John Goldbach’s third book, It Is an Honest Ghost, in some ways continues the formal and thematic explorations of his earlier work. The stripped-down prose and philosophical semi-speculation that marked his first story collection and his satirical noir novel The Devil and the Detective are present here, too. That noted, It is an Honest Ghost is no rehash; it provides new, and arguably more polished, takes on such concerns.
To beckon is to entice, to draw someone in. It may be an act of deception, but it is not an act of coercion. When someone is beckoned, he responds willingly. That is the difficult reality that lies at the heart of Matthew Murphy’s debut novel, A Beckoning War.
The opening catalyst of Sylvain Neuvel’s sci-fi thriller Sleeping Giants is a classic premise of the genre: something is where it shouldn’t – or can’t – be. A giant metal hand is accidentally found by an eleven-year-old girl in the Midwest. The hand appears to be a millennium older than the oldest known civilization in the Americas; the technology needed to create and move the hand barely exists now, let alone then.
The desire to solve the mystery of the Franklin expedition’s loss has infected investigators like a virus. Potter himself has been seized by this infection, but he is still able to record the patient histories of those swept up in a contagion that has produced outbreaks for more than a century and a half.
“I can’t do realism. I mean, it’s a lie,” Jacob Wren says with a laugh in his voice. Sitting across from me in a café in Mile-Ex, the prolific novelist and artist continues, “a book isn’t reality. Reality isn’t even reality.”
Michael Harris’s Field Notes: Prose Pieces 1969–2012 begins with the story of an ill-fated trip to the Hamptons where
“a well-intentioned and fastidious cleaning-person” discarded ten years of his writing. Two books of poetry and over four hundred pages of prose by the Montreal writer, editor, and teacher were consigned “to the keening atten- tion of the seagulls circling above the local Long Island landfill.”
Paul Up North is the eighth volume in the Paul series. Rabagliati says it might be the last, and if that turns out to be true, we’re leaving at an odd juncture. The new book disdains straight chronology to take a nostalgic trip back to the Olympic summer of 1976; Paul is an awkward, frequently surly adolescent discovering love in the Laurentians when he isn’t hiding out in his bedroom at home.
Translator Peter McCambridge is no ingénue to the art, having translated seven novels, all from Quebec. He directs the website Québec Reads and Baraka Book’s new imprint of Quebec literature in translation, QC Fiction.
"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.
