Literary

Sam Sutherland had the unenviable task of giving a coherent narrative of the early punk scenes across Canada. The result is Perfect Youth, an almost exhaustive account of the emergence of Canadian punk rock that covers everything from Newfoundland’s the Reaction to Regina’s The Extroverts to Victoria’s Dishrags. Perfect Youth doesn’t purport to be a comprehensive […]

First-time author and full-time geek Robin Sloan’s fast-paced new novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, is comfortably nestled between the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, a cramped and curious bookstore in San Francisco and a secret society in New York. On his website, Sloan claims “I wrote this book because it’s the one I wanted to […]

Williams’ debut novel, winner of the inaugural Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature, packs a solid educational punch and boasts an engaging plot. In 1974 Peter, heartbroken and guilt ridden, flees his urban home and the unbearable pressures and perpetual disappointment of his successful perfectionist father, to be a grunt monkey in an asbestos mine […]

It’s hard enough to be a young girl navigating the treacherous world of middle school without the Earth’s rotation slowing and causing a series of end-of-the-world phenomena. But, that’s the lot Julia is cast in The Age of Miracles. It would be easy for Karen Thompson Walker to go full nutty sci-fi with the concept […]

If Eugene Mirman gets screwed on his Delta flight from New York next week, the airline will hear about it. In fact, he’s known for his letters. Once Mirman took out a full-page ad in the Greenpoint Gazette lamenting his woes with Time Warner Cable. In it, he wishes a series of plagues upon Time […]

The “novel from life,” part diary, part play and part excerpts from friends’ conversations, How Should a Person Be? is best read in small chunks over time. A chapter here and there is charming, but too many all at once is like spending time with a friend who is so uncomfortable being authentic that she […]

Mathew Henderson has spent about 32 months of his life in Alberta’s oil fields. The PEI-raised poet worked away the summers after high school and in between years of university, and while at the time it all felt less than inspiring, eventually those exhausting months became the unlikely muse for haunting, yet beautiful poetry. “I […]

A lot can be lost when adapting from one form to another. Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimetres Per Second was a critically acclaimed film that took advantage of the animated medium to bring this love story to life. In turn, its comic adaptation shines in how little is lost in translation. While music is absent, the […]

In her first collection of short stories, Misha Bower, a founding member of Toronto band Bruce Peninsula, offers the reader a series of emotionally complex visions rich with colloquial dialogue. Bower adopts a series of plainspoken voices to tell the tales of brothers, cousins and lovers, all of whom attempt to define themselves within a […]

The only thing better than Adam Marek’s book of fantastic short stories is imagining how he possibly came up with them. Absurd, darkly comic and at times head-scratchingly bizarre, Marek’s talent for rending the supernatural or outrageous in real, human terms is mind-boggling. A couple finds out they are pregnant with 37 babies. A man […]

The title of Mike Parker’s latest book may be slightly misleading. Yes, there is a smattering of the supernatural, but it really delves into a subject perhaps more intriguing: baffling island culture now extinct on many of the 30 or so Nova Scotia isles Parker explores. For instance, readers learn of Percy Morris who was […]

Olympos is a visually engrossing graphic novel loosely inspired by Greek mythology. The narrative follows the god Apollo, here a youthful looking boy who finds his endless days full of tedium. He entertains himself by interacting with other Gods and making sport of harassing Ganymede, a beautiful young man held forever captive within an endless […]