On the heels of Joe Ollmann’s widely acclaimed graphic novel Mid-Life comes Science Fiction, the story of Mark Sett, a high school biology teacher who experiences an unforeseen crisis that shatters his belief system and threatens his long-term relationship.
Modern Montrealers mortified by the current corruption at city hall might be mollified to learn that we've been through all this before. An inquiry in 1909 found favouritism and corruption among city politicians, and another, in the 1950s, blamed crooked cops and councillors for the city's rampant gambling and prostitution.
You don’t hear Packard’s name in Montreal these days, but a century ago he was the city’s bestselling novelist. His fame was such that British publisher Hodder & Stoughton took to substituting the usual author credit with slogans like “It’s hard to beat PACKARD”.
Exactly three years ago, Haiti was levelled by a massive earthquake, and while the international media was quick to give us an overall picture of the devastation through harrowing footage and dire statistics, it largely ignored the resilience of the Haitian people.
Rathwell's deep understanding of and personal experience in the developing world is obvious in Jump the Devil, his latest collection of linked short stories.
On first cracking open Julija Šukys’s second book, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė, readers probably expect the straight biography of the Lithuanian librarian who helped save countless Jews from the Vilna Ghetto. But that’s not what they’ll get.
