Literary

In Dalhousie instructor Rebecca Babcock’s debut novel, mother-daughter narrators Liz and Katie tentatively navigate their strained relationship over the years, from childhood to college, across seas, always with a smothering inability to communicate. Babcock gives us glimpses of familial decisions that come to represent the landmarks of heartbreak in the two women’s lives; a more-loved […]

Kerrang! editor Paul Brannigan’s new biography, This is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl, tells the triumphant rise of everyone’s favourite drummer from punk rock obscurity to fronting one of the biggest arena rock acts. Brannigan does a good job detailing Grohl’s early years but sometimes gets lost in the details, devoting […]

Heather Jessup’s The Lightning Field has the potential to be a Canadian classic. Set in Cold War Toronto, Jessup writes with incredible depth, detail and insight. The novel spans four decades and sheds light on the Avro Arrow, but it’s when Lucy Jacobs is struck by lightning in a field the narrative unravels. Jessup’s take […]

That The Truth About Marie is beautifully written is no surprise. Toussaint is known as a writer with a gift for drawn-out, visceral scene-setting. This offering has three of them: one in which eroticism is shattered into panic and whitewashed by clinicians; a middle act in which a frightened horse transforms Japanese airport efficiency into […]

There are words that spring to mind like sadness like violence like senseless crime like how this affects all of us like how every tear in every eye falls from all of us and today Halifax is an ocean of anguish a sea of angry beside the Atlantic. And how do we handle this what […]

Crime stories and comic books might not seem like an obvious match but the two have mixed together for decades: Dick Tracy was catching crooks years before Superman showed up on the scene. If history had shaken out a bit differently it’s possible crime and noir stories would be the default comic genre instead of […]

Seeing your hard work in print is a pretty great feeling, whether or not you’re an aspiring writer. Knowing that someone— anyone—will read it is even better. That’s the beauty of Fathom, Dalhousie’s annual creative writing journal—it’s a platform for emerging voices, and not necessarily just those of writing students, but any student in an […]

Much like the protagonists in his upcoming novel A Matter of Life and Death or Something, Ben Stephenson found journaling just when he needed it. “It was just a great way to take the thoughts out and put them somewhere and get past them,” Stephenson says over tea in the Trident Cafe’s back room. “I […]

Bibliokleptomania. This was John Gilkey’s weakness. A lust for books so intense it was criminal. Indeed, John Gilkey was willing to go to jail for the love of books; and did. Seamlessly blending investigative journalism and personal memoir, Allison Hoover Bartlett introduces the reader to the world of rare books and the individuals who inhabit […]

They call it a novel-in-stories, but what Carrie Snyder manages in her second book is deeper and more coherent than that. Juliet grows up in Nicaragua (post-revolutionary war) with her two brothers as almost an afterthought for their activist parents, until illness drives them home and into the immediacy of conventional family life. Each early […]

Asaka is a wedding planner who’s disillusioned with his job—it seems like none of the couples he works for ever stay together. When he bumps into Sasagawa, a former client, Asaka feels like he’s found the one happily married man in all of Tokyo. The two men quickly become friends and drinking buddies, and as […]

Steven Laffoley allows readers to imagine so easily as his own imagination, inspired by true events, soars through the pages of The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. He reopens a cold case circa 1896 and questions whether a guilty verdict was based on truth or mass hysteria. Laffoley follows a gory crime scene upon […]