Christian Guay-Poliquin’s second novel The Weight of Snow, winner of the Governor General’s Award as well as three Quebec literary prizes after it was published in French in 2016, has just appeared in English, translated by David Homel. Part dystopian survival tale, part existentialist character study, it’s a compelling read with a minimalist style that masks some heavy-duty themes.
Fog has some ingredients – a finely detailed setting, a strained friendship between two young men – that point to the novel’s potential as a suspenseful work about the lost men of a neighbourhood.
Gégoire Courtois’s novel The Laws of the Skies conducts a visceral experiment with both narrative and human nature. It removes all prospect of hope from the outset, then creates a spectacle of waiting for forewarned deaths to occur, rather than generating suspense about whether or not they will.
My friend picked up Jan Zwicky’s The Experience of Meaning for me on the morning I had what I thought might be the first signs of labour. Were these period-like cramps early contractions, I wondered? What is labour and how do you know when are you in it? It’s a question thick with meaning; reading Zwicky’s book in this liminal time changed the way I thought about and sought to answer this question.
Does nationalism make us small, even if we try to confine it to coffee, football, and grilled meat? Why didn’t Communism make us better? Why is ownership fatal while belonging is salvific? Who exactly is supposed to forgive you when you leave home? Do all children more or less consciously live out an allegiance to their parents’ beliefs? And are the contradictions between the remembered past and the necessary present impossible to reconcile?
The journalist/academic/overqualified intellectual who takes a service job and writes a mildly politicized memoir about it has become a genre unto itself. Walmart’s well-publicized crappy labour practices and hokey bluster make it an obvious choice for this kind of project (Barbara Ehrenreich also worked at Walmart for 2001’s Nickel and Dimed, the gold standard of real-work-sucks literature).
"You’ve got to legalize it,” sang Peter Tosh in his famous song. On October 17, 2018, Canada took Tosh’s advice and did exactly that, legalizing cannabis throughout the country. High Time is a book that thinks about what might happen as a result of this fundamental change in Canada’s regulatory regime, when a drug that was widely available on the black market moves to being widely available by legal means.
The title of Michael DeForge’s new book, Leaving Richard’s Valley, hints at the deft mix of whimsical and sinister themes within: four animal friends must leave their home in an idyllic, cult-like community and face a Toronto mired in condo construction and gentrification. This is DeForge’s latest Drawn & Quarterly title, and it’s obvious why NPR calls the author “one of the comic-book industry’s most exciting, unpredictable talents.” Leaving Richard’s Valley dissects community, public space, and the dubious line between adventure and exile.
On a warm, spring Easter Day afternoon, I visited the offices of Black Rose Books to speak with the members of the collective – Dimitrios Roussopoulos, Nathan McDonnell, Clara-Swan Kennedy, and Dan G. Reid – about the past, present, and future of this Montreal literary institution.
