Literary

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 […]

This is not your grandmother’s poetry. Filled to the brim with scenes that delight and disturb, Forsythe constantly surprises with an unforeseen twist or metaphor that is so strangely perfect that you have to reread and ruminate. In “Romance” she writes, “That year, we all had waitressing jobs/and stalkers./Sore teeth and short answers./Bruised hips and […]

Reviving serialized literature seems like certain failure in the post-Twitter landscape of devastated attention spans, but Jennifer Egan’s Black Box is no Bleak House. Her newest experiment, published by The New Yorker’s Twitter feed in 10 one-hour installments, responds to, rather than bucks, contemporary realities. Integrating literature into the patience-destroying medium itself, Egan unveils a […]

Roy begins her tale just before the birth of its protagonist, Yezi, during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China. From the opening page Roy establishes the omnipresent fear of tyranny, which permeates life’s every decision, be it minor (what to wear) or major (whether to keep a child, and what to name it). Step wrong […]

Michel Rabagliati’s latest graphic novel starts quite oddly, with a jumbled chapter full of rapid fire references and reminiscences of a family reunion on St. Jean Baptiste Day. Its nostalgic gleam is over-emphasized and oddly unsettling, which at first seems unrealistic and unfairly forced until we come to learn the truth of father-in-law Roland’s harsh upbringing […]

DC Comics and Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen: Minutemen, gets away from the good guy versus bad guy trope and tells a well-crafted story of human struggle. by Kathleen Higgins Peter Parker was motivated by the knowledge of the great responsibility that comes with great power. Bruce Wayne became Batman because of the tragic death of […]

“The idea is to give people who want to express themselves in poetry a place where they could send it. I think of it as being a ‘pick-up game of poetry,’ where anyone is welcome to play,” says Mary Ellen Sullivan, who’s a regular contributor to Open Heart Forgery. OHForgery is a free, monthly collection […]

This is the time of year—now that it’s been 20 degrees for more than three days straight—that we start piling our totes full of books and heading for nearby docks, rocks and shores. Saturday, June 16 will help you pick out your summer’s worth with writers running all over the province in celebration of Atlantic […]

The best parts of Toronto-based writer Joey Comeau’s stories in The Complete Lockpick Pornography are his surprising yet compassionate endings. The first story in the volume is a “genderqueer adventure story” that follows four friends as they challenge heteronormative beliefs of the Halifax community with a schoolbook scandal, Sesame Street, sizzling sex and more. After […]

Jonah Campbell’s Food & Trembling is a love song of food and language written by a lover of gravy and a hater of brunches. This collection of essays and rants reads like a collection of posts from a food blog, but a blog that I would read and refer people to without hesitation. If food […]

It’s the summer of 1994, and Danny’s friends have a mission to get him laid before he starts grade twelve in the fall. Danny however, is just not that into girls. Determined to prove once and for all that he is not gay, Danny hopes his new coworker Lisa, visiting for the summer from New York City, […]