ow can we stop parenthood from being an exclusively female responsibility so that mothers can thrive ...
By Emily Raine
Non-Fiction
Péan tells these stories without a sense of outrage or anger, because he’s writing as a Quebecer, with a sense of sometimes uneasy but always real belonging, and it is this sense that permeates Taximan from beginning to end.
By Vince Tinguely
Context is everything. If there’s anything to be learned from watching the news in the age of Trump (and there’s a lot), it’s the peril of reading about and reacting to world events divorced from their historical nuances. Mike Mason’s Turbulent Empires: A History of Global Capitalism since 1945 might help.
By Emily Raine
In this intricately layered book, a cross-genre narrative encompassing memoir, biography, goodbye letter, and poetic socio-historic treatise stretching from Vancouver to Montreal, Erín Moure reminds us that memory transcends mortality, that in our rawest grief, love and reflection can offer the greatest shelters. The disclaimer upfront avows that “memory is a work of the imagination.”
By Cora Siré
Will Aitken does something remarkable in his new book: he brings together a keen critical eye and an open heart, and – in doing so – creates a unique hybrid of critical essay and memoir. And though Aitken begins with strong material – a classic play in a new translation by a major poet, staged by a renowned actor and director – it’s what he does with the material that is most striking.
By Peter Dubé
Bologna’s success is just one of several interesting stories in Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince’s engaging, if at times frustrating, Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators. The chapters, written by academics, journalists, and activists, delve into the “political side” of the question of how best to address the mobility needs of a city.
By Yutaka Dirks
As editor Andy Brown sets out in the foreword of this collection of essays and interviews, BDQ refers to Quebec comics or bande dessinée québécoise, just as manga refers to comics from Japan. The collection is divided into four time periods, with the longest section devoted to “The Nineties,” evidently an ebullient period for sequential art, particularly in Montreal.
By Heather Leighton
This playful nihilism roots Jonah Campbell’s writing in Eaten Back to Life, a collection of forty-four short essays, each a rambling meditation on food, booze, and philosophy. It’s the follow-up to 2012’s Food and Trembling, also from Invisible Publishing, and both volumes cull pieces from Campbell’s long-running blog, Still Crapulent After All These Years.
By Emily Raine
In Wrestling with Life, his stirring memoir written with Richard King, George Reinitz looks back on a life coloured by both tragedy and triumph. His story reveals the horrors of Auschwitz, the loss of family, struggles in a new country, and achievements won through hard work, determination, and an open heart.
By Gina Roitman
But behind the lofty reasons for establishing a national park – preservation of the environment, educational opportunities – are the coarse politically and economically motivated attempts at creating “a coherent national story,” some of them as cringe-worthy as they are fascinating. It is this forging of a national story that Claire Elizabeth Campbell, associate professor of history at Bucknell University, deciphers in Nature, Place, and Story.
By Leila Marshy
On the cover of Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids, a portrait of author Zebedee Nungak appears superimposed on a photo of what Hydro-Québec calls “the giant’s staircase.” This spillway for the Robert-Bourassa Dam on the La Grande River boasts ten steps blasted from bedrock that each exceeds the span of two football fields. It is a tourist attraction of the James Bay region – symbolic of the monumental scale and technological prowess of a power-generating system that the Quebec government trumpeted as “the Project of the Century” when announcing plans to build it in 1971. For the Inuit of Nunavik, however, the giant’s staircase conjures up the provincial Goliath that once threatened their homeland in northern Quebec with proposed hydroelectric installations on the Great Whale and Caniapiscau Rivers.
By Louise Abbott
Smitten by Giraffe is very readable, even for those who don’t gravitate towards books about science. It can feel disjointed, jumping as it does from Dagg’s research to her feminist activism and back again, but it is a memoir, after all: life doesn’t move in a straight line, especially for trailblazers.
By Sarah Lolley