Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) is a strange and wonderful hybrid that uses the creation of an encyclopedia about a fictional 2001 television show, Little Blue, to pay tribute to the narrator’s closest friend Vivian Cloze after she’s gone. In the process, it casts beautiful insights onto its many themes: queer and trans living, unrequited love, ongoing mourning, joyful friendship, and the powers of (obscure) pop culture to help us cope.
Of Vengeance hints at another layer of crime that forms the undercurrent of the novel. In deceptively simple prose, Kurtness mounts a poignant and timely argument about the danger of running headlong into the hands of technologies we don’t fully understand.
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.
Heroine, Gail Scott’s classic feminist Montreal novel, balances on the border of these two eras. Gail, our narrator, soaks in the bath in a rented room in 1980, recalling her recent experiences as a young would-be militant during the heady days of separatist revolutionary fervour. As she remembers, she also reconfigures what happened, visiting and revisiting her relationships, her moods, and her own trajectory as both an observer and an actor in a time of personal and political upheaval.
Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair is Paterson’s third short story collection, and it demonstrates his ease with the form’s range. “Salut King Kong” is a quick hit – quirky and to the point. Even quicker and quirkier are postcard pieces like “Body Noises with the Door Open” and “Spring Training.”
Hollywood North paints a dark portrait of Trenton, Ontario. This institutional port town is a gateway to the Trent-Severn Waterway and Prince Edward County, and it has a storied history as an epicentre for tragedy. Author Michael Libling pushes his hometown’s reputation to the extreme, and he would have us believe it to be the township of Quinte’s own Bermuda Triangle, with a forever-burning creosote plant, tragic fires, unexplained plane crashes, wartime losses, train derailments, drownings (so many drownings!), and various traffic accidents.
The cover of Aphelia features an out-of-focus photograph of a young woman. In the gauzy light, few of her features are visible beyond an outline of shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a smudge where her mouth should be. This haunting image neatly symbolizes the novel’s central character, whose name we never learn.
We’ve all had the experience where our mind arbitrarily takes a snapshot, a freeze-frame that reverberates with the particulars that shaped our state of being at that moment in our lives. These flashes capture a near-simultaneous amalgamation of thought, emotion, and vivid sensory experience, a kind of neural artifact of an ever-changing self. But what if it were possible to compile the experiential snapshots of an array of different people in a single book? This is the ambitious challenge that Simon Brousseau has set for himself in his experimental novel Synapses.
People have been writing novels about infidelity for about as long as people have been writing novels. Indeed, within the literary canon – think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or The Great Gatsby – adultery is about as common a subject as an absent father or an unplanned pregnancy. Incidentally, 26 Knots, the debut novel from Montreal- based pediatrician Bindu Suresh, has all three of these things. It wasn’t until after I’d finished reading, however, that I noticed just how much Suresh had packed into such a slight volume.
Shortly into their marriage, the narrator of Maude Veilleux’s autofictional novel Prague and her husband decide to experiment with an open relationship: “We told ourselves we should enjoy our bodies now while we were young. And what were a few lovers in a lifetime spent together?” As part of the experiment, she begins to write a book about an open marriage. Yet, as one relationship escalates in intensity, the novel quickly takes on a mind of its own.
A book about friendship, polyamory, queerness, and unconventional families, Run J Run has all the makings of an exciting novel. But, bogged down by racial and mental health tropes, the book leaves an unsettling feeling.
Christian Guay-Poliquin’s second novel The Weight of Snow, winner of the Governor General’s Award as well as three Quebec literary prizes after it was published in French in 2016, has just appeared in English, translated by David Homel. Part dystopian survival tale, part existentialist character study, it’s a compelling read with a minimalist style that masks some heavy-duty themes.
