Reviews

To Me You Seem Giant

The most effective vehicles for nostalgia are often sensory: the sight of former stomping grounds revisited after time away; the unbearably saccharine wave of the vodka coolers you swore off after too many notoriously bad ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Fiddler Is a Good Woman

By Geoff Berner

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Shoe on the Roof

By Will Ferguson

Is madness a choice? Can a person be “driven sane” through behaviour modification and tough love? Is a sense of oneness with God nothing more than a reaction to stimulation in a specific part of ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What Can You Do

By Cynthia Flood

Two new short-fiction collections – one by a first-time author, the other by a veteran – each examine the life experiences and inner worlds of a range of characters, but in radically different ways. In ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

★ The Doll’s Alphabet

By Camilla Grudova

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Carpenter from Montreal

By George Fetherling

“Am I trying to deal with a crisis I left behind?” wonders Cynthia McConnell near the beginning of George Fetherling’s neo-noir novel. Well might she ask, as she speaks to us from beyond the grave ... Read More »

October 3, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Afterwork: Essays on Literature and Beauty

By Anne Compton

Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Anne Compton’s latest book is a collection of essays surveying the writer’s life and interests, all bound by Compton’s lyric voice. Afterwork begins with an essay on the first summer ... Read More »

October 3, 2017 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

By Ken McGoogan

The Arctic adventures of explorers like Sir John Franklin are familiar to the many Canadians who harbour a seemingly insatiable interest in the discovery of the Northwest Passage. But for every white man obsessed with ... Read More »

October 2, 2017 | Filed under: History

Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming – in Alberta, and in Ottawa

By Kevin Taft

For all the wealth they potentially possess, Alberta’s vast petroleum reserves have proved a mixed blessing at best. Even the industry’s staunchest defenders have to concede that the laborious extraction of oil from sand has ... Read More »

October 2, 2017 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Science, Technology & Environment