Sue Carter Flinn

[image-4]Published February 07, 2008.The Book of Other PeopleZadie Smith (edited)(Penguin)If you’re a commitment-phobe who likes to be sure of an author before putting out cash, this book of short stories serves as a fantastic sampler of contemporary authors and comic artists. The premise is simple: Editor Zadie Smith (White Teeth) asked 23 contributors for stories […]

Get It Ripejae steele(Arsenal Pulp Press)The best parts of jae steele’s entertaining vegan cookbook, Get It Ripe, are what’s missing from its pages: No judgmental preaching and lists of expensive ingredients that you’ll never find in Halifax anyway. steele, a registered holistic nutritionist, spends a good chunk of the book breaking down food choices, nutrition, […]

The LearnersChip Kidd(Simon & Schuster)Chip Kidd is one of North America’s most famous graphic designers, named in Time’s top-100 most influential people. Best known for his DC Comics publications (he’s obsessed with Batman), Kidd is an author, too: His hilarious first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, is set in a 1950s American college where naive narrator […]

Krazy!Curated by Bruce Grenville(Douglas & McIntyre)Pop culture fans don’t need to travel past the Rockies to enjoy KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime+Comics+Video Games+Art, an exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery running until September 7. Although the institution, which invited six curators to select works (including Seth, Art Spiegelman and Tim Johnson—who directed the famous 3D […]

Jerome: The Historical Spectacle Ami McKay (Gaspereau Press)Jerome, in production at Two Planks and a Passion Theatre until Sunday, is a juggernaut of Nova Scotian talent: The play’s written by Ami McKay (The Birth House), and stars Zuppa Circus’s Ben Stone and Susan Leblanc-Crawford. Now Jerome is published by Gaspereau Press, the creator of books […]

SlashSlash with Anthony BozzaHarper Collins’Tis the season when publishers load our holiday-gift plates with rock ’n’ roll autobiographies like Marianne Faithfull’s (this one’s too cold) and Ron Wood’s (too old). As far as salacious, dirty stories go, Slash is just right. I don’t want to read how the Crüe lads degraded legions of female groupies; […]

In a MistDevon Code(Invisible Publishing)I could have sworn Devon Code was American, not from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The now Toronto-based writer’s debut collection of short stories would fit nicely beside John Updike or Raymond Carver. In fact, Code’s paired-down stories are reminiscent of 1970s American “dirty realism.” While reading these meticulously constructed and intelligent stories, […]

FallingAnne Simpson(M&S)The first sentence of Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Anne Simpson’s novel begins with a fall. Teenager Lisa tumbles off a four-wheeler, her body pinned underneath in a small stream while her brother, Damien, drunk on swimming and sun, dozes nearby. A year later, Damien and his mother Ingrid travel to Niagara Falls, a place that […]

Big White KnucklesBrian Tucker(Vagrant Press)It’s a testament to Brian Tucker’s writing that I had to put White Knuckles down several times. Not because it’s a terrible book—not at all, but because Tucker’s bloody, squishy, crunchy fight scenes are wincingly vivid. Lucky for me, Tucker isn’t afraid to deploy his sharp sense of humour too, which […]

I TaniaBrian Joseph DavisECWI always thought that it would be a great idea for an author to provide a soundtrack to accompany a novel and then I found one, on brianjosephdavis.com. As much as I approve of Funkadelic and Chrome, his music choices left me as cold as his experimental “highly fictionalized true story,” I, […]