Literary

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 […]

Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy (all three books are being released this year). One back cover blurb compares VanderMeer to Stanley Kubrick and it’s easy to see it with VanderMeer’s distant but unsettling writing style. Content-wise he’s closer to Lovecraft, with his characters slowly breaking down as they […]

Poetry is renegade. Poetry is sex. Poetry is rebel. Poetry is Amber Dawn’s first love. Her sophomore book, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (Arsenal Pulp), brings the award-winning author to Halifax for the first time, reading with Kaleigh Trace, author of the forthcoming Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned To Talk […]

In her latest novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi uses loose allusions to fairy tales and folklore to examine race in mid-century America. It’s 1953 and Boy Novak is a young white woman escaping an abusive father. After fleeing to a small Massachusetts town she marries Arturo Whitman, a local jeweler, and becomes stepmother to […]

Publishing industry insider Alena Graedon’s debut novel The Word Exchange invokes modern Luddite disgust with Facebook and paranoia about Google Glass. Advertised as “a dystopian novel for the digital age,” Graedon pens a high-data NYC satire depicting industry and cultural wars between high-tech behemoth Synchronic and The North American Dictionary of the English Language. Synchronic, […]

For all intents and purposes, humour is unexplainable. And so, when it comes to making art, it’s a dangerous tool. Though if one can learn to manipulate it well, humour can unlock all sorts of impossible spaces. It can function as a key to topics, feelings and ideas that remain otherwise beyond limits. So it […]

In Be Safe I Love You, Lauren returns from duty in Iraq in time to spend the holidays with her family. From rural New York and a talented singer, she enlisted to provide for her family, especially her younger brother Danny. Despite calls from an army psychologist and hints from Lauren’s behaviour, nobody wants to […]

If you’re into Lydia Davis, you’ll find exactly what you’d expect to in Can’t and Won’t, her first collection since Collected Stories was published five years ago. If you’re not, here’s what you need to know: her stories aren’t really stories, they’re snippets; usually have no characters beyond the “I” (the speaker); the majority are […]

This first collection of poetry from Halifax author Richard Norman is refreshingly diverse and consistently bracing. Norman pairs themes of subjectivity with scientific advancement, personal anecdote with ancient myth, and exotic geography with inner landscapes, resulting in poetry that is multifaceted and expansive. Many of the poems zig-zag their way towards an understanding then suggest […]

In Maria Mutch’s debut, Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours, she details her life between the hours of midnight and 6am during the two years her son, Gabriel, rarely slept. Gabriel, who has autism and Down syndrome, loves jazz music and stopped speaking around five years old. As Mutch cares […]

Wonderbook is the creative writing textbook you wished you’d had as a teenager. Rather than dictating rigid rules, it encourages play and creativity: instead of charts and diagrams it uses pictures of gangly monsters and abstract paintings to illustrate its points. This fits, as Wonderbook is aimed at sci-fi and fantasy writers, and also because […]

Late last year Jason Guriel’s review of Memorial, a loose translation of The Illiad by Alice Oswald, became the grounds of a lit crit wrestling match. Poet-critic Helen Guri took Guriel down, calling the review “dismissive,” “snide,” and anti-feminist. Poet-critic Steward Cole picked Guriel back up, calling Guri’s review “violently distorting.” And then on Twitter […]