John Dunning's memoir, You’re Not Dead until You’re Forgotten, paints a portrait of a man who would have preferred to remain out of the public eye. Born in 1927 in Montreal’s Verdun suburb (“the Brooklyn of Montreal,” to hear him tell it), Dunning had a life marked by poor health, frequent automobile accidents, and a crippling stage fright that plagued him until his death in 2011. The memoir, unfinished at the time of his passing, has been collected by Bill Brownstein and bookended with testimonials from Brownstein and a coterie of industry names who owe at least part of their fame to Dunning, one-half of a pair dubbed “the Roger Cormans of Canada.”
Arcan approaches her subjects with the rigour of ritual. In her hands, hysteria takes the form not of a woman screaming uncontrollably in a fit or spasm but a woman returning again and again to the same subjects, circling them, ordering and disordering – a kind of OCD hysteria.
Chloe is a twenty-something bank teller with a broken heart. Anson, her charming but feckless boyfriend has walked out on her after freaking out at their housewarming party, where a guest arrived with mushroom-and-pot brownies. Now Chloe would rather mope at home in her pyjamas than show up at her dull job. Into this scenario enters a parrot – one capable of magic – and Chloe’s life takes a “fantastic” turn.
George Rideout’s Michel and Ti-Jean is the story of an imagined meeting between two great writers: Michel Tremblay and Jack Kerouac. The meeting takes place during an afternoon in a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, a few months before Kerouac’s death.
The script of Motherhouse tells a compelling story. It paints a picture of working-class Verdun during World War I and the impact the war had on the community, particularly the women at home, left to labour in the British Munitions Supply Factory.
It's the harvest season and the prolific illustrators and authors of Quebec have produced a bumper crop of beautiful and delightful picture books that go a long way to answering some of the many questions children ask us.
Mirrors and Mirages offers a refreshing glimpse into the inner lives of a cohort not yet well represented in Canadian fiction. In fact, believers of any faith are thin on the ground in CanLit, and the effort these characters make to balance their individual beliefs and the demands of their families and the culture around them is central to the story Monia Mazigh wishes to tell.
April, it seems, is not the cruellest month. That would be November. That is, if we’re to believe James Benson Nablo’s protagonist in his novel The Long November. The latest book to be published under Véhicule Press’s Ricochet imprint, The Long November is a noir, gritty, raw novel, but it’s not a mystery or a potboiler. It’s an anti-war novel, a rags-to-riches novel, a love story, and a coming-of-age story in oh so many ways. In short, it’s nothing you would expect.
“It’s easy to romanticize the sea,” writes Louise Carson in Mermaid Road. While the evocative seafoam colour of this hand-bound chapbook does well to immerse the reader in a romanticized feeling of the sea, the story emphasizes the practical considerations a mermaid and her family must make when getting by in the twentieth century.
To enter the world of Jacob Wren’s novel Polyamorous Love Song is to enter a bizarre yet compelling dreamscape, a parallel universe where everyone is an artist (regardless of whether they produce physical artwork or not) and where revolutionaries don mascot uniforms and risk death for their cause, the politics of which are left ambiguous.
Where do we draw the line between storytelling and lies? Can a good story veil (or protect) reality while revealing a larger truth? And what is the responsibility of the storyteller to his audience? In his second novel, The Goat in the Tree, Lorne Elliott – comedian, award-winning playwright, musician, and Hudson resident – playfully poses these questions, wrapping them in a tale about a storyteller whose talent for fabrication is his ticket to ride. To sweeten the plot, Elliott adds parables and fables as guideposts to the characters we meet along the way.
