Every so often, a book comes along that shakes up the way we look at Montreal. Mauricio Segura’s first novel, Black Alley is such a book. Other authors have come at Montreal from a dreamier angle, adding new layers to the city’s mythology, but Segura does the opposite. What makes this book so affecting is that it feels so painfully real.
"You can’t be deep without a surface,” proclaims a cheeky lover in Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, and surface, or in this case, style, is the first thing to jump out at the reader in Nadine Bismuth’s newly translated collection of short stories, Are You Married to a Psychopath? (Just look at the striking title.)
I Am a Japanese Writer is Haitian-born author Dany Laferrière’s thirteenth novel, newly translated from the original French. Douglas & McIntyre is publishing the book this fall alongside a reissue of the author’s first novel, 1985’s How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. As part of a campaign to introduce the prolific francophone author to English-Canadian audiences, these two novels separated by twenty-three years share the distinction of being among the most provocatively titled in his catalogue.
