Yutaka Dirks

Until recently, Yutaka Dirks lived in Montreal. He has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, THIS, Briarpatch, Ricepaper Magazine, rabble, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the CBC Creative Non-Fiction Prize and the Canadian Association of Journalists/CWA Award for Labour Reporting.

Reviews by Yutaka Dirks:

November 3, 2019
Prez’s story is drawn from the author’s own experiences. In 1969, nineteen-year- old Freeman was stopped by a white Chicago police officer. When Freeman argued that the stop was unconstitutional, the officer, Terrence Knox, became extremely aggressive, shouting racist epithets. He pointed a gun at Freeman’s head. There was a struggle, and Knox was hit in the arm by three bullets.
July 6, 2019
Fog has some ingredients – a finely detailed setting, a strained friendship between two young men – that point to the novel’s potential as a suspenseful work about the lost men of a neighbourhood.
January 25, 2019
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.
September 18, 2018
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.”
March 24, 2018
Bologna’s success is just one of several interesting stories in Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince’s engaging, if at times frustrating, Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators. The chapters, written by academics, journalists, and activists, delve into the “political side” of the question of how best to address the mobility needs of a city.
November 1, 2017
Jacques Filippi and John McFetridge have assembled an impressive roster of Francophone (most translated by Katie Shireen Assef) and Anglophone writers for Montreal Noir, the second volume in Akashic Books’s long-running Noir series to feature a Canadian city. As per the format of the series, which began with Brooklyn Noir in 2004, each of the fifteen contributors sets their story primarily within a specific Montreal neighbourhood or area.