Getting Out of Hope, James Cadelli’s debut graphic novel, opens with a literal cliffhanger: Justin and his two friends, a trio of hippie dudes from “Halifax-ish,” are road-tripping across the country in a creaky RV, having pledged to “do anything and everything that’s fun, funny and dumb.”
In But When We Look Closer, her debut collection of eighteen short stories, Susan E. Lloy establishes a literary version of film noir, presenting us with characters whose suffering comes in many forms. In prose that fluctuates between stark and densely cinematic, Lloy explores the inner lives of the lost, the lonely, and the mentally ill.
Openness, dissection, reconstruction, and the wringing out of language are key to the newly released Planetary Noise. Celebrating one of North America’s most prolific and groundbreaking poets, this anthology also honours Moure’s ongoing project of embracing the fallibility of language and, by extension, of poetry itself.
Mary Soderstrom might just be my new favourite writer. She’s been writing for years, and we’ve been reading her for years, but meeting her reveals an energy that is contagious, and a humility that should be. Soderstrom in person is as unassuming, open, and delightful as she is erudite and elegant on the page.
Taking place nine years after the events of Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods flips everything we learned in the first volume on its head. When an alien robot related to Themis arrives in downtown London, followed by a dozen others who take up residence in the most populous cities in the world, it’s no spoiler to say that the results are a little bit destructive.
In the beginning, secrets were solicited through Web ads and in public places around Québec City. These became a series of monologues performed in a park called Chaque automne j’ai envie de mourir. This project turned into a book of short stories of the same name by Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon. The latest iteration, I Never Talk About It, is an experiment in translation that sets out to explore the marks translators leave on a text.
The title of Lesley Trites’s debut work serves as a useful metaphor for the relationship between the eleven short stories included in the collection. While the tiers of a cake may have different flavours, they also fit together, with unity often created by the decoration. Likewise, Trites’s stories echo with distinct styles and voices.
It's the middle of the night. Your vessel: a worn, wooden, overcrowded fishing boat. Even if you survive the Mediterranean’s choppy waters and reach foreign land, your life as a refugee is destined for danger. Given the risks, just how desperate would you need to be to climb aboard? This is the kind of question that floods your heart as you dip into Montreal author Ami Sands Brodoff’s timely new novel, In Many Waters.
In Suzanne, first published in French as La femme qui fuit (the woman who flees), Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s grandmother takes her place in a long roster of literary missing persons – from April Raintree to Amy, the Gone Girl – who form, through absence, the driving force of a novel. But rather than build her narrative around a grandmother-shaped hole, Barbeau-Lavalette has chosen to construct Suzanne Meloche in fiction.
For a book peopled with characters who feel life is empty of meaning, who rely on pilfered pills and large quantities of alcohol for fun, who spend money as fast as they can acquire it in a desperate search for some kind of satisfaction, Listening for Jupiter and its denizens are unexpectedly sweet and appealing.
A first novel without a single misstep, In a Wide Country showcases Robert Everett-Green’s unfaltering ability to fashion resonant set pieces from the raw materials of human memory – a striking image, a telling object, a colour, a snippet of dialogue, and healthy doses of hope and humiliation.
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s newest novel Winter Child draws embodied affect from the reader like poetry, and is so deeply personal that it almost reads like creative non-fiction. Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s words aren’t obscured by smoke or mirrors; instead, she depicts a complex constellation of relations among three generations of a Cree-Métis family, and all its present love and strain.
