I must be honest: I was apprehensive about reading Songs for the End of the World. I worried about it being more coronavirus realness than I could handle. Instead, this New Normal we’re living in worked to reduce the tension in the novel.
Forty-five-year-old Margot, who’s “never risked anything greater than a found dollar on a lottery ticket,” has ditched her long-held career as an antique firearms dealer in an attempt to sidestep a midlife crisis.
Wendy’s back, bitches. You know Wendy, right? She’s like an artist? White girl, long hair, always wears black. She used to write that Montreal scene report blog?
Sherwin Tjia’s latest, the graphic novel Plummet, is the surreal story of a woman who wakes up to find herself, along with assorted other people and objects, in a state of continuous freefall.
Addie Tsai’s journey towards publishing Dear Twin, her first book, has been circuitous – with many side roads, some dead ends, and plenty of footnotes, not unlike the novel itself.
Kaie Kellough can be serious. His general demeanour is that of considered statements and well-placed pauses. He speaks like a poet. The thing is, spending too much time enjoying the way he puts sentences together, both on the page and in person, means that the accompanying sly humour can be missed.
Who Belongs in Quebec?: Identity Politics in a Changing Society closely examines recent political developments and landmark events in Quebec, including the 2018 election of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority government, debates around Quebec’s Charter of Values, and the secularism law, Bill 21.
Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Nyla Matuk, slices through the narrative of Canadian exceptionalism, the idealized notion of that elusive “melting pot” we’ve all heard so much about but have yet to experience for ourselves.
A sense of being trapped – by gender, mental illness, duty, class, or indeed, a town so small that everyone knows you – is palpable in many of the stories in Send More Tourists... the Last Ones Were Delicious.
Sean Michaels’s second novel is about luck. The Wagers also casts a tender, incandescent light on ramshackle grocery stores, extended families, stand-up comedy, sibling rivalry, romantic and platonic love, art-making, and an unnamed city that looks uncannily like Montreal.
Gretchen McCulloch's book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, is a study of what she calls “informal writing” and how it’s flourished in the online era.
