Chester Brown is an award-winning cartoonist and a two-time Libertarian Party of Canada candidate, but these days it’s his life as a john that’s getting the most attention. In his recent autobiographical graphic novel, Paying For It, he tells us about the twenty-three prostitutes he has been with since deciding to pursue paid sex in 1999.
It takes a long time to read The Obituary, the eighth book from acclaimed writer Gail Scott, considering it’s a mere stripling of 162 pages. It’s a question of density, partly, but also of shifting gears – you might need to enter this book slowly, as you would a cold lake.
Do not create anything,” famously wrote Bob Dylan in his poem “Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday”: “it will be misinterpreted. / it will not change. / it will follow you the rest of your life.”
Go into any bar of a certain type and you’re almost sure to see a guy like Spat Ryan. He’ll look like he’s been there for a while, sitting alone, but not so alone that he’s not compelled to voice his comments about all and sundry: the music, the weather, politics, women.
As Canadians, we pride ourselves on our national image as protectors of multiculturalism; H. Nigel Thomas’s new short story collection Lives: Whole and Otherwise offers a bleaker picture of our supposedly progressive nation. Thomas presents poignant, blunt, and hauntingly heartbreaking accounts of members of the Caribbean community in Montreal, many of whom struggle with the physically and emotionally frigid conditions of their new home.
The characters in Teri Vlassopoulos’s debut short story collection, Bats or Swallows, are trying to make sense of themselves and the world. Many are in that purgatory between adolescence and adulthood, when the security of childhood erodes and the ugly complexities of the self and human experience are revealed.
When you pick up a book whose cover motif is interlocking coffins and find that it is set in Croatia, you can bet there’ll be more than three deaths inside. True to the title, though, the three stories are about the poisoning of a golden and cherished child, a father’s blood-frothing deathbed address, and a mother who spent a decade dying.
Linda Leith’s memoir, Writing in the Time of Nationalism, records her stellar career: she pioneered the teaching and researching of Anglo-Quebec writers, worked to establish QSPELL (Quebec Society for the Promotion of English-language Literature) – later the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) – served as editor of Matrix magazine and various collections, wrote three novels and a number of academic papers, and undertook the organization of the cross-linguistic literary event Write pour écrire which ultimately led to her crowning achievement, the mammoth and much celebrated Blue Metropolis Festival.
Jewish mothers worry. This is a truth so universally acknowledged that it has not only become a cliché, it’s become a running gag. Even so, the joke behind the title of David Reich’s new autobiography – You Could Lose an Eye: My First 80 Years in Montreal – is not so much about his mother’s overbearing concern for Reich’s welfare, but how willing he has been to take her concerns to heart.
In her latest book, Mary Soderstrom – inspired first by the veritable world map of imported foods she saw at the Portuguese grocer’s as a child and then by a trip to Portugal decades later – sets her sights on the “little country with great ambitions.” Soderstrom’s story is a much-needed addition to the genre of historical non-fiction, in which Portugal remains largely unrepresented compared with its European neighbours.
When the AIDS epidemic in Africa exploded in the 1990s, global relief initiatives sought HIV-positive Africans to testify for their campaigns. Their recruitment, however, was frustrated by stigma. AIDS confessions often deeply upset social and familial hierarchies and many sufferers preferred to live in denial. The limited medical resources available at the time thus created a barter system in which victims who were more forthcoming banked on their stories for treatment, even as others were left to die.
