Quill and Quire

Reviews

Blood and Salt

By Barbara Sapergia

The life-affirming power of storytelling is central to Barbara Sapergia’s fourth novel, a revealing saga based on historical events involving the internment of Ukrainian-Canadian immigrants during the First World War. The year is 1914 and, ... Read More »

January 3, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Harem

By Safia Fazlul

Farina is the deeply cynical and unhappy daughter of Bangladeshi parents. Living in a Muslim ghetto in a large Canadian city, she eschews university and instead gets a full-time deli job to fund her independence. ... Read More »

January 3, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Cosmo

By Spencer Gordon

The word “spiritual” appears in each of the first three stories in Spencer Gordon’s debut collection, an appropriate marker for a book that traffics so resolutely in the existential malaise of our pop-culture-saturated world. Gordon’s ... Read More »

January 3, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Painted Girls

By Cathy Marie Buchanan

Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Cathy Marie Buchanan’s second novel tells the fascinating story of the young 19th-century Parisian ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture Little Dancer, Aged ... Read More »

December 17, 2012 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

A Nation Worth Ranting About

By Rick Mercer

In the latest issue of the recently reanimated magazine The Baffler, Steve Almond takes aim at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for, among other things, being “parasites of the dysfunction they mock” and “remaining careful ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Reference