October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
With Loving This Man, her first novel, Althea Prince follows other West Indian-Canadian authors (Dionne Brand, Rabindranath Maharaj, Austin Clarke) in exploring the trauma of emigration. The first half of the novel is set in ... Read More »
“Spent the rest of the night guzzling coffee at a Horton’s, reading Bukowski, trying to mind my own business.” With this literary invocation, Matthew Firth posits himself as a contemporary Charles Bukowski, a chronicler of ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short
Reflecting back on his life, twentysomething Gideon Gast finds that, when it comes right down to it, he’s spent most of his time “in anticipation and remembrance of sex.” Caught between his born-again mom and ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
On opening night at a strip club in the Troutstream Arms, a performer with the evocative name of Burnadette is nearly incinerated when her spectacular Joan of Arc routine goes awry. As the patrons gawk, ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
Thunder and Light is the sequel to Marie-Claire Blais’ astonishing These Festive Nights (1997), a novel that won international praise – and a Governor General’s Award – in its original French version, Soifs. Another book ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
Vancouver author Mark Macdonald’s first novel, Flat, transformed the architecture of the apartment building into an effective and subtle symbol for, amongst other things, the essential strangeness of urban life. Desire, compartmentalized and isolated inside ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short
In Waiting for Gertrude, Vancouver writer, broadcaster, and notorious cat-fancier Bill Richardson envisions Paris’s famed Père-Lachaise Cemetery as inhabited by the souls of its notable occupants reincarnated into the bodies of feral cats. Chopin has ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
The 14 stories in Nadine McInnis’s Quicksilver are linked by a spectrum of characters somehow experiencing revelations in the midst of suspended lives. Mercury, the rare metal also known as “quicksilver,” is a recurrent image, ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short
Design in Canada is an ambitious project: a richly illustrated survey, in under 300 pages, of half a century of Canadian design. The high quality of the result is a testament to the authors’ comprehensive ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture
Journalist and television host Steve Paikin’s authorial debut, The Life, promises to shed light on the seductive call of Canadian politics, but underdelivers on this ambitious goal. Paikin uses the political lives of such Canadian ... Read More »
October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Politics & Current Affairs