To catnap or not to catnap, that is often the life-or-death question in Tjia’s latest creation.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
Interviews
Green pepper aficionados, weekend brunchers, and self-identified foodies beware: Jonah Campbell has no love for you.
By Andrea Belcham
Adam Gopnik has been reliably surprising us for so long now that there might be a danger of taking him for granted. Step back a bit from his work, though, and it becomes clear just how unusual the fifty-five year-old’s approach is.
By Ian McGillis
In the 1960s and 1970s, “Canada’s toughest neighbourhood” was neglected, disenfranchised, and prone to outbreaks of fire, roaches, and gangs of kids warring over territory. It was also Dobson’s childhood home.
By Anna Leventhal
As a rule, Daniel Griffin avoids using exclamation points. The economical, unadorned prose that is the distinguishing feature of his new short-story collection, Stopping for Strangers, doesn’t provide much room for excessive gushing, punctuation marks included.
By Joel Yanofsky
One of the downsides of being a lifelong reader is that one rarely approaches a book innocently, free from the spoiler effects of hype and reputation. I was out of the country, away from the news this summer, when Peter Behrens’ novel The O’Briens came to me in a near pristine state.
By Marianne Ackerman
Writer Maria Meindl inherited thirty-eight boxes of papers from her grandmother Mona Gould. Mona was a big name at one time, but, by the 1960s, she was virtually forgotten.
By Anne Legacé-Dowson
So, girl dates cad. Girl leaves cad. Girl trips serendipitously over business card. Girl buys into expensive arranged-marriage service. Marriage is arranged. Newly-met husband turns out to be knave. Girl leaves knave. Arranged husband professes love, knaveship is overturned. Ta-dah!
By Katia Grubisic
André Pratte is the editor-in-chief of La Presse. His newest book, Wilfrid Laurier, is part of the Extraordinary Canadians series, published by Penguin Canada and edited by John Ralston Saul, that aims to provide historical insight into our own times.
By Anne Legacé-Dowson
There are ways in which biographies, interesting ones at any rate, act as reference points; for better or worse, they turn a life (whether typical or atypical) into a marker for a particular historical moment, or use it to summarize events too complex for readers to grasp in other ways. Though this is not their only effect, it is a compelling one.
By Peter Dubé
Chester Brown is an award-winning cartoonist and a two-time Libertarian Party of Canada candidate, but these days it’s his life as a john that’s getting the most attention. In his recent autobiographical graphic novel, Paying For It, he tells us about the twenty-three prostitutes he has been with since deciding to pursue paid sex in 1999.
By Lori Callaghan
Sylvia Weisler, age thirty-three, published writer of a book of poetry, is tackling a new subject in earnest. Her next book will be about newspaper-based personal ads, she has decided.
By Sarah Lolley