Reviews

The Party

Traditionally, the main engine of narrative, especially in commercial and genre fiction, can be boiled down to a simple question: what happens next? Everything else is subservient to that overarching concern, which, at its best, ... Read More »

July 13, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What We Once Believed

By Andrea MacPherson

Pop culture has in recent years launched the concept of motherhood into more nuanced and realistic incarnations than the perpetually smiling housewife of yore. From Drunk Mom to Bad Moms, portrayals of women with children ... Read More »

July 13, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ The Blinds

By Adam Sternbergh

“Damnatio Memorae,” reads graffiti sprayed across the walls of a trashed workshop in the remote Texas town of Caesura, the setting for Adam Sternbergh’s taut conceptual thriller, The Blinds. “The condemnation of memory”: that ominous ... Read More »

July 12, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage

By Bill Gaston

The characters in Bill Gaston’s new story collection are almost all haunted by thoughts of what might have been, or else perched on the verge of making mistakes they’ll rue for years to come. But ... Read More »

July 4, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Sea Was in Their Blood: The Disappearance of the Miss Ally’s Five-Man Crew

By Quentin Casey

On February 17, 2013, five men set out from Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia, aboard a 12-metre fishing boat called the Miss Ally. Despite a non-functional spotlight and warnings that a massive winter storm was approaching, ... Read More »

July 4, 2017 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography

★ The Heavy Bear

By Tim Bowling

“I was as sane as any man in the twenty-first century can expect to be,” says the protagonist of The Heavy Bear, “dragging the bloodied pelt of the twentieth century behind him.” Prolific poet Tim ... Read More »

June 22, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple in North America

By Helen Humphreys

Clad in wool and plaid, pumpkin spice latte in hand, we might find our yearly autumnal excursion to the apple orchard not quite the same after reading Helen Humphreys’s latest book, a fascinating glimpse into ... Read More »

June 22, 2017 | Filed under: Food & Drink, History

Arrival: The Story of CanLit

By Nick Mount

The vicissitudes of time and gentrification notwithstanding, it can be difficult to comprehend Toronto through its writers. The bust of poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, who dropped out of school in 1959 at age 18 to teach ... Read More »

June 22, 2017 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture, History

Searching for Petronius Totem

By Peter Unwin

The 21st-century digitized world – replete with technology that allows governments to surveil their own citizens and corporations to engage in ever-more-sophisticated target marketing as a means of selling their customers’ own obsessions back to ... Read More »

June 19, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

By Jessica Raya

Jessica Raya published her first novel, The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club, in 2007 under the pseudonym Jessica Morrison. Ten years later, she returns with her own name and a new book – a politically ... Read More »

June 19, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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