Eric Boodman

Li Bai, the eighth-century Chinese poet, didn’t like to feel tied down. He spent much of his life on the road. He got married four times. Drank himself to sleep in bars. And he admired those who, as he put it, “made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing.”

While details in the new book are as bizarre as in Bang Crunch, the setting is markedly different. Smith’s zaniest short stories take place on Earth: even the innermost thoughts and feelings of a pair of gloves are revealed against the backdrop of downtown Chicago. Now, in Boo, Smith brings his off-the-wall imagination to a whole other realm: the afterlife.

Morissette may have captured the utter loneliness of the dot-com generation, but he does not see the Internet as a source of isolation. Nor does he see New Tab as critical of our dependence on the virtual world.

If you’re trying to reach Josh Freed, don’t call him on a Friday afternoon. When most of us are wrapping up our workweek, he is fiddling with his humour column, trying to smooth out the kinks so that it is ready to go to press.

Rawi Hage likes to think of himself as a historical novelist, but you wouldn’t know it from reading his new novel Carnival. Set in an unspecified time, in an unnamed city, it contains no historical figures or events.

Near the beginning of Rain Falls Like Mercy, a Wyoming ranch owner tells a reporter what’s what: “You want to write about the West, you have to know the truth about this country. Take away the yarns that stretch the truth, and all you have left is the East with better scenery.”

Constant Internet access has, for many, displaced an indispensable part of our thinking. As soon as a fact is in dispute, out comes the smartphone, and – ta-dah! Yet we remember nothing. Even worse, our interest in intellectual questions seems to have flagged.

There is a whole branch of philosophy about the Just War, but Dimitri Nasrallah remains sceptical. “Ultimately, war is chaos,” the Montreal author says. “The vast majority of people are caught in the middle. They’re waiting for the shelling to die down so they can go to the store, hoping that the electricity doesn’t cut off long enough for their food to go bad or that a bullet doesn’t come through their window.”

Every so often, a book comes along that shakes up the way we look at Montreal. Mauricio Segura’s first novel, Black Alley is such a book. Other authors have come at Montreal from a dreamier angle, adding new layers to the city’s mythology, but Segura does the opposite. What makes this book so affecting is that it feels so painfully real.