Prez’s story is drawn from the author’s own experiences. In 1969, nineteen-year- old Freeman was stopped by a white Chicago police officer. When Freeman argued that the stop was unconstitutional, the officer, Terrence Knox, became extremely aggressive, shouting racist epithets. He pointed a gun at Freeman’s head. There was a struggle, and Knox was hit in the arm by three bullets.
Heroine, Gail Scott’s classic feminist Montreal novel, balances on the border of these two eras. Gail, our narrator, soaks in the bath in a rented room in 1980, recalling her recent experiences as a young would-be militant during the heady days of separatist revolutionary fervour. As she remembers, she also reconfigures what happened, visiting and revisiting her relationships, her moods, and her own trajectory as both an observer and an actor in a time of personal and political upheaval.
Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair is Paterson’s third short story collection, and it demonstrates his ease with the form’s range. “Salut King Kong” is a quick hit – quirky and to the point. Even quicker and quirkier are postcard pieces like “Body Noises with the Door Open” and “Spring Training.”
Hollywood North paints a dark portrait of Trenton, Ontario. This institutional port town is a gateway to the Trent-Severn Waterway and Prince Edward County, and it has a storied history as an epicentre for tragedy. Author Michael Libling pushes his hometown’s reputation to the extreme, and he would have us believe it to be the township of Quinte’s own Bermuda Triangle, with a forever-burning creosote plant, tragic fires, unexplained plane crashes, wartime losses, train derailments, drownings (so many drownings!), and various traffic accidents.
The cover of Aphelia features an out-of-focus photograph of a young woman. In the gauzy light, few of her features are visible beyond an outline of shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and a smudge where her mouth should be. This haunting image neatly symbolizes the novel’s central character, whose name we never learn.
Georges Sioui’s Eatenonha: Native Roots of Modern Democracy promises to retell the history of Canadian democracy by tracing its origins back to Indigenous confederations that pre-existed the arrival of Europeans. It’s an exciting promise. Closely related to this effort is a second goal, which is to challenge the Canadian textbook histories that he finds grant an outsized role to the Hodenosaunee Confederacy and ignore the Wendat Confederacy almost completely.
Throughout modern history, the concept of hygiene has shifted, going from mere outward appearance (distinguishing the rich who had time and money to get their clothes washed from the poor who didn’t) to the idea of cleanliness for health (with the discovery of germs) before becoming an easily purchased sign of beauty and a daily routine.
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, the award-winning author of Grass, is known for both her work about the marginalized and for her manhwa, a South Korean comic style. Grass is a graphic work of non-fiction about a former comfort woman, Lee Ok-sun, during World War II.
Éric Mathieu’s The Little Fox of Mayerville is a coming-of-age tale that follows the life of Émile Claudel, a young outcast born into a small village in France in 1945. Although he exhibits many of the traits of a burgeoning genius, Émile is brought up in a traditional home where children are meant to be seen and not heard. Told through a series of vignettes of varying lengths comprised of both prose and poetic verse, the novel offers an intimate glimpse into the mind of a young boy who yearns to belong.
In Martin Lukacs’s The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent, the political and rhetorical interchangeability between the country’s two largest parties is shown to have never been as apparent as with the rise of the Trudeau brand over the past fifty years.
