"I wish more food writers would write about going to the bathroom,” declares Lisa Hanawalt in her new comic book, Hot Dog Taste Test, shortly after giving her thoughts on the sanitary installations of a restaurant, “because it’s funny and interesting and it’s the inevitable result of all of this.” This encapsulates Hanawalt’s approach in this book: irreverent, funny, silly, and insightful.
Montreal writer Alice Zorn immortalizes this icon in her beautifully crafted second novel, Five Roses. Like the gigantic blue eyes of T. J. Eckleburg looking down on the Valley of Ashes, Zorn’s sign is a landmark that does service as a literary device.
There is a moment in childhood that first marks our awareness of the wider world, the moment we recognize what takes place beyond our own sphere. Our young selves are drawn to the narrative, to the images played and replayed on the news, to the hushed thrall of the grown-ups.
Our featured Montreal illustrator is Ohara Hale, a multi-disciplinary artist whose books for children include the five titles in her Who Did It? series.
My earliest exposure to Montreal’s literary scene came in the late 1990s, when, as a new arrival to the city, I started going to YAWP!, the spoken word/performance poetry/live music series hosted at various venues around town. Several of these events happened at Bistro4, an unassuming bar on Saint-Laurent around the corner from the apartment where I experimented with Stoicism and made my own soy milk.
Irish historians – and Irish people in general – are currently revisiting important moments in their national past as part of the hundred-year anniversaries of the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence and Civil War. Donald Akenson’s new book also seeks to revisit and revise a formative moment in the Irish past, albeit one that has been mostly forgotten: the emergence in the 1830s of a distinctly Irish variant of apocalyptic Evangelical Protestantism.
In the 1970s, Marguerite Andersen compiled one of the first feminist anthologies in Quebec, Mother Was Not a Person. Many books later, on the cusp of her ninth decade, she picked up her pen again to reconsider one mother in particular: herself.
From the very first page, Police Wife sensitizes readers to the horrors of domestic violence, highlighting the extra challenges faced by victims of officer-batterers, such as when 911 calls are answered by the aggressor’s colleagues.
