Literary

On Saturday afternoon your ears will likely need a rest from music overload and yelling concert-goers. It’ll be a lovely break to shift the workload over to your eyes for a few hours and check out the annual HPX Zine Fair where loads and loads of amazing zines, small-press books, indie record labels and cool […]

Is the medium the message? With Ian Williams’ Not Anyone’s Anything, it could be. The three times three stories are experimentally told using musical notations, flashcards and simultaneous narratives broken up by horizontal or vertical striations. At times, readers are taken out of their comfort zones as if they are witnessing Williams’ brainstorming sessions—but this […]

Bong, Chim-si Bong. Sound familiar? This is just one of the classic film quotes artist Gerard Choy has transcribed from Cantonese to Cantonese-sounding English words for his media installation The Phrase Book of Migrant Sounds Vol. 1, on at NSCAD’s Port Loggia Gallery during Nocturne. Choy will be offering a unique linguistic experience, and participants […]

In Roadsworth’s work, crosswalks become candles. Sewer drains with dangling rubber stoppers. Concrete cracks become roots and branches with budding foliage. Or a whole parking lot that miraculously becomes a field of dandelions. Compared with fellow stencil masters Banksy or Blek le Rat’s political bent, Wordsworth’s oeuvre is rife with whimsy and playfulness. Like the […]

The intent behind Jorge G. Castaneda’s Manana Forever? mirrors John Ralston Saul’s Reflections of a Siamese Twin—it’s an intellectual excursion into national identity so as to set contemporary national priorities. Like former Canadian vicar general and native Ottawan Saul, Castaneda (both Jorge and his father served on different Mexican presidents’ cabinets) boasts Mexico City federal […]

Jordan Thomas is looking to the future. That future includes him and members of the Halifax Slam Team delivering poems and diatribes at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Toronto, running October 11 to 15. The present, however, is preoccupied by one thing: money. The team, consisting of team captain Thomas (AKA JPhat), as […]

Known for a myriad of literary pursuits (including founding the Toronto Small Press Book Fair) Ross’ poetry, essays, publishing and editing work have garnered plenty of international attention. Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew is his first novel and bears many of the earmarks of his other works: keen detail, time/space conflation and unlimited vibrancy. The novel sews […]

Gordon Rankin Jr.—“Rank” to his friends—is a hulking goon; a hockey enforcer; a bouncer, held in awe by all due to his impressive size and presumed criminal tendencies. When Rank discovers one of his oldest and most trusted friends has published a novel turning his most tragic moments into an embarrassing cliche, Rank writes his […]

Elliot Jonson can’t catch a break. Edward Riche’s newest protagonist boasts a stagnant screenwriting career, an estranged son and newly-homosexual ex-wife, and a passion (but lack of skill) for wine-making. Bitter with his unaccommodating life, dodging debts and caught up in a burgeoning scandal, Elliot moves to escape to France but finds himself detained in […]

It happened. Summer ended and students went back into classrooms. For a few days there were more moving trucks than bicycles young ones with two-fours and ice cubes and penchants for hollering on sidewalks at all hours of night. It became fall and Halifax is still all right. Thing about our city is that it […]

Within the first 30 pages, McIntosh had led me so seamlessly from the fall of Ninevah in 612 BCE to the sacking of Iraq in 2003 that I hadn’t realized she had changed scenes, and I was hooked. The Witch of Babylon is an antiquities thriller—like the DaVinci Code, but more interesting and without the […]

It’s certainly not the first graphic novel about zombies. Brian Ralph’s got his own take on the genre. He takes you, the reader, into the story. Open the cover. Find yourself ragged, covered in debris. A one-armed man greets you, offers underground safety. Pours you a cup of water. Becomes your protector. Daybreak’s a survival […]