First published in 2008, the small, sparsely rendered story of a nine-year-old boy’s attempts to come to terms with the death of his five-year-old brother did more than just launch the comics career of Jonquière-born Girard; it became a word-of-mouth cult item inspiring a rare devotion in its readers. People press Nicolas on friends, give it as a gift, revisit it in times of need.
Fifty years after the publication of Leonard Cohen’s groundbreaking and notoriously difficult postmodern novel, poet David McGimpsey reflects on its enduring relationship to the city of Montreal.
After winning several prestigious awards in its original French, Catherine Leroux’s second novel, The Party Wall, expertly translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, has been shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize and for a Governor General’s Literary Award for translation. And deservedly so.
The key to understanding the French, according to Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau, authors of The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed, is to consider the gulf between communication and conversation. According to the Canadian duo, the French do not communicate; they converse. And when they do so, they may deliberately provoke controversy, they may avoid admitting they don’t know something, and they may even say no when they mean yes
Montreal artist and curator Anne Golden’s debut novel, From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire, is a remarkable depiction of the heady early years of video art in 1970s Montreal.
Poitras takes her reader into the anachronistic world of present-day calèche drivers, each with their own sad story, at a moment when their frozen-in-time way of life faces immediate danger. Harnessing the language and conventions of the spaghetti western, the Montreal-based author and journalist dips into the genre’s stable of tropes for insight into the machinations underlying the urban landscape we inhabit.
In just over a hundred pages, All That Sang is many things. It is a tale of two cities, opening with a subtle, cinematic description of the rooftops of Paris before leading the reader down into the streets, evoking a morning’s gathering activity. The other city is Toronto, which appears from time to time, usually in counterpoint to the French capital.
Tragedy can result from the most mundane detail in life,” a dramatist remarks about his own tale, in one of the nine stories in Montreal-based Xue Yiwei’s Shenzheners. One can easily imagine Xue making the same comment about his short fiction collection, originally written in Mandarin Chinese, and his first to be published in English.
Shhh ... silence is golden, so they say. No one puts this to the test like Candy, the coquettish auctioneer’s daughter in Mark Foss’s second novel – a darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and devotion.
