Literary

“Mom, what’s a fag?” asks a five-year-old Rae. The answer from their evangelical Christian mother involves, expectedly, images of sin and hell and then the clincher—“and God made AIDS to punish gay people.” First Spring Grass Fire, Rae Spoon’s debut work of fiction, depicts many such instances of a child’s pain and confusion while growing […]

The power of excellent Twitterer (and writer, doye) Lynn Coady compels you, despite it being, like, 2am, to keep reading another of the addictive stories in Hellgoing. In “The Natural Elements,” Cal can’t connect with his irritating (and familiar, at least to me) daughter, and feels too much—for his sad-sack tenant, for his family, for […]

I can say without a doubt that Amber Dawn is the only author I’ve ever read who’s quoted Sylvia Plath while using a Sharpie to colour in the scuff marks on her Value Village stripper pumps. She’s also one of the bravest voices I’ve ever heard. How Poetry Saved My Life is an undeniably intense […]

Halifax poet Rachel Lebowitz’s new book, Cottonopolis, opens on a very gloomy Manchester. “Not today’s city, but ‘Cottonopolis,’ that city of smoke and grit and back-to-backs, that burst into being in the 19th century: the city of Mary Barton, the city of child labour, the city’s geraniums on the windowsills of the poor.” Here we […]

“The law was a folktale that’s changed every time it was told.” How do you follow up a novel like February? Well, if you’re Lisa Moore–coming off a Canada Reads win–you might want to challenge yourself. And what better way to do so than to take a genre typically unassociated with literary merit, and pump […]

Where was this book when I was 23? To women who take time out of their quarter-life crisis to watch Girls and cry-laugh, I highly recommend this self-deprecating memoir. There’s one catch: unless you’re of the belief that giggles are the best medicine, you can’t expect this book to actually help you in any traditional […]

The Shining Girls is the third novel from South African writer Lauren Beukes and her first real push at breaking into the mainstream. While her first two novels (Moxyland and Zoo City) were fun, cutting sci-fi stories set in Cape Town and Johannesburg, The Shining Girls is a thriller with a sci-fi trappings set in […]

For something so strange, House of Leaves made a big impact when it was published over 10 years ago, drawing in readers with its weird fonts, stranger formatting and narrative quirks like footnotes that went nowhere1. Mark Z. Danielewski’s latest book, The Fifty Year Sword, shows that he’s still capable of crafting a unique puzzle-box […]

Originally performed as a monologue, Confessions may appear to speak to a very specific, minority audience, but it’s this kind of misconception he book challenges. As Wearing comes to understand as an adult, “So long as the rest of society can get over it, the ‘gay’ part doesn’t matter nearly so much as the ‘parent’ […]