Though it’s only one day long, the Word on the Street Festival packs in the special guests and artfully highlights local talent. Ending with the East Coast Literary Awards, this is an unofficial literary week in Halifax. Our powerful poet laureate El Jones releases her debut book Thursday night, and reads at WOTS on Sunday. […]
Literary
Posted inArts + Music
Literary awards season
the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia presents both The East Coast Literary Awards and the Atlantic Writing Competition, each geared towards celebrating local talent and exceptional reads. The East Coast Literary Awards jurors sifted through 64 submitted titles from all over the Atlantic provinces to come up with this tight little list of nine. Winners […]
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Half-heard, chapter 5
You can open Northwood’s plant- and petiole-covered basement window if you ever want to. You would just skulk down the narrow driveway between them and the neighbours when pedestrian and car traffic is quiet and drop yourself to the ground. The window’s latch has been broken since the day Trevor forgot his keys and had […]
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Half-heard, chapter 4
Welnot didn’t believe at all that Trevor Bognetti was capable of rubbing one out into the kitchen sink, but it was not like Bong-yetti was really much of a paragon of virtue or anything like that. Though an unassuming, pathological people-pleaser who would give a pint of his type O to anyone who asked, he […]
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Half-heard, chapter 3
Alex arrived home from a weekend visiting his parents outside of the city and was dropped off at an absurdly early hour before the onset of light, earlier than expected. And as far as anyone else knew he was totally alibi’d up, ruling him out as the one who would gun his Bavarian into A.’s […]
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Half-heard, chapter 2
A. was leaning over the sink when he turned up to Alex with that I-have-something-to-say tautness to his shoulders. “How was the weekend?” “Oh, it was fine. Just making it back now. Yours?” “Yeah, fine, fine, it was fine. Listen though Alex, can we talk about something?This morning I came into the kitchen,” A.’s face […]
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Half-heard, chapter 1
Past the endless acres of trees topped with iridescent red Honeycrisp, Cortland and Northern Spy rattling beneath bellies of blue skylines littered with low-hanging clouds along the banks of the Cornwallis River lies kms and kms of invasive weed: black campion, creeping buttercups, coltsfoot, lady’s thumb, wormseed, ragweed, toadflax, purslane, ox-eye daisy—expanses of unwanteds province-wide. […]
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Seconds chances
If you’ve ever missed an opportunity to get the autograph of noted comics writer/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley, you’ll get another chance when he visits Strange Adventures in Halifax on August 2 as part of the tour for Seconds, his new book about restaurant meals, house spirits and magical, mushroom-induced do-overs. Similar to the good fortune […]
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Animals with Sharpies
[iamge-1] Birds are racist and rejected, frogs are pathetic and rude, an anteater looks for a job, dogs are stupid and snakes need your help desperately in Dumontier and Farber’s beautifully painted and hand-lettered book. My main complaint is that it wasn’t 1,000 pages longer, I could have spent all day happily flipping and reading […]
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The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line
For fans of the Veronica Mars franchise, there’s a new mystery series picking up where the recent film leaves off. Ten years after graduating from Neptune, Veronica is working at Mars Investigations and is called in when a college girl goes missing during spring break; only to find out she has a connection to the […]
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Precious Thing
Precious Thing is the story of a close friendship gone horribly wrong. As teenagers, Rachel was shy and awkward until she met Clara, the friend everyone wanted but who chose her. As adults their situations reverse, and Rachel has everything she could have wanted, including a television career. Assigned to cover a missing person press […]
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Bark
In Bark, Lorrie Moore’s first collection in 16 years, everyone is middle-aged and in crisis. There is nothing cheerful about these characters, they are defeated and hopeless, and there’s a dark humour about their experiences. In “Debarking,” Ira, a recently divorced man forms a relationship with an eccentric and erratic woman with an unusually close […]
