When Alain Deneault uses the word mediocre in his new book-length essay, he is not describing something (or someone) inferior or incompetent. Rather, he is talking about mediocrity as it defines the actual average, the mean of things. He is taking aim at a society where this average “has been granted authority.”
Wisdom in Nonsense, which is based on the CLC Kreisel Lecture O’Neill gave in 2017, introduces The Real Mister O’Neill. Having aspired to become a gangster in his youth, Buddy O’Neill stepped up to the paternal plate after his once-and-former love shrugged off the yoke of motherhood. In these thirteen “lessons” (and one incongruous blank-paged invitation for readers to contribute their own dadnecdotes), O’Neill fille catalogues what good can be gleaned from advice that is at worst delusional and at best out of step with reality.
The Véhicule Press offices are on the lower floor of co-publishers Nancy Marrelli and Simon Dardick’s house on Roy Street, just east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, where they’ve been since 1981, when Véhicule shifted from a printing and publishing co-operative model to that of a small publisher.
Through his first-person narration, his honesty, humility, and stringent self-criticism, through the descriptions of his internationally acclaimed performance work beyond the scope of his literary achievements – of which I had already been aware – I was able to become more familiar with Wren. If I already held Wren in high esteem as a writer, artist, and person, this fascinating hybrid of memoir, archive, performance history and theory, and humorous storytelling reinforced that impression.
As a former soldier in the Iraq War, Dean knows he’s being trailed. He catches Eugenie, whose dilapidated New Brunswick farmhouse he’s been working on, following him into the backwoods of her property where he’s set up camp.
Though it is a fairly slender book, Mauricio Segura’s novel Oscar practically bursts at the seams with historical events, colourful characters, and timeless themes. Based loosely on the life of pianist Oscar Peterson, the novel’s heart and soul lies in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood, its bustling life seen through the eyes of a thriving black, immigrant community.
The first thing that hit me in my experience of Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Love That Bunch was the looming, powerful presence of bodies in the comics. The force of the bodies was overwhelming. It wasn’t a cerebral experience – it was physical.
As the movable type printing press spread across Western Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century, it’s estimated that Europeans printed around twelve million books. By the eighteenth century, they printed one billion. Such exponential growth began a period, roughly from 1700–1900, during which European culture could “most fully” be described as a print culture, according to the authors of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation.
I come to Benjamin Woo’s book Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture not as a hostile observer of the culture he examines, but as a baffled one.
Hamidou Diop is a bit character in Hubert Aquin’s novel Prochain épisode (translated into English as Next Episode). A Wolof double agent, he occupies only a few lines in the novel, but in the last fifteen years, he’s reappeared at least three times in the works of other writers. Kaie Kellough and Alain Farah have both revived Aquin’s minor spy for their own ends, responding to Aquin’s representation of race and using Diop to reimagine the role of racial minorities in the narrative of Quebec nationalism.
Rose & Poe, a novel by Montreal Gazette sports columnist Jack Todd, is a North American fable loosely based on The Tempest. It tells the story of Poe, a simple-minded, hunchbacked gentle giant with six fingers and six toes, and his doting mother Rose. The pair have a modest existence cleaning houses, making cheese, tending goats, and merrymaking in their local tavern in Belle Coeur County, a fictional region of New England surrounded by water on three sides and Quebec the other.
