Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment

There is a Monty Python sketch from 1969 called “Candid Photography” (or sometimes simply “Nudge, Nudge”), in which a young rake interrogates an older, conservative man about his sex life by means of cryptic but ... Read More »

October 24, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

A Brief History of Oversharing: One Ginger’s Anthology of Humiliation

By Shawn Hitchins

Shawn Hitchins dedicates his debut collection of essays to two people: “Harrison Ford, for making me gay,” and “my father, for making me a comedian.” That salty-sweet-salty combination is Hitchins’s go-to mode in A Brief ... Read More »

October 17, 2017 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

★ Louis Undercover

By Fanny Britt; Isabelle Arsenault (ill.); Christelle Morelli (trans.); Susan Ouriou (trans.)

Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault follow up their Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Jane, the Fox and Me with a second graphic novel collaboration of equal acuity. The titular protagonist of Louis Uncover is a perceptive ... Read More »

October 17, 2017 | Filed under: Graphica, Kids’ Books

A Reckoning

By Linda Spalding

The biblical principle of the sins of the father being visited upon the sons is very much at play in Linda Spalding’s follow-up to her 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award winner, The Purchase. That novel ... Read More »

October 17, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit

By Lynn Gehl

In the Anishinaabe culture, “Mino-pimadiziwin” means “the good life.” In context, Mino-pimadiziwin can be understood as a wholistic life, one that includes fostering a relationship to land and community, and sharing knowledge with others. Lynn ... Read More »

October 16, 2017 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

To Me You Seem Giant

By Greg Rhyno

The most effective vehicles for nostalgia are often sensory: the sight of former stomping grounds revisited after time away; the unbearably saccharine wave of the vodka coolers you swore off after too many notoriously bad ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Fiddler Is a Good Woman

By Geoff Berner

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Shoe on the Roof

By Will Ferguson

Is madness a choice? Can a person be “driven sane” through behaviour modification and tough love? Is a sense of oneness with God nothing more than a reaction to stimulation in a specific part of ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

What Can You Do

By Cynthia Flood

Two new short-fiction collections – one by a first-time author, the other by a veteran – each examine the life experiences and inner worlds of a range of characters, but in radically different ways. In ... Read More »

October 10, 2017 | Filed under: Fiction: Short