September 13, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Now that we have enough distance from the early days of the pandemic, it feels instructive to view this global event – and how it has affected us – through the lens of history. The ... Read More »
Author and playwright David Demchuk was deeply affected by the murders committed by Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur; he knew one of the victims personally. But what if the disappearances of gay and bisexual men ... Read More »
September 8, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
In Kim Thúy’s fiction, Vietnam largely resides in the memories and gestures of those who fled the country during the war. More than a geographic backdrop, the nation occupies the psychic terrain of heroines who ... Read More »
September 8, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
At the start of the pandemic, as my life shifted to sitting in my apartment all day, I noticed a noise, like two glasses rubbing together. For weeks, I walked around my place with an ... Read More »
September 8, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy. So wrote William Wordsworth of his sister, Dorothy, ... Read More »
September 1, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Premee Mohamed imagines a dystopic future in a new novella that is deeply speculative and character driven. Through Mohamed’s breathtaking prose, this post-apocalyptic story unravels meditations on community building, adaptation, and collective survival. The narrative ... Read More »
September 1, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The passage of time can shroud awareness of past horrors. What then happens when an atrocity is unearthed decades after the fact? Judith McCormack’s latest novel, The Singing Forest, confronts this question. Two Belarusian boys ... Read More »
August 17, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
There’s a line in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover: “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.” In Jane Woods’s second work of fiction, Running ... Read More »
July 12, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Though about 3,000 kilometres and a century apart on the map of Canadian literary places, Amy LeBlanc’s Snowton, Alberta, recalls Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa, Ontario – both little towns sketched with a fondness that’s not shy ... Read More »
July 7, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Where is the line between human and animal, and what happens when that line is blurred – or crossed? In Pamela Korgemagi’s verdant and eerie debut novel, that question is put to the readers over ... Read More »
July 5, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews