Yutaka Dirks

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.