★ Cosmo

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 Lava in My Bones

By Barry Webster

The best magic realism aims to satirize some element of societal trauma or injustice. Think Bulgakov parodying the excesses of Stalinism in The Master and Margarita, or Márquez dissecting Latin American fatalism in One Hundred ... Read More »

January 3, 2013 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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

Words to Live By

By William Whitehead

There’s a one-man show – and, possibly, a standup routine – dying to leap out of the pages of Words to Live By, the amusing memoir by William Whitehead – actor, documentary writer, and, by ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

America, but Better: The Canada Party Manifesto

By Chris Cannon and Brian Calvert

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

A Nation Worth Ranting About

By Rick Mercer

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Reference

Comics Versus Art

By Bart Beaty

In the not-so-distant past, the humble comic book found itself elevated to its own distinct category in bookstores: the graphic novel. However, as University of Calgary professor Bart Beaty points out, this distinction privileges the ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture

Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams

By Barry Gough

Much has been written about the discovery of the Northwest Passage, especially the explorers who travelled Canada’s North, often with brutal consequences. Less well known are the men who sought a path from the Atlantic ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: History

Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk

By Sam Sutherland

In the introduction to Sam Sutherland’s Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk, the author eruditely sets out the far-reaching effects of the first wave of punk in Canada, and – in appropriately irreverent fashion ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, Children and YA Non-fiction

Walls: Travels Along the Barricades

By Marcello Di Cintio

Ursula K. Le Guin begins her seminal novel The Dispossessed with a characteristically simple yet profound observation about a wall: “Like all walls it was ambiguous and two-faced. What was inside it and what was ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Science, Technology & Environment

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