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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Marianne Ackerman, Montreal novelist (Jump, Matters of Hart, and Piers’ Desire), journalist, and playwright, now moves into satire with the novella “Holy Fools,” the first part of Holy Fools + 2 Stories.
Arcan approaches her subjects with the rigour of ritual. In her hands, hysteria takes the form not of a woman screaming uncontrollably in a fit or spasm but a woman returning again and again to the same subjects, circling them, ordering and disordering – a kind of OCD hysteria.
Chloe is a twenty-something bank teller with a broken heart. Anson, her charming but feckless boyfriend has walked out on her after freaking out at their housewarming party, where a guest arrived with mushroom-and-pot brownies. Now Chloe would rather mope at home in her pyjamas than show up at her dull job. Into this scenario enters a parrot – one capable of magic – and Chloe’s life takes a “fantastic” turn.
In My October, Hannah is struck by “the voices” in Roy’s classic, finding them all “so closely observed that it was easy to forget they were fictional.” The same could be said of Rothman’s well-orchestrated choir of characters, thanks to which My October rings true.
Fortier’s writing is very far from “pure ravings.” It is lucid, rich in detail, and showcases her deep and broad interest in the history of science, which sets her novels apart from much of fiction.
