paul’s Emergency pacemaker jumping like a sockeye salmon while he teaches two nurses four verses of Danny Boy.
GORAN SIMIC
Old People and Snow
My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.
ANTONINE MAILLET
Not Really French
So how can we be Québécois if we don’t live in Québec? Well, for the love of all that’s holy, where the hell do we live, then?
No One Explains Things To Dogs
No one explains things to dogs. The voice that’s missing has left its aroma everywhere,along with the faint stale smells of those who used to be here:
Rhonda Waterfall
Night Kitchen
The phone rings at 11:30 at night and as soon as you hear your father’s voice you know something bad has happened.
CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso
"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."
CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso
"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."
ERIC DUPONT
Trouble at the Henhouse
"I now know that every omelette, every angel cake, every soufflé, and every bucket of Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken brings us closer to a better, more intelligent world, where cruelty and pettiness do not exist."
MARY MEIGS
Tripwire
They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.
CRAIG SAVEL
Traversing Leonard
"He had white hair at every angle, a paunch, and he didn’t bathe much. Colleagues joked about the Leonard Condensate, one whiff of which reduced matter into muck."
KATIE DAUBS
To Be Read by My Children in the Event of My Demise
In Katie Daubs' short fiction, a father writes a deathbed letter to his children, explaining the surprising way he really met their mother.
TROY JOLLIMORE
Tom Thomson in Transit
His wallet’s stuffed with currency from allmanner of countries not in business now;his camera aches for discontinued film.
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
EMILY SCHULTZ
Soft Ice Cream
Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.
AMY DENNIS
Skin Graffiti
Use your grandmother’s knitting needles if they are steel and sharp, her crochet hooks. Hell, you could even use the split edge of this table. Slide your inner arm against the jagged grain, watch the splinters scrape you raw.
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