Anna Leventhal

A random find in a free library box turns into a literary quest in Cesario Lavery's self-published graphic serial.

In Suzanne, first published in French as La femme qui fuit (the woman who flees), Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s grandmother takes her place in a long roster of literary missing persons – from April Raintree to Amy, the Gone Girl – who form, through absence, the driving force of a novel. But rather than build her narrative around a grandmother-shaped hole, Barbeau-Lavalette has chosen to construct Suzanne Meloche in fiction.

The opening catalyst of Sylvain Neuvel’s sci-fi thriller Sleeping Giants is a classic premise of the genre: something is where it shouldn’t – or can’t – be. A giant metal hand is accidentally found by an eleven-year-old girl in the Midwest. The hand appears to be a millennium older than the oldest known civilization in the Americas; the technology needed to create and move the hand barely exists now, let alone then.

My earliest exposure to Montreal’s literary scene came in the late 1990s, when, as a new arrival to the city, I started going to YAWP!, the spoken word/performance poetry/live music series hosted at various venues around town. Several of these events happened at Bistro4, an unassuming bar on Saint-Laurent around the corner from the apartment where I experimented with Stoicism and made my own soy milk.

Fans of Kate Beaton don’t need a review to tell them what to expect from Step Aside, Pops, the second collection from the author of the web-comic Hark! A Vagrant. Beaton’s followers have no doubt been eagerly anticipating another feast of lumpy presidents, sassy dames, and unaccountably bitter superheroes since Beaton’s first collection (also called Hark! A Vagrant) came out in 2011. Step Aside, Pops won’t disappoint, and those who have yet to discover her work have a hearty spread awaiting them.

In recent years, Mile End has endured more than its fair share of mythologizing. The supposed beating heart of Montreal’s artistic lifeworld, not to mention the first thing you think of when you hear “hipster” and “gentrification,” the neighbourhood is almost a caricature of itself, an imaginary Sesame Street dreamed into being by someone who reads exclusively VICE, Kinfolk, and Japanese post-rock blogs.

Montreal’s Véhicule Press has a reputation for publishing strong, modern, stylistically original fiction by new writers, and Anita Anand’s debut collection, Swing in the House and Other Stories, published under the revamped Esplanade Books imprint, is very much in keeping with that tradition.

Arcan approaches her subjects with the rigour of ritual. In her hands, hysteria takes the form not of a woman screaming uncontrollably in a fit or spasm but a woman returning again and again to the same subjects, circling them, ordering and disordering – a kind of OCD hysteria.

A new cartoon biography of Sanger, written and drawn by underground comics luminary Peter Bagge, attempts to rescue Sanger from the online maelstrom that has her putting the so-called undesirable and unfit under the sterilization knife.

Gollner’s latest publication, The Book of Immortality, is a sweeping, eclectic examination of a few of humanity’s deepest obsessions.

For generations of Eastern European Jews, Yiddish was the language of daily life – it expressed tragedy, boredom, affection, and tenderness, alongside all that great trash talk.

As one of Canada’s early modern poets, a woman who lived almost a century and spent the better part of it making some of the most startling, masterful writing we’ve seen, P. K. Page cut her own path.

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.

This is the kind of book I would love to be excited about. Casselman’s prose is full of righteous anger, directed at the numberless tentacles of patriarchy that have limited women’s social, economic, sexual, and personal freedom.

It takes a long time to read The Obituary, the eighth book from acclaimed writer Gail Scott, considering it’s a mere stripling of 162 pages. It’s a question of density, partly, but also of shifting gears – you might need to enter this book slowly, as you would a cold lake.

Subtle Bodies is a fascinating little book, a “fictional biography” that takes as its inspiration the life of René Crevel – French writer, idealist, communist, and occasional medium.