Quinn Mason

The stories in The Butcher of Park Ex and Other Semi-Truthful Tales, Andreas Kessaris’s book of autobiographical essays, feel pleasantly familiar. For Montrealers, the liberal use of local landmarks and street names helps contribute to the impression that we’ve been here before; over the course of the collection, he attends parties on Clark Street, peruses record stores on Ste. Catherine’s, and recalls childhood trips to the Fairview centre in Pointe-Claire and Les Galeries d’Anjou.

Of Vengeance hints at another layer of crime that forms the undercurrent of the novel. In deceptively simple prose, Kurtness mounts a poignant and timely argument about the danger of running headlong into the hands of technologies we don’t fully understand.

The stories in Vita, Susan E. Lloy’s second collection, are imperfect; in this book, that might be the point.