Reviews

★ Instructions for the Drowning

The first and last stories in Steven Heighton’s posthumous collection both feature characters punching someone with unintended consequences. In the title story, which opens the book, Ray recalls his father advising him that the only ... Read More »

March 29, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

★ The Fake

By Zoe Whittall

Cammie, the chaotic force at the core of Zoe Whittall’s fifth novel, The Fake, can charm anyone. Even you, dear reader. “You’re a smart person, obviously,” she writes in an introduction. “You read books.” Much ... Read More »

March 22, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel

By Jeannie Marshall

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is currently touring event centres across Europe and North America (including a stop in Toronto this spring), promising a “life-size, up-close, never-before-seen perspective” of one of the world’s most celebrated ... Read More »

March 15, 2023 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, History, Memoir & Biography

★ Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

By Quinn Slobodian

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that stripped Walt Disney World of its special zoning – a move critics said was blatant retaliation for Disney’s opposition to DeSantis’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law – ... Read More »

March 15, 2023 | Filed under: Business & Economics, History, Politics & Current Affairs

The Book of Rain

By Thomas Wharton

Thomas Wharton’s ambitious new novel, The Book of Rain, begins with a tech blackout on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The confused city folk take it as it comes, a break from the monotony of ... Read More »

March 8, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality

By Lindsay Wong

Is immortality pleasant? Certainly not for some of the Chinese mythological creatures in Lindsay Wong’s new collection of 13 short stories, including the diao si gui (Red-Tongued Ghosts) who face ghost hunters and psychics after ... Read More »

March 1, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Short, Reviews

Some Unfinished Business

By Antanas Sileika

Reading two novels set in Soviet Europe in tandem, recurrent questions echo between two distinct fictional worlds. Must the past be understood in order to move forward? And in what ways does it define our ... Read More »

February 15, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark

By Jonathan Garfinkel

February 15, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Chrysalis

By Anuja Varghese

Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, Chrysalis, offers 15 shapeshifting stories that transport us to sex clubs, food courts, small towns, and haunted motels where women reclaim their lives. The opening story, “Bhupati,” tells of a new ... Read More »

February 8, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Strange Loops

By Liz Harmer

In the opening pages of Liz Harmer’s smart, sharp, and magnetic novel Strange Loops, Francine revisits the past. Deeply, frantically restless (whether in her role as wife, mother, graduate student, or coffee shop proprietor), Francine shows up ... Read More »

February 1, 2023 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

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