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?
It’s 2020, and you can find everything you need – and tons of stuff you don’t – on the internet. For Alison Rowley, professor of Russian history at Concordia University, the stuff she’s after features images of a shirtless Vladimir Putin riding a bear, catching a tan, or wading hip-deep into a freezing Siberian river.
Aquino, a trailblazer in her own right, understands how to synthesize other people’s stories with conscious grace. Each chapter contains detailed glances into the routines, personalities, and idiosyncrasies of its subject while simultaneously covering their whole lifespan, all in eight to ten pages.
In this collection of comic strips, as in the previous three, Delisle, a stay-at-home dad, makes some questionable parenting decisions involving his children, Louis and Alice. In this final book, Delisle’s children are obviously older, and as life would have it, both children have developed their own interests.
Prize-winning Cree and Algonquin painter and poet Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau wrote and published her debut novel, Ourse bleue, in 2007 – the first to be published by an Indigenous woman in Quebec. Blue Bear Woman is, however, her second to be translated into English, and finely so by award-winning translators Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli. Published by Inanna Press, the novel traces the seemingly easy and meandering journey the narrator, Victoria, makes to visit relatives and piece together her family story. It also makes plain her desire to resolve the enigmatic death of her Great-Uncle George, who went missing in 1953 on his hunting expedition during a period of starvation.
Lucas Harari’s debut graphic novel, Swimming in Darkness, has all the markers of a debut by a talented, creative, smart young dude. It’s full of promise as the first movement in a career with potential. If you like work in a noir-influenced genre that takes place in a mysterious location filled with freaky locals and conspiracies, then this is for you.
This latest book from the prolific and thoughtful novelist and non-fiction writer Mary Soderstrom considers instances of imperfect cleavage. So-called frenemy nations, she writes, are separate states with “so much in common they might seem like unidentical twins.”
