Web Exclusives

Erín Moure’s The Elements: (Namloz) begins, shoulders back, index finger up, with the words “In fact.” This gesture is a complex one because of the way Moure shifts between battle scenes, theory, and philosophy.

What is creativity, and how does it work? Is creativity something that one has or one does? Adrian McKerracher’s What it Means to Write: Creativity and Metaphor is a layered meditation on how metaphors for creativity respond to these kinds of questions, even as they strive to express them.

“Feminism is not a done deal,” Monique Polak writes in I Am a Feminist: Claiming the F-Word in Turbulent Times. She doesn’t need to tell me twice. In fact, I’d argue that we need intersectional feminism more than ever before.

The highly readable noir crime novel The Birds That Stay – a first book from established playwright Ann Lambert – starts with one person strangling another in the frigid Quebec Laurentians.

Neighbourhood: Designing a Liveable Community, the latest book by Avi Friedman, begins with a two-part question for the reader: think about a neighbourhood you like, then about why this is so.

Manon Tremblay’s 100 Questions About Women and Politics digs into why achieving a balanced representation of men and women has been so difficult. The title is literal: the volume is framed as a hundred questions, followed by mini-essay responses that parse women’s participation in global government, as citizens and as officials.

Some novels hold their secrets tightly, leaving the reader to fumble in the darkness for any sense of where the book is leading them, while others let flow a glut of detail that can overwhelm and at times obscure what’s happening beneath the surface. Montreal writer David Turgeon manages to do both simultaneously in The Supreme Orchestra.

In her memoir, In Search of Pure Lust, Lise Weil shares a history of self-discovery, led primarily by her lesbian identity, and paints a constellation lit up by a life lived relationally.

With Mayonnaise, the second book of the 1984 trilogy, the poet and novelist Richard Brautigan becomes Rivages's central fixation. Among Plamondon's forest of factoids about Camus, General Jodl, and Saint Antoine, about the Remington Rifle Company and the Singer Sewing Machine, Charlie Chaplin and Vladimir Nabokov, Brautigan emerges as a commanding influence.

Just like its namesake street, Abla Farhoud’s newly translated novel is populated with memorable characters from all walks of life. Young and old, settled and transient, the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, inhabiting a modern, multicultural society that shares its neighbourhood with a thriving but insular community of Hasidic Jews. In brief, vivid chapters, Farhoud provides glimpses into the lives of the Montreal residents who inhabit Hutchison Street, which “does not separate Outremont from Mile End, as you might think; it brings them together.”

But what if Michael Bay is really a misunderstood genius? An artist, critically misinterpreted, academically ignored, deprived of his true vision because of the manipulation of the studios in the name of outrageous commercial profits? Or what if he’s part of something much deeper and even more mysterious, something beyond the scope of mass media, something that’s shaped both civilization and his very consciousness from childhood? These are the kinds of heady, ridiculous questions Mathieu Poulin detonates consistently throughout the course of his novel Explosions: Michael Bay and the Pyrotechnics of the Imagination.

Aja Moore’s hotwheel conjures a deeply psychic mood, called into existence through Vancouver’s verdant backdrop.