Literary

And it came to pass that there was a pig. It was an animal that was unclean, and which belonged to a Roman soldier. It was his wicked servant. In its pained mind it sought me, a woman—with talents I did not yet know of. It found me on the street as I walked home […]

We’ve all got our vices, and for some of us it’s YA novels. No judging. But even if you aren’t looking for your next hit of teenage-vampire love, Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown will still hook you. Sure, there’s a vampire love interest and the pacing is weird (every other chapter is either […]

Fans of cult hit The Room in all its rose petal-strewn, surreal glory, would do well to dive into actor Greg “Oh, Hi, Mark” Sestero’s mind-boggling and hilarious account of the making of, and his bizarre and intense friendship with broken man/impossible puzzle/The Room director Tommy Wiseau. It certainly helps to have seen the movie […]

We are truly living in the era of the domestic thriller. I can’t very well talk about The Silent Wife without comparing it to the (also) bestselling Gone Girl, both for the (sort of) shared subject–victimized wife becomes murderous villain; adulterous husband gets his due–as well as the he-said/she-said format. It works well in both […]

“If only the heart had antennae to tap/out the way to the safest places.” Cadeau’s sophomore poetry collection is, as her name suggests, a little gift. A poet whose hushed phrases read with a fluidity and clarity approaching effortlessness, she instills in each poem in a sense of dark whimsy, a gentle crumbling of those […]

An epic technological thriller set in the not-distant-at-all future, The Circle is named after a Facebook-meets-Google (though the author claims no relation) hands-in-every-pie computer company in Silicon Valley that has completely monopolized the e-sphere. Set completely on “campus,” this novel has a slow buildup but a reader-is-wiser eeriness from the get go. We follow newbie […]

Adding to the generation of books based on blogs is Alice in Tumblr-land by Tim Manley, based on his Tumblr Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings. Filled with illustrations and matching blurbs a few sentences long, the book reimagines familiar fairytales like Peter Pan, who becomes internet-famous, and Rapunzel, who chops off her hair. Despite their new […]

It’s one of the most basic and enduring arguments of our time: creationism versus Darwinism; intelligent design versus evolution. In Lauren Grodstein’s newest novel, it is precisely this argument that is taken up, over and over, from the perspectives of its protagonist, a professor of ethics in biology who offers a popular (though highly contested) […]

Childhood is one of Taiyo Matsumoto’s favourite themes and his manga often depict worlds both whimsical and slightly sinister. Sunny, his latest work to be published in English, is more down to earth than his past series. This fits, since Matsumoto is drawing from his own childhood—specifically a time when he lived at a group […]

Canadian urban fantasy author Kelley Armstrong starts a new series with Omens, featuring Olivia, a wealthy young woman with a perfect life until it all predictably falls apart. In this case it’s because she, and the world, learn she was adopted from serial killers serving life sentences. She escapes to Cainsville, Illinois, a small town […]

This spring the Friends of the Halifax Common released a collection of all-new poetry inspired by and in tribute to the 250th anniversary of Halifax’s iconic green space(s). With a detailed introduction of “the common” as a concept born in 11th-century Britain through to the modern, local iteration, the collection speaks to its enclosed poets’ […]

The marriage of form and content has never been healthier than in this darkly humourous rewriting of biblical and mythological parables. Rage of Poseidon brings a 21st-century perspective to iconic stories, from a first-person account of Athena’s drunken escapades to a three-frame retelling of Leda and the Swan to a single-frame that begins “So Jesus […]