June 15, 2022 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Memoir & Biography, Reviews
Each chapter of Sina Queyras’s Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf opens by revisiting the corresponding chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. For example: But, you may say, we asked you to speak about ... Read More »
Early in Tanis MacDonald’s new essay collection, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, the author asserts that stories about walking have largely been the domain of a certain kind of writer on a certain kind ... Read More »
May 17, 2022 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
Early in Tanis MacDonald’s new essay collection, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, the author asserts that stories about walking have largely been the domain of a certain kind of writer on a certain kind ... Read More »
May 17, 2022 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
Sharon Butala bookends her new essay collection with ruminations on the plight of the elderly in contemporary society. Railing against ageism in the opening essay, Butala laments that in the industrialized West of the 21st ... Read More »
November 29, 2021 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
The word “disillusion,” Steven Heighton posits, is something of an anomaly in the English language: a double-negative construction that yields not a positive synthesis but a negative. It’s a “paradox,” Heighton explains, using mathematical principles ... Read More »
October 1, 2020 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
A collection of 14 essays, many of them extensions of pieces that originally involved other media, along with several reproductions of photographs, Index Cards is a frequently fascinating, if ultimately exhausting, survey of Toronto-born, New ... Read More »
June 8, 2020 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
It is not an exaggeration to say that Desmond Cole’s book should be taught in classrooms, roiling in the minds of the next generation, lauded in social justice movements. It’s a striking, searing, perspective-shifting book ... Read More »
January 20, 2020 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews, Social Sciences
Kai Cheng Thom is a force within social-justice communities. A quick-witted, sharp-tongued, staggeringly prolific trans woman of colour, Thom is known primarily for her insightful and critical writing – including a fairy-tale novel, a book ... Read More »
November 4, 2019 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
“Murder,” David Adams Richards writes in his new work of non-fiction, “is always the same crime. It is always done in fear and rage. It always tries to hide itself and run away, and when ... Read More »
October 21, 2019 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews
In her 2001 memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand recalls that her grandfather told her “he knew what people we came from.” Despite the 13-year-old Brand’s prodding, which included rhyming ... Read More »
October 7, 2019 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews