Literary

Johannesburg journalist Kevin Bloom illustrates a post-apartheid South Africa united in fear. White and black people both perpetrate and suffer violence and psychological injury. Writing through the three years before players took to the pitch for the World Cup, the author walks shifting ground. Taking a good look around, Bloom considers the murder of his […]

Paul Quarrington passed away in January of this year. He’d already been working on a book about his life in music when he was diagnosed with advanced, terminal lung cancer. This became his “new thematic material” for a book that became about his life, as seen and heard through music. The novelist, who won the […]

This allegory opens with a worker for a “neuromarketing” company. He works under the codename Trotsky. The company measures his brain-wave response to big-brand products. Trotsky stumbles into an anti- consumerist underground led by a guy named Che. Trotsky renames himself Warhol. The resistance comes to believe he leads a fabled faction, the Warhol Gang. […]

Ever wonder what happened to Ethan Hawke’s smug slacker from Reality Bites? He probably shares cubicle space with Lipsyte’s Milo Burke, a failed painter and porn-lover now working as a development officer for Mediocre University, half-assedly siphoning money out of New York’s wealthy. Although Lipsyte’s testosterone-dripping, very, very funny and dark satire suggests a mid-life […]

For fans of Joey Comeau’s web comic A Softer World, the writer’s newest project of a young adult horror novel is only a side step from his usual voice. Stripped of its horror elements, the story is about the best friendship—and possible romance—of two teenage girls, and what it means to be “family.” Add in […]

These stories aren’t always narrative and, when they are, they’re not conventionally so. The reader’s frequently left with the sense that the author believes certain conventions (for example, motivation and fullness of characters) are old, worn, unnecessary. Brian Joseph Davis’s characters usually come across as vessels to contain his social comment, satirical wit or to […]

Ottawa-based poet Paul Tyler slows down the process of memory (recognizing, naming, remembering, renaming). He reminds readers that to remember is a shared experience, a part of being, and not just a process, a doing. It feels like a slow poetry, an equivalent of what’s happened in food, for example. On the downside, the reader […]

Isobel is a teenage girl, a runaway of sorts. Emile is a puppeteer who stops in Isobel’s town for the summer. We don’t know much more about Isobel or Emile’s background, but we know the feel of their naked bodies, the decor in their rooms, the taste of their cups of coffee. Emile leaves for […]

Liz Worth is much younger than the Toronto punks she admires from the city’s first-wave heyday in 1977-’81. Perhaps this is why she decided to let all her interview subjects speak for themselves in her oral history of the scene. Stories from members of Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels, the recently reformed The Diodes and more—mostly […]

This weekend’s Long Live The Queen festival isn’t just about the music—it’s bringing in the wordsmiths. Organizer Nathan Doucet says Sunday’s Literary Lunch was inspired by good friends of the festival who are writers, and when local writer Stephen Patrick Clare joined as host the literary ball started rolling. With musicians Daniel Ledwell, Terra Lightfoot […]

On the cover of The Age of Persuasion is a cow and a no-name sneaker. Between the two images sits a sentence: “Remember when cows wore brands and you wore sneakers?” It’s with that thought that Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant—researchers, writers and producers of CBC Radio’s series The Age of Persuasion—open the history books […]

Kenk is an ambitious book—perhaps overly so. A journalistic graphic novel about infamous Toronto bike thief/ mechanic Igor Kenk, arrested in 2008, the book began as hundreds of hours of documentary footage. Producers/authors Alex Jansen and Richard Poplak turned it into a comic through an elaborate process of photocopying and drawing onto film stills. Jansen […]