Employing a variety of experimental techniques in style and structure, Daniel Allen Cox’s fourth novel, Mouthquake, details the queer coming-of-age of a stuttering young man in Montreal.
By Jeff Miller
Fiction
Claudine Dumont’s Captive is animated by the idea of power, and how quickly it can be gained or lost. When Emma, the novel’s first-person narrator, is abducted from her bedroom by a group of masked assailants and awakens in a locked room, she is quickly reduced to a state of helplessness and terror.
By Danielle Barkley
The title suggests tangled nights on the beach, afternoon cocktails, at least a bit of coming-of-age necking. But That Summer in Provincetown is only glancingly about any such summer.
By Katia Grubisic
In the village of Malabourg, girlhood is a difficult, even dangerous time. This fictional town on the Baie des Chaleurs, the setting of Perrine Leblanc’s second novel, is a place out of time, inhabited by generations of lantern-jawed fishermen and run by local gossips. The Lake, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, seems at first glance to promise a kind of thriller, but its village setting is the stuff of contes or legends.
By Aimee Wall
The word Balkan may bring to mind a number of associations. Complex borders, fraternity, religion, betrayal, atrocity. It gets complicated very quickly. Josip Novakovich’s most recent collection of short stories, Ex-Yu, explores each of these topics in turn and in conjunction
By Rob Sherren
While short story collections tend to feature a relatively even style and emotional palette, Daydreams of Angels offers readers a wide spectrum of both. In these twenty stories sparkling with wit and fantasy, O’Neill gives us a variety of genres, including heartfelt coming-of-age stories, miniature historical fictions, allegories, tall tales, and even literary cover versions. And while these stories largely stray from the gritty realism of her novels, they nonetheless retain the powerful emotional resonance of those works.
By Jeff Miller
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.
By Peter Dubé
n the brief space ...
By Jim Napier
Music must float in the air over Montreal, a city that has nurtured many a lauded performer from the late classical pianist Ellen Ballon to Arcade Fire and Nikki Yanofsky. So it is only natural that music has been the central focus of a number of books by local authors, including most recently Mary Soderstrom’s River Music.
By Gina Roitman
In Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination, Jan Beveridge explores the stories, characters, settings, and themes that have preceded and often inspired the tales we know today.
By Mélanie Grondin
Like a magic wand, Dubé’s poetic pen mesmerizes with sumptuous metaphors while beauty mingles seductively with recklessness and wreckage. Dubé’s sixth book, an addition to his already noteworthy contributions to gay literature, serves up stories that are often surreal, sometimes supernatural, and never static.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
ublished in French as Pourquoi Bologne, Alain Farah’s book, impeccably translated by Lazer Lederhendler, reconstructs a mental breakdown in short disconnected chapters that shift topic and time period, occasionally descending into hallucinatory paranoiac episodes.
By Rob Sherren