


Cheryl Strayed’s blockbuster Wild marked a formidable shift in the women’s memoir category, essentially taking Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love from a Contiki tour to a blistering bootcamp detox. Somewhere along the marketing way, these ... Read More »
August 26, 2021 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

If Netflix is looking for a thriller with suspicious deaths, greed, gold, government corruption, a secret underground cave, and an eccentric lead character, it would do well to consider first-time author Paul McKendrick’s brisk and ... Read More »
August 24, 2021 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

The passage of time can shroud awareness of past horrors. What then happens when an atrocity is unearthed decades after the fact? Judith McCormack’s latest novel, The Singing Forest, confronts this question. Two Belarusian boys ... Read More »
August 17, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Being human means being made up of countless invisible, uncontrollable processes: muscles contracting, neurons firing, cells dividing. Each of these processes has the potential to go catastrophically wrong, and many of us carry in us ... Read More »
August 11, 2021 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

In December 2018, Canadian Edith Blais vanished. The 34-year-old had been travelling for some time with her Italian companion, Luca Tacchetto, on their way to pursue a volunteer work opportunity in Togo. Then, while driving ... Read More »
August 10, 2021 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

In the anthology Changing the Face of Canadian Literature (Guernica Editions), editor Dane Swan discusses the diversity and breadth of Canadian literature, writing in the preface: “Congratulations Canada, you finally have a literature that looks ... Read More »
July 14, 2021 | Filed under: Anthologies, Reviews

In the anthology Changing the Face of Canadian Literature (Guernica Editions), editor Dane Swan discusses the diversity and breadth of Canadian literature, writing in the preface: “Congratulations Canada, you finally have a literature that looks ... Read More »
July 14, 2021 | Filed under: Anthologies, Reviews

There’s a line in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover: “It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.” In Jane Woods’s second work of fiction, Running ... Read More »
July 12, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Though about 3,000 kilometres and a century apart on the map of Canadian literary places, Amy LeBlanc’s Snowton, Alberta, recalls Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa, Ontario – both little towns sketched with a fondness that’s not shy ... Read More »
July 7, 2021 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews