Quill and Quire

Reviews

The Birth House

By Ami McKay

Although she is Knopf’s New Face of Fiction for 2006, Ami McKay springs from a venerable tradition of Maritime storytelling. Her engaging first novel, set in rural Nova Scotia around the time of the First ... Read More »

February 27, 2006 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Vandal Love

By D.Y. Béchard

The haunting story of the Hervé family – cursed by a genetic fluke that causes them to become either giants or “runts” – provides the impetus for a compelling first novel by Montréal author D.Y. ... Read More »

February 13, 2006 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Sympathy

By Dede Crane

The dancer is like a wounded swan, her graceful neck bowed in the catatonic state that followed the gruesome deaths of her son and husband in a car accident. She is admitted to the Rosewood ... Read More »

February 6, 2006 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Me Funny

By Drew Hayden Taylor, ed.

It is a paradoxical truth that explaining why something is funny is intrinsically unfunny. It is perhaps for this reason that Drew Hayden Taylor, the editor and compiler of Me Funny, a motley collection of ... Read More »

January 30, 2006 | Filed under: Anthologies

Inter Alia

By David Seymour; $, pp.,

Inter Alia is Toronto-based David Seymour’s first book. The first section – a suite of poems that adopts the geological themes and manner of Seymour’s mentor and editor, Don McKay – is rather uninspired. Entitled ... Read More »

January 12, 2006 | Filed under: Poetry

Blue Feast

By Shawna Lemay

In a prefatory note to her third full-length collection, Edmonton writer Shawna Lemay says, “The reader who wants these poems is the reader who understands the complicated joy that is entwined with sadness.” In the ... Read More »

January 12, 2006 | Filed under: Poetry