The protagonist of Heather O’Neill’s long-awaited second novel is nineteen- year-old Nouschka Tremblay: intelligent but directionless, poor despite her celebrity, and stuck in the well-worn rut of her relationship with her deadbeat twin brother, Nicolas
If the author is spectral, as Moure suggests in Secession/Insecession, then this book is doubly haunted, with the renowned Canadian poet translating and responding to an award-winning series of poetic texts by Pato published in Galicia as Secesión.
The collection’s 15 stories unfold cinematically through rapidly intercut glimpses of everything from the beginning of life to its end, making for a diverse spectrum of tone, point of view, and topic.
Morissette may have captured the utter loneliness of the dot-com generation, but he does not see the Internet as a source of isolation. Nor does he see New Tab as critical of our dependence on the virtual world.
Though I have never had the pleasure of formally meeting Gender Failure authors Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote, their voices and stories feel as warm and achingly familiar to me as those of my own family members.
There is something magical about picture books that manage to successfully tackle big life questions while also engaging and entertaining the early reader.
The private self is arguably one’s most authentic voice, if only for the truth of what is expressed before any social filter is applied. The written word, however, “outs” the author, muddying the distinction between private self and public persona. What happens to the author who knows his or her most personal reflections will be paraded in front of the public and even celebrated by that public? What happens to the writing? And what exactly is celebrity?
Young Canadians travelling abroad have a reputation for being pleasant, earnest, and occasionally prickly. Daniel Baylis is just such a Canadian, searching for social engagement, and meaning at a point in his late twenties when, for some people, working life can begin to look like a protracted actuarial exercise. The Traveller is the true story of the year Baylis spent volunteer-circumnavigating the world. Twelve months. Twelve countries. Twelve volunteer stints. Or that was the plan anyway.
It’s October 16, 1970, the morning the War Measures Act is brought into force in Quebec. Fifteen-year-old Gaétan Simard, who has just started working in a textile factory, arrives at the apartment of his older friend Luc Maheu, also a factory worker. They’re about to go for a beer at the tavern after Gaétan’s overnight shift the first week on the job, when unexpected visitors arrive.
Some readers of Bill Haugland may remember him from his tenure (from 1961 to 2006) as a journalist and reporter at CFCF-TV in Montreal. His profession has, evidently, given him the chops to shape a story succinctly and with empathy. His first two novels, Mobile 9 and The Bidding, are devoted to crime, danger, and mystery as experienced by his main character, television reporter Ty Davis. After the Rain is Haugland’s first short story collection, and each story skilfully builds suspense.
George Ellenbogen is a cartographer of the heart and of the memories it contains. In his memoir, A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighbourhood, he maps the circumstances leading to his family’s immigration to Montreal from Europe in the years prior to World War II.
