Summer 2015

Drawn and Quarterly

Drawn and Quarterly

The D&Q brand is the kind that earns your trust, and before you know it you can find yourself venturing into outré realms – Marc Bell’s intricate free-standing psychedelic tableaux, Anders Nilsen’s dream-logic minimalist epics – that you would previously have never considered.

By Ian McGillis

A Secret Music

A Secret Music

The emotional core of A Secret Music is this passionate, enmeshed bond between mother and son, both of whom hope that his music will help keep her demons at bay. For Lawrence, his mother’s belief in, and single-minded focus on, his music is a burden-laden blessing.

By Ami Sands Brodoff

My Shoes Are Killing Me

My Shoes Are Killing Me

Robyn Sarah’s poetry has always reckoned with the past, but her newest collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, reflects from a particular juncture in life, one she defines succinctly as “the beginning of dwindle.” Sarah explores the time in middle life when what has happened takes on a larger presence than what remains to happen.

By Jaime Forsythe

The Book of Faith

The Book of Faith

A small-town charm dominates much of the local fiction about our fair city, and Montrealer Elaine Kalman Naves’s first novel, The Book of Faith, keeps religiously to this invisible holy commandment.

By Sarah Fletcher

Poetry

A selection of this summer's poetry collections.

By Bert Almon

The Last Bonobo

The Last Bonobo

The Last Bonobo is a brilliant book, exactly the kind of intellectually powerful, clear, and compassionate account that could – literally – help save the world.

By Elise Moser

Studio Grace

Studio Grace

How many people once played in a band, tried their hand at writing songs, and eventually let the whole music thing fall by the wayside – but have a nagging feeling that someday they’d like to take it up again? No doubt the number is too high to count, but Montreal writer Eric Siblin decided to take up a personal music revival in earnest, and to write about the experience. Studio Grace is an intimate, at times exhaustive account of Siblin’s journey in writing and recording an album.

By Malcolm Fraser

Anthems and Minstrel Shows

We’re not likely to get a more thorough biography of Calixa Lavallée than Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Christopher Thompson’s huge and meticulous account of the life and times of the composer of “O Canada.” It’s exhaustively researched, even if sometimes the bigger picture is lost in the denseness of facts.

By Dane Lanken

Daydreams of Angels

Daydreams of Angels

While short story collections tend to feature a relatively even style and emotional palette, Daydreams of Angels offers readers a wide spectrum of both. In these twenty stories sparkling with wit and fantasy, O’Neill gives us a variety of genres, including heartfelt coming-of-age stories, miniature historical fictions, allegories, tall tales, and even literary cover versions. And while these stories largely stray from the gritty realism of her novels, they nonetheless retain the powerful emotional resonance of those works.

By Jeff Miller

Breathing Lessons

Breathing Lessons

Breathing Lessons is a timely novel. It feels contemporary, and – as an account of the intimate life of Henry Moss, identified as a “homosexual everyman” on the back cover – it deals with questions that could only be broached now, when gay people are making their way into the social mainstream and facing the issues that this inevitably involves.

By Peter Dubé

Open Season

Open Season

n the brief space ...

By Jim Napier

River Music

River Music

Music must float in the air over Montreal, a city that has nurtured many a lauded performer from the late classical pianist Ellen Ballon to Arcade Fire and Nikki Yanofsky. So it is only natural that music has been the central focus of a number of books by local authors, including most recently Mary Soderstrom’s River Music.

By Gina Roitman