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.
The Headless Man is Montreal-based writer Peter Dubé’s twelfth book. His previous publications encompass novels, collections of short fiction, a novella, essays, three edited anthologies of gay and queer literature, and – like The Headless Man – a book-length prose poem. This pluralistic approach to form is mirrored in a polymath’s interest in the world.
When I ask Avasilichioaei whether the performance piece or the print versions of this work came first, she explains that the creation of different renditions of the same work often happens simultaneously, and these versions mutually impact one another so that it is ultimately irrelevant which one originated the process.
I must be honest: I was apprehensive about reading Songs for the End of the World. I worried about it being more coronavirus realness than I could handle. Instead, this New Normal we’re living in worked to reduce the tension in the novel.
Forty-five-year-old Margot, who’s “never risked anything greater than a found dollar on a lottery ticket,” has ditched her long-held career as an antique firearms dealer in an attempt to sidestep a midlife crisis.
Wendy’s back, bitches. You know Wendy, right? She’s like an artist? White girl, long hair, always wears black. She used to write that Montreal scene report blog?
Published by Exile Editions, Amun: A Gathering of Indigenous Voices is a collection of ten different stories set in multiple epochs and contexts, offering glimpses of lives that provide a wider view and understanding of Indigenous experiences.
After months of stasis and waiting, the protagonist of If You Hear Me muses, “Everything still happens in the present tense.” The stark uncertainty of her situation – her husband has spent months in a coma, hovering somewhere between life and death – has made imagining a future impossible, while the happiness of their previous normal life becomes harder and harder to remember.
Joe Adler, the narrator of Matt Mayr’s new novel Things Worth Burying, is a stand-up guy. If this sounds like an old-fashioned label, that’s because Joe’s an old-fashioned guy. A logger in a small Northern Ontario town, he’s spent his life set in his ways and stuck in one place.
A number of words come to mind while reading Bertrand Laverdure’s newest novel in English translation, The Neptune Room: beautiful, messy, morbid, poetic, and, at times, problematic.
