This new undertaking by QWF Award- winner Gollner belongs to a specialized category attached to writers with especially fervent followings. Can there be a devoted reader who hasn’t mused on how fun it would be to hang with her favourite writer for a couple of hours?
This volume brings together Indigenous traditional knowledge holders, Indigenous scholars, and settler scholars, whose varied contributions convincingly demonstrate that the biological character of North America has been shaped by millennia of intentional, knowledgeable landscape management.
As writer, activist, and podcaster Nora Loreto thoroughly explores in Take Back the Fight, organizing around the feminist cause in Canada has waned without large-scale social movement building. More perniciously, who and what is even considered “feminist” has been defined by corporate and political interests that would be reluctant to actually engage with feminism’s world-changing possibilities.
Charles R. Acland’s American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder picks apart the history and meaning of this universal, yet peculiar, phenomenon.
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.
Dani Jansen’s The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life is a YA novel that provides a compelling twist on a typical high school romance by introducing us to likeable characters and a well-crafted storyline.
If you’re looking for a hard sci-fi space-colony love story featuring giant ladies, then TITAN is the book for you. But maybe that’s not specifically what you’re after – in that case read TITAN for a pointed adventure that is incredibly deep and complex, telling more story in its 500-some trichromatic panels than could be told in 500 pages of text.
The dark side of Chicoutimi, an industrial town in the Saguenay, is the main character in Kevin Lambert’s first novel, recently translated into English by Donald Winkler as You Will Love What You Have Killed. Lambert, a Chicoute native, channels the resentment that fuelled his flight to Montreal in early adulthood into this vengeful, desperately violent novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the entire trilogy and was especially grateful for its rejection of most aspects of the conventional novel, but I also felt suspicious of an overarching cleverness that brushed against so many difficult questions, while at the same time brushing them off.
