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.
The point is to make Indigenous languages and cultures in Canada, bizarrely, less foreign and more familiar to young readers. It’s part of a global movement to save Indigenous languages from extinction, an effort that’s having a bit of a moment.
Be warned: reading The Ghost Garden may change you. Susan Doherty, a petite woman with shining blue eyes and a ready smile, is doing big, radical things in the field of mental health – the kinds of things that might inspire you to pitch in and help. At the very least, the book risks challenging misconceptions you may hold about schizophrenia.
Set in the belly of a high-end Montreal restaurant at the turn of the millennium, the novel is narrated by an unwitting nineteen-year-oldi plongeur who has just started his first job in a professional kitchen. Larue’s prose is expertly infused with the sights, smells, and exhausting physical labour of the job.
Readers make good detectives. Reading always involves finding clues and solving riddles. The detective-protagonist of Cathon’s graphic novel The Pineapples of Wrath is a bibliophile named Marie-Plum Porter ... In this tongue-in-cheek black comedy, reading is a matter of life or death.
The poems in I Am a Body of Land are tangled up in their considerations of home, identity, and memory, as well as with constructs of memorial, community, and trauma. To utter what one is and is not, for these speakers, is crucial to their existence...
Part of me wants to say that nîtisânak is the literary equivalent of a middle finger, sporting chipped black nail polish and waving in front of Nixon’s knowing smirk. At times it is, directing justifiable anger and irreverence towards racist, transphobic, and homophobic institutions, perceptions, and people.
