Quill and Quire

BOOK REVIEWS

Asylum

By André Alexis

There is a tendency among today’s more ambitious novelists to ignore or minimize the messy, contradictory inner lives of their characters in favour of highlighting broader sociological, technological, and political themes. In the big contemporary ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Orphic Politics

By Tim Lilburn

Orphic Politics is the seventh collection from Victoria-based poet Tim Lilburn, the first since his GG-winning Kill-Site. In this new book, he sings his traditional eco-mystical preoccupations in what has become his signature style. Lilburn ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Poetry

The Calling

By Inger Ash Wolfe

One of the nice things about reviewing The Calling, the first novel from pseudonymous “well-known and well-regarded North American writer” Inger Ash Wolfe, is that one can avoid entirely the question of who Wolfe is ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Sun Going Down

By Jack Todd

Jack Todd is best-known for his hard-hitting sports journalism in Montreal’s The Gazette and his 2001 memoir of dodging the draft, The Taste of Metal. Unfortunately, the road from non-fiction to fiction is not always ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Barnacle Love

By Anthony De Sa

The latest trend to grip Canadian publishing – immigrant literature – has been both refreshing and an inevitablity. It has given prominence to the voices of a significant and influential group within Canadian society – ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Gerbil Mother

By D.M. Bryan

Gerbil Mother asks readers to overcome an impossible premise: that a fetus, age zero, can be a conscious, thinking, seeing thing. A narrator, even. One named Gerbil. Calgary-based D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a story ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Darren Effect

By Libby Creelman

Eight years after publishing a well-received book of short stories, Massachusetts-born, Newfoundland-based writer Libby Creelman has written a remarkably self-assured first novel with characters that must surely exist somewhere outside of its deftly written pages. ... Read More »

March 28, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels