Memoir & Biography

All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is currently touring event centres across Europe and North America (including a stop in Toronto this spring), promising a “life-size, up-close, never-before-seen perspective” of one of the world’s most celebrated ... Read More »

March 15, 2023 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, History, Memoir & Biography

Reasonable Cause to Suspect: A Mother’s Ordeal to Free Her Son from a Kurdish Prison

By Sally Lane

In the fall of 2014, Sally Lane’s son called to tell her he was in Syria. Eighteen years old at the time, Jack Letts was a recent convert to Islam and, according to Lane, idealistic ... Read More »

January 25, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Politics & Current Affairs

Carrying It Forward: Essays from Kistahpinânihk

By John Brady McDonald

In this new collection of essays, readers will find personal observations, commentaries, and essays by a Nêhiyaw (Cree) and Métis warrior, Knowledge Carrier, and Otacimow (storyteller) who, as a child, was given the same moniker ... Read More »

January 18, 2023 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Indigenous Peoples, Memoir & Biography

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart

By Jen Sookfong Lee

Pop culture is powerful. Our shared experiences can foster a sense of collective belonging, while just as quickly isolate and traumatize. Consider the divisive social and political issues exposed by some of 2022’s biggest cultural ... Read More »

January 11, 2023 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, Criticism & Essays, Memoir & Biography

A Friend Sails in on a Poem: Essays on Friendship, Freedom and Poetic Form

By Molly Peacock

Friendship, for poets, has long been grist for the mill. Anyone studying poetry is likely to stumble upon literary friendships – William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge come instantly to mind, but also Charlotte Bronte ... Read More »

December 14, 2022 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Memoir & Biography, Poetry

If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture

By Moshe Safdie

While still an adolescent living in Israel, Moshe Safdie once received a report card in which his teacher wrote: “Moshe is unable to control his spirits.” Now, in his 80s, Safdie still cannot be contained, ... Read More »

November 22, 2022 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, Memoir & Biography

My Road from Damascus

By Jamal Saeed

Jamal Saeed’s memoir My Road from Damascus begins not in Damascus, but in a small village in northern Syria named Kfarieh (often spelled as Kafriyah) several hours away from the capital. Saeed spends the ... Read More »

November 2, 2022 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

★ Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother

By Norma Dunning

“The naming of a child for Inuit is ceremonial,” writes Norma Dunning in her new nonfiction work Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother. She describes how ... Read More »

October 26, 2022 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples, Race & Ethnic Relations

Holden After and Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose

By Tara McGuire

When Tara McGuire’s son Holden died from an accidental opioid overdose at the age of 21, she was flattened by grief. There is no playbook for how to mourn the loss of your child, particularly ... Read More »

September 28, 2022 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

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