The legend of Lynda Barry began, for me, when I heard that Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, refers to her as “the Funk Queen of the Galaxy” – and even asked her to marry him.
By Nina Pariser
Reviews
In the Jewish tradition, fragments of worn-out holy books are not discarded when they are past use; instead, they are buried in a cemetery or subterranean storage room. In these underground genizot, the name of God is protected from destruction. The holy fragments – sheymes – provide Elizabeth Wajnberg, a child of Holocaust survivors, with a powerful metaphor for the recollections she patches together in her memoir.
By Sarah Woolf
When author and activist June Callwood was asked to provide some words of wisdom for aspiring writers, she responded, “Read, read, read. Forgive your parents.” Blind Spot, by Laurence Miall, is the story of a man who cannot follow the last part of that advice.
By Rob Sherren
The epigraph to Jon Paul Fiorentino’s I’m Not Scared of You or Anything is a quotation from comedian Andy Kaufman: “I never told a joke in my life.” It’s a code of conduct Kaufman undoubtedly followed. He was a prankster and a trickster – audiences sometimes wouldn’t know whether he was performing or not. His characters were strange and childlike, uncomfortable, completely open … and funny.
By Deanna Radford
Chez L’arabe, the debut short story collection of National Post columnist Mireille Silcoff, establishes its homegrown credentials early on. Not two pages in, readers will encounter Mount Royal, chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges, potholes, and the narrator’s assumption that “all Montreal Arabs [are] Lebanese,” a throwaway line designed to set up a not-so-surprising revelation about the national origin of two minor characters.
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zra Pound wrote, in an early poem, “Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection— / We shall get ourselves rather ...
By Bert Almon
Winter expands her focus well beyond gender identity to study other triggers of alienation, including ageing, homelessness, and poverty. Stunning beauty intertwines tough emotional truths, while sucker-punch endings leave you reeling. Meanwhile, an oddly alluring hue of loneliness tinges the collection and leaks into her non-fiction title.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
Kim Thúy is a marvellous storyteller, full of energy, vibrant and animated, quite unlike the jewel-like precision and restraint of her writing.
By Elise Moser
For all its advice on effective time-management and organizational skills, The Organized Mind also makes room for serendipity. The more information we have easy access to, the more important it becomes not only to filter out what we don’t need to know, but also to figure out what we want to know. According to Levitin, “the twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection.”
By Joel Yanofsky
Speaking Out on Human Rights is a powerful response to the right-wing backlash against human rights commissions and tribunals. In this readable book, lawyer and McGill University lecturer Pearl Eliadis details the positive contributions these commissions have made to the advancement of human rights and points the way forward to strengthening these important institutions.
By Yves Engler
British explorers who ventured into the Arctic were a stubborn sort. Though many of them possessed the unrelenting tenacity and unstoppable work ethic memorialized in song, it was the nearly universal refusal to change their ways that truly defined European seekers of the Northwest Passage.
By Dru Oja Jay