Montreal artist and curator Anne Golden’s debut novel, From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire, is a remarkable depiction of the heady early years of video art in 1970s Montreal.
By Sara Spike
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Poitras takes her reader into the anachronistic world of present-day calèche drivers, each with their own sad story, at a moment when their frozen-in-time way of life faces immediate danger. Harnessing the language and conventions of the spaghetti western, the Montreal-based author and journalist dips into the genre’s stable of tropes for insight into the machinations underlying the urban landscape we inhabit.
By Emily Raine
Mend the Living, here translated into English by Jessica Moore, explores the processes, both physical and emotional, that surround a heart transplant.
By Aimee Wall
My earliest exposure to Montreal’s literary scene came in the late 1990s, when, as a new arrival to the city, I started going to YAWP!, the spoken word/performance poetry/live music series hosted at various venues around town. Several of these events happened at Bistro4, an unassuming bar on Saint-Laurent around the corner from the apartment where I experimented with Stoicism and made my own soy milk.
By Anna Leventhal
Irish historians – and Irish people in general – are currently revisiting important moments in their national past as part of the hundred-year anniversaries of the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence and Civil War. Donald Akenson’s new book also seeks to revisit and revise a formative moment in the Irish past, albeit one that has been mostly forgotten: the emergence in the 1830s of a distinctly Irish variant of apocalyptic Evangelical Protestantism.
By Aidan Beatty
n 1932 – as Hitler was paving his rise to power in Germany – the great Canadian Jewish poet A. M. Klein declared ...
By Elaine Kalman Naves
Panther, by cartoonist Brecht Evens, is a colourful and sombre psychological thriller about the troubling relationship between a small girl and a fantastical creature.
By Eloisa Aquino
The Company of Crows begins with thirteen-year-old Veronica Reid and her father driving to the Laughing Willows Trailer Park where their family will spend the summer, her father commuting from the city on weekends. It’s a spot where the family can get away, and escape is a prominent thread throughout the book.
By Deanna Radford
In his introduction to A View from the Porch, Avi Friedman espouses his “firm belief that homes and neighborhoods are first and foremost about people.” This view unites the collection of twenty-two essays, and makes his subject – the often-rarefied spheres of architecture and design – highly accessible.
By Patricia Maunder
Teaching Plato in Palestine opens with a bold thesis: “Can philosophy save the Middle East? It can.” It’s an ambitious statement, but McGill philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel’s real objective is slightly humbler: he makes the case that philosophy can offer a language to help communities in conflict find common ground to overcome their differences.
By Emily Raine
Couched in the English title of Madeleine Gagnon’s newly translated autobiography is a consciousness of the inability to accurately convey the facts of one’s life. Memoir refers not only to a Life, but more specifically to a Life in Writing: “fiction is everywhere when you tell your own story,” Gagnon writes. Autobiography emerges from the contradiction between a unified life and multiple selves.
By Klara du Plessis
Bock’s characters are immersed in trying to find their context in a Quebec that is experiencing the same struggle. These stories are rich in both the tacit and tangible manifestations of a people who at once belong and do not, are citizens and are not, are Canadians and are not.
By Mike Spry