The Night Is a Mouth

In The Night Is a Mouth, Lisa Foad’s first collection of short stories, the protagonists are almost exclusively women: vulnerable and downtrodden women, women who had it rough as girls, women who could use a ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Breaking Lorca

By Giles Blunt

Current popular culture has an almost unholy fascination with torture, from the singleminded Jack Bauer on 24 to the seemingly innumerable Saw films. Award-winning crime writer Giles Blunt contributes to this canon in Breaking Lorca, ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Porny Stories

By Eva Moran

When Canadian writers turn to the subject of sex, they tend to become a tad prudish. Perhaps a vestige of colonial uptightness is to blame. Perhaps it’s our inherent politesse. Whatever the cause, sex in ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Mystery of Grace

By Charles de Lint

Admirers of urban-fantasy novelist Charles de Lint might be surprised to find that the Ottawa writer’s new novel, his first full-length work in three years, is a marked and decisive shift away from the Newford ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Heaven Is Small

By Emily Schultz

According to Emily Schultz, Heaven is located somewhere in North Toronto – among packing houses and printing plants in a mirrored, 70-storey behemoth. This isn’t the prototypical hereafter with the pearly gates and cherubs. This ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Secret Lives of Litterbugs and Other (True) Stories

By M.A.C. Farrant

In her eighth book, the prolific humourist M.A.C. Farrant takes us back to the days when cleaning out the car meant throwing everything out the window, drinking and driving was simply the way things were ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Reference

Beside Still Waters

By Barry Callaghan

In 1989, Barry Callaghan published The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, the story of a Canadian war correspondent named Adam who treks deep into Africa, braving violence, privation, and infectious disease in order to ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination

By Karen Engle

Eight years on, with a new American administration in place, we can – and should – reconsider the events surrounding Sept. 11, 2001, argues Karen Engle in this timely analysis of 9/11’s commemorative artworks and ... Read More »

April 20, 2009 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture

Soccer Sabotage

By Liam O’Donnell; Mike Deas, illus.

It used to be that there was a pretty strong dividing line between comic books and “real” books. When we were kids, books were revered, accepted as the only true means of developing language and ... Read More »

April 20, 2009 | Filed under: Book news