Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic is a fascinating read for anybody interested in Canadian domestic history and cooking.
By Mélanie Grondin
Non-Fiction
Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life, edited by Concordia University professor Sherry Simon, collects scholarly perspectives on the multilingual city, ranging from historical and political to activist and creative points of view.
By Klara du Plessis
What does it mean when images of femininity are staged as near clones or repeating figures? That’s the question novelist and UQAM professor Martine Delvaux tackles in Serial Girls: From Barbie to Pussy Riot, recently translated into English by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.
By Emily Raine
Songs Upon the Rivers engages readers in an important and timely conversation about the legacies of French colonialism in North America, but its unorthodox methods and questionable historical approach should leave readers with more questions than answers.
By Émilie Pigeon
Considering the complexities and difficulties surrounding questions of Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity in Canada, few would have the expertise and courage required to write “A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues.” But this is exactly what Métis author and educator Chelsea Vowel has done.
By Daniel Rück
ro wrestling is inherently homoerotic. As a boy watching wrestling on TV, the sight of these muscle-bound, ...
By Malcolm Fraser
The hockey arena has fairly humble and perhaps predictable origins. Sheds erected over naturally occurring ice surfaces provided shelter and comfort for recreational skating and other amusements, eventually evolving into more robust (though largely nondescript) buildings. Initially it may seem difficult to get excited by the subject. But Howard Shubert’s book Architecture on Ice: A History of the Hockey Arena is beautifully illustrated with a carefully curated selection of paintings, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings
By Valerie Minnett
The desire to solve the mystery of the Franklin expedition’s loss has infected investigators like a virus. Potter himself has been seized by this infection, but he is still able to record the patient histories of those swept up in a contagion that has produced outbreaks for more than a century and a half.
By Douglas Hunter
Michael Harris’s Field Notes: Prose Pieces 1969–2012 begins with the story of an ill-fated trip to the Hamptons where
“a well-intentioned and fastidious cleaning-person” discarded ten years of his writing. Two books of poetry and over four hundred pages of prose by the Montreal writer, editor, and teacher were consigned “to the keening atten- tion of the seagulls circling above the local Long Island landfill.”
By Mike Spry
In the 1970s, Marguerite Andersen compiled one of the first feminist anthologies in Quebec, Mother Was Not a Person. Many books later, on the cusp of her ninth decade, she picked up her pen again to reconsider one mother in particular: herself.
By Elise Moser
From the very first page, Police Wife sensitizes readers to the horrors of domestic violence, highlighting the extra challenges faced by victims of officer-batterers, such as when 911 calls are answered by the aggressor’s colleagues.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
The fascinating story of how contemporary activists learn from each other and disseminate their knowledge is still being unravelled by acad- emia, as well as by social movements themselves. In Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements, Aziz Choudry,an activist-turned-academic and professor in McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, pays homage to the intellectual work that is inherently produced and circulated when people get together to challenge oppressive systems.
By Patricia Boushel