Peter Dubé

What exactly constitutes a "real" family? Questions like this are at the heart of Christopher DiRaddo's novel The Family Way.

The publication of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader is a happy occasion to be sure, but it does beg some questions. Notably: “What took so long?” Brossard’s career spans five decades, after all, and though compilations of her work have appeared, there hasn’t been a collection with the ambition demonstrated by Avant Desire before now.

Will Aitken does something remarkable in his new book: he brings together a keen critical eye and an open heart, and – in doing so – creates a unique hybrid of critical essay and memoir. And though Aitken begins with strong material – a classic play in a new translation by a major poet, staged by a renowned actor and director – it’s what he does with the material that is most striking.

John Goldbach’s third book, It Is an Honest Ghost, in some ways continues the formal and thematic explorations of his earlier work. The stripped-down prose and philosophical semi-speculation that marked his first story collection and his satirical noir novel The Devil and the Detective are present here, too. That noted, It is an Honest Ghost is no rehash; it provides new, and arguably more polished, takes on such concerns.

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.

More than merely “not linked,” the stories in Abray’s book demonstrate noteworthy range. They examine family, romantic relationships, childhood, loss, and mourning among other things and do so using diverse voices, points of view, and formal treatments.

There are ways in which biographies, interesting ones at any rate, act as reference points; for better or worse, they turn a life (whether typical or atypical) into a marker for a particular historical moment, or use it to summarize events too complex for readers to grasp in other ways. Though this is not their only effect, it is a compelling one.