There are two kinds of people in this world, as the saying goes. Michael DeForge uses this premise, normally the setup for a joke, to engage in some nimble psychedelic riffing with results more bleak than funny.
Haiti occupies an important place in the consciousness of the Americas. Formerly known as St. Domingue, it became independent in 1804 when its former slaves defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, the French general’s first major military defeat.
Panther, by cartoonist Brecht Evens, is a colourful and sombre psychological thriller about the troubling relationship between a small girl and a fantastical creature.
The Company of Crows begins with thirteen-year-old Veronica Reid and her father driving to the Laughing Willows Trailer Park where their family will spend the summer, her father commuting from the city on weekends. It’s a spot where the family can get away, and escape is a prominent thread throughout the book.
In his introduction to A View from the Porch, Avi Friedman espouses his “firm belief that homes and neighborhoods are first and foremost about people.” This view unites the collection of twenty-two essays, and makes his subject – the often-rarefied spheres of architecture and design – highly accessible.
Teaching Plato in Palestine opens with a bold thesis: “Can philosophy save the Middle East? It can.” It’s an ambitious statement, but McGill philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel’s real objective is slightly humbler: he makes the case that philosophy can offer a language to help communities in conflict find common ground to overcome their differences.
Twenty-eight. That’s the number I can’t get out of my head. There are a lot of figures and statistics in Wade Rowland’s cir de cœur for the decline to near-terminal status of the once proud and nation-defining CBC, but for this reader the one that jumped off the page and put it all in perspective appears in a breakdown of the comparative per capita subsidy for public broadcasting among countries who have such things.
The written histories of cities usually tell the big stories, hashing out biographies of visionary men building things and founding things and fighting one another for the spoils. In Beyond Brutal Passions, Mary Anne Poutanen delves into the details to create a portrait of Montreal’s early nineteenth-century prostitutes, scouring city archives for moments when the lives of these mostly forgotten women intersected with official public record.