Reviews

One Madder Woman

It’s hard to imagine from today’s vantage that some of Édouard Manet’s most celebrated paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, with its female nude picnicker gazing defiantly at the viewer, were decreed artistically worthless when ... Read More »

December 3, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Written in Stone

By Peter Unwin

Linda first meets Paul at the cast party for a no-budget production of Beckett’s Happy Days in which Linda stars. Paul approaches Linda and asks if she’s any good with a canoe. When Linda begs ... Read More »

November 30, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Blaze Island

By Catherine Bush

Coming into Catherine Bush’s Blaze Island is akin to entering a world with a large cast of characters, not unlike a Charles Dickens novel. While Dickens’s novels are cultural artifacts of their time, Bush’s book ... Read More »

November 26, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Hammer and Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman

By Kate Braid

Years back, I remember listening to Kate Braid read poems from Turning Left to the Ladies and being awed by the way she lyrically broke open the male-dominated world of construction – a field in ... Read More »

November 23, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

Waiting for a Star to Fall

By Kerry Clare

Toronto writer Kerry Clare’s sophomore novel begins with the fall of superstar politician Derek Murdoch. Standing accused of sexual assault, Derek denies the anonymous allegations at a press conference, viewed via livestream by his most ... Read More »

November 19, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

★ Black Matters

By Afua Cooper; Wilfried Raussert (photog.)

The world of Burning Sugar – the intimately powerful debut from Vancouver poet and activist Cicely Belle Blain – is, above all else, dynamic, always moving, tracing arcs and trajectories, modes of learning and loving. ... Read More »

November 16, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

★ Burning Sugar

By Cicely Belle Blain

November 16, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laferrière

By Adam Leith Gollner

In the introduction to his collection of interviews with celebrated Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière, Adam Leith Gollner writes that his subject’s “narrators are always a version of himself.” There is no line that divides Laferrière’s ... Read More »

November 12, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

★ Because They Were Women: The Montreal Massacre

By Josée Boileau; Chantal Bilodeau (trans.)

Anyone who has ever attended a vigil on Dec. 6 knows that there’s a certain protocol to be followed when remembering the victims of the Montreal Massacre: speeches are made about gender-based violence, both in ... Read More »

November 9, 2020 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography

★ Titan

By François Vigneault

Old energy sources have become unsustainable. An alienated workforce agitates for systemic change. New technologies are manipulated to nefarious ends. And a world can no longer bear its own government’s kleptocracy. Science fiction is often ... Read More »

November 5, 2020 | Filed under: Graphica, Reviews

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