Quill and Quire

Reviews

Felix Roth

By Cary Fagan

Toronto author Cary Fagan has steadily developed a reputation as a writer of articulate and entertaining novels and short stories. Felix Roth, his eighth work of fiction, confirms Fagan as a writer of measurable talent. ... Read More »

February 13, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Swimming with Jonah

By Audrey Schulman

Audrey Schulman’s fictional debut, The Cage, traced the psychic breakthrough of a troubled magazine photographer assigned to shoot polar bears in the wild, from inside a metal cage. In bizarrely uneven prose, it nonetheless told ... Read More »

February 13, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

See the Child

By David Bergen

David Bergen has staked his literary claim to the turf of rural southern Manitoba, with its particular mix of French (read “earthy”) and Mennonite (read “repressed”) farming communities. In his last novel, he parsed a ... Read More »

February 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Fat Lady Struck Dumb

By David Waltner-Toews

In The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, his sixth book of poems, David Waltner-Toews convicts himself of “the crime” identified in one of his cheerfully reflective poems: “that a man can still be amateur.” Fortunately Waltner-Toews ... Read More »

February 12, 2004 | Filed under: Poetry

Shahnaz

By Hiro McIlwraith

Shahnaz, a first novel from Nanaimo-based author Hiro McIlwraith, is a troubling book, only in part because its major theme is the oppression of women in India. The novel begins in 1972 when Shahnaz, the ... Read More »

February 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Bafflegab

By Stan Rogal

Almost every page in Bafflegab, Stan Rogal’s second novel, contains an allusion or citation. Orphan Annie’s “leaping lizards!” aside, most of the sources are decidedly weighty. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Stein (amongst others) are invoked as ... Read More »

February 12, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels