Emily Raine

Mostafa Henaway’s book unspools around a brutal paradox: how can a person be at once essential and disposable? 

Unpacking the Personal Library offers a prismatic lens on how libraries speak.

Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir chronicles her two-year stint in the northern Alberta oil patch.

In Will Aitken's latest novel, a sumptuous cruise ship spirals into class war. 

Lisa Hanawalt's I Want You and Adrian Tomine's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist are works by artists at the height of their careers and powers.

It’s hardly news that “sharing economy” tech – Uber, Airbnb, gig services like Fiverr, sponsored social media content – is changing how we live and earn a living. But somehow their politics seem fuzzy. Are they democratizing the means of production or nudging hard-working folks out of steady jobs? Creating opportunities or entrenching new forms of control? Disrupting calcified service sectors or sidestepping labour laws? In short, are they freeing us or exploiting us?

The journalist/academic/overqualified intellectual who takes a service job and writes a mildly politicized memoir about it has become a genre unto itself. Walmart’s well-publicized crappy labour practices and hokey bluster make it an obvious choice for this kind of project (Barbara Ehrenreich also worked at Walmart for 2001’s Nickel and Dimed, the gold standard of real-work-sucks literature).

What is creativity, and how does it work? Is creativity something that one has or one does? Adrian McKerracher’s What it Means to Write: Creativity and Metaphor is a layered meditation on how metaphors for creativity respond to these kinds of questions, even as they strive to express them.

Manon Tremblay’s 100 Questions About Women and Politics digs into why achieving a balanced representation of men and women has been so difficult. The title is literal: the volume is framed as a hundred questions, followed by mini-essay responses that parse women’s participation in global government, as citizens and as officials.

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.

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.

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.

Shanghai Grand takes Grescoe and his readers far from Montreal – not only to a distant land but also to a very different time. Its story unrolls in the streets, nightclubs, luxury hotels, and shikumen lane courtyards of Jazz Age Shanghai.

Poitras takes her reader into the anachronistic world of present-day calèche drivers, each with their own sad story, at a moment when their frozen-in-time way of life faces immediate danger. Harnessing the language and conventions of the spaghetti western, the Montreal-based author and journalist dips into the genre’s stable of tropes for insight into the machinations underlying the urban landscape we inhabit.

Teaching Plato in Palestine opens with a bold thesis: “Can philosophy save the Middle East? It can.” It’s an ambitious statement, but McGill philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel’s real objective is slightly humbler: he makes the case that philosophy can offer a language to help communities in conflict find common ground to overcome their differences.

The written histories of cities usually tell the big stories, hashing out biographies of visionary men building things and founding things and fighting one another for the spoils. In Beyond Brutal Passions, Mary Anne Poutanen delves into the details to create a portrait of Montreal’s early nineteenth-century prostitutes, scouring city archives for moments when the lives of these mostly forgotten women intersected with official public record.