How many people once played in a band, tried their hand at writing songs, and eventually let the whole music thing fall by the wayside – but have a nagging feeling that someday they’d like to take it up again? No doubt the number is too high to count, but Montreal writer Eric Siblin decided to take up a personal music revival in earnest, and to write about the experience. Studio Grace is an intimate, at times exhaustive account of Siblin’s journey in writing and recording an album.
We’re not likely to get a more thorough biography of Calixa Lavallée than Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Christopher Thompson’s huge and meticulous account of the life and times of the composer of “O Canada.” It’s exhaustively researched, even if sometimes the bigger picture is lost in the denseness of facts.
While short story collections tend to feature a relatively even style and emotional palette, Daydreams of Angels offers readers a wide spectrum of both. In these twenty stories sparkling with wit and fantasy, O’Neill gives us a variety of genres, including heartfelt coming-of-age stories, miniature historical fictions, allegories, tall tales, and even literary cover versions. And while these stories largely stray from the gritty realism of her novels, they nonetheless retain the powerful emotional resonance of those works.
Breathing Lessons is a timely novel. It feels contemporary, and – as an account of the intimate life of Henry Moss, identified as a “homosexual everyman” on the back cover – it deals with questions that could only be broached now, when gay people are making their way into the social mainstream and facing the issues that this inevitably involves.
Music must float in the air over Montreal, a city that has nurtured many a lauded performer from the late classical pianist Ellen Ballon to Arcade Fire and Nikki Yanofsky. So it is only natural that music has been the central focus of a number of books by local authors, including most recently Mary Soderstrom’s River Music.
In 1990, Paul Almond (OC) retired from his career as a television and film screen writer, director, and producer and embarked on a new career path as a novelist. His Alford Family Saga is a series of eight historical novels chronicling the arrival of his ancestors in 1880 to the Gaspé region of Quebec, and their subsequent settlement there. Each novel follows a different male protagonist along the Alford family line and offers stories about personal struggle, overcoming the odds, and love set against the backdrop of historical events.
In recent years, Mile End has endured more than its fair share of mythologizing. The supposed beating heart of Montreal’s artistic lifeworld, not to mention the first thing you think of when you hear “hipster” and “gentrification,” the neighbourhood is almost a caricature of itself, an imaginary Sesame Street dreamed into being by someone who reads exclusively VICE, Kinfolk, and Japanese post-rock blogs.
Her memoir, The Permanent Nature of Everything, is a reflection on her early years from birth until her first year of high school. It also involves a great deal of historical excavation, an attempt at uncovering the lives of her parents and grandparents.
Pain and Prejudice is a rare account of one woman’s scientific career. Messing has an easy style – personal and personable, earnest and engaging. The book is a lively portrait of a committed scholar doing science with and for people
