January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
Readers tend to forgive memoir writers the indulgence of scripting their lives as coherent narratives connected by subtle transitions and dramatic plot points, but only so long as their stories are compelling. There is no ... Read More »
Describing himself as “a self-hating Jew from Ottawa,” Matt Cohen lived a writing life governed by anomaly, paradox, and contradiction. In short, he was a true Canadian. Always the outsider, Cohen was a highly professional ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays
Tim Jocelyn was a central figure in the art scene that exploded around Toronto’s Queen Street West in the early 1980s. He first emerged as an innovative designer of clothing and fashion accessories, for which ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
Many of the characters in Habits and Love, Alberta writer Rod Schumacher’s first collection of stories, are caught deep in the web of their own lives, trying to think and feel their way out to ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Short
In Sally Cooper’s debut novel, Love Object, young Mercy Brewer is thrown into a state of confusion when her mother is hospitalized with a serious mental illness. The girl’s ability to communicate, especially with males, ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
How the Blessed Live considers a modern family while mirroring mythic relationships that muddle magic and the real world. Susannah Smith opens this first novel with quotes from the myth of Isis and Osiris, and ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
The opening chapters of Tempting Faith DiNapoli brim with bodily fluids – not surprising, considering that four of the main characters, Matty, Faith, Hope, and Charlie, are all under the age of four. Those fluids ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
Alex, a disillusioned former artist, and Conrad, a manic mid-career artist, are flatmates and sometime lovers in London’s northeast end in transplanted Canadian novelist Jean McNeil’s Private View. It is a skillfully evoked, somewhat sordid ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels
Writers of quality often come from the fringes, and places on the fringes can became centres of literary excellence. The Ireland of Yeats, Synge, and Joyce is one example, as is the American South of ... Read More »
January 14, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
In her first collection of poetry, On Every Stone, Rachel Vigier explores the meaning of disappearance as she reflects on the life and loss of her sister, Micheline, who disappeared October 9, 1988. But the ... Read More »
January 12, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Poetry