Sarah Woolf

Like the twenty-nine other pithy contributions, “Salut King Kong” is no longer than 1200 words. The stories are short and seldom (too) sweet; they showcase established talent as well as new voices. It’s a Montreal book timed perfectly for a Montreal metro ride.

Enter Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier’s masterful investigation into the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing. Originally published in French in 2013, this fascinating, carefully constructed volume has been translated with precision and grace by Debbie Blythe in time for April’s centennial.

In the Jewish tradition, fragments of worn-out holy books are not discarded when they are past use; instead, they are buried in a cemetery or subterranean storage room. In these underground genizot, the name of God is protected from destruction. The holy fragments – sheymes – provide Elizabeth Wajnberg, a child of Holocaust survivors, with a powerful metaphor for the recollections she patches together in her memoir.

The book features crisp and meticulously detailed black-and-white illustrations, and the whimsical, comedic, and occasionally surreal moments of the original story are particularly well served by the graphic novel form, making some scenes feel foreordained for a visual medium.