Literary

Oh James Franco and your big ambitious eyes and your sly smile. You had to fail sometime, right? No one can cut their own arm off (alright, that’s in your movie, 127 Hours, but who else would we pay to watch do that?), make visual art, write plays and screenplays, while pursuing three MFAs from […]

If you’re expecting some Aesop-like morality tales from David Sedaris’ book of animal short stories, head back down the rabbit hole. Through these paw-sized character sketches and scenes, Sedaris exposes some of the most rude, contradictory and head-scratching truths about modern living, like a crow hating on part-time vegetarians (it gets worse), and a potty-mouthed, […]

George Sipos, a poet and former bookseller in Prince George, BC, recounts his youth in London, Ontario. He arrived there in 1957 with his parents after they left Hungary and before they moved to the west coast. Sipos considers a series of sites for their ordinary, quotidian resonance. One of the best is the shuttered […]

Jon is a young man getting ready to move to Peru with his girlfriend. Koko is a slacker with a broken moral compass. When they meet, it changes the trajectories of both their lives: Jon starts to wonder if he’s making the right choice while Koko decides to become a better, more charitable person. While […]

Wise Words All Rights Reserved Fall Launch Party Once a year All Rights Reserved publishes their journal and as usual, it’s chock-full of untapped local literature. Managing editor Ryan Jones says while each issue follows a theme, they try not to limit writers, “Our goal is to be a venue for writers, to get them […]

Three men stand tall in Grant Lawrence’s story: father, mentor and figurehead. They’re bound together by place, Desolation Sound, “a collection of deep inlets, islands and coastal mountains found at the northern end of the Strait of Georgia,” as Lawrence writes in his coming-of-age memoir, Adventures in Solitude. In the mid-70s, successive provincial BC governments […]

Using spare black and white drawings and uncomplicated, insightful prose Leavitt tells the story of Alzheimer’s—from the early signs of the disease through her mother’s diagnosis, decline and eventual death. Laughter and love intertwine throughout with the horrors of losing a loved one to memories that are no longer theirs to keep when all those […]

Felipe Smith managed to do what many manga fans only dream about: he not only went to live in Tokyo but also managed to get his comic, Peepo Choo, published in the pages of a Japanese comics anthology, no small feat considering the insular nature of Japan’s comic industry. It’s an even bigger accomplishment considering […]

The book itself bears the design of an index card, from old wooden catalogue drawers with brass handles. The image works perfectly, recalling the certain anxiety of knowing how much one didn’t know about the location of information and the connections that went on and on, seemingly without end or sense. We’re all similarly indexed […]

After a seven-day residency at London Heathrow, de Botton reveals the peninsular nature, not fully island or mainland, of airports. Entering these in-between spaces, we become projections of ourselves, a point underscored by Richard Baker’s photographs. We’re detached from our real selves, the ones at home and work. As passengers, we leave one aiport for […]

Wednesday Comics is a callback to when Sunday newspaper strips took up an entire page and were actual works of art in term of graphics and storytelling. The book is a homage to that format, with various artists and writers re-imaging superheroes like Superman and Batman (along with some of their more obscure counterparts) in […]