Literary

Spontaneity always gets the glory. Forget that. Simultaneity is where it’s at. As though all at once, Lance Blomgren peers into lives being lived beyond the doors in walk-up apartment buildings across Montreal. These are actual addresses in the city that the author occupies with stories, told in shifting voices and with varying points of […]

The cover of this book describes it as “a novel,” but it’s part-diary, part-story, part-comedy, part-comic book. Chronicling suspiciously autobiographical protagonist Jonny’s journey from young wage slave in a Winnipeg strip mall to divorced writing professor in a Montreal basement apartment, Stripmalling jumps from confessional to fiction to film script. The book is punctuated by […]

Brilliant at times, nonsensical, poorly written and (sometimes) funny, I Am the New Black is about what you’d expect from a Tracy Morgan autobiography. Each moment of candidness (the cessation of his relationship with his mother) and tragedy (the AIDS-related death of Morgan’s father) is matched by a reflective moment in which Morgan passes on […]

White presents a deeply intimate account of her chronic struggle with loneliness, evoking the barrenness of an existence marked by sparse human contact, devoid of intimate connections. White asserts that loneliness is a distinct—and stigmatized—psychological problem, deserving of public attention. Her clinical breakdown of loneliness, compounded by existing research, is illuminating. Yet, in investigating a […]

From word one, a description of a bloody and harrowing car accident, there is such a volume of tragedy in Chad Pelley’s ambitious debut novel, it feels dense and weighty, like a Paul Haggis movie script. Owen Collins is a writer, who goes to live with his brother Alex’s family, eventually having an affair with […]

With the book’s very first theme, tectonics, one thinks of plate tectonics, the earthquake in Haiti. But in architecture tectonics refers to architects’ thoughts on and uses of “construction details.” These fall into “materials and assemblies.” As with the book’s other four sections, specific projects are considered in accessible language and design. One starts to […]

Matsumoto’s works that have been released in English are often met with high critical praise and low sales. His style, manga with a heavy European comic influence, has earned him a following, but the surrealistic nature of his stories might scare off more casual readers. GoGo Monster manages to showcase both the uniqueness of his […]

Marie is the classic awkward teenager: square-framed glasses, frumpy clothing and an inability to feel comfortable in her own skin. But everyday teen woes don’t explain it all, as Marie’s learning to live with her mother’s schizophrenia and her split family’s poverty. The road to god knows is largely autobiographical, but author and illustrator Von […]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, James Scudamore’s second novel takes place in São Paulo, but really, this pleasurably dark, humourous satire on the tenuous coexistence of extreme wealth and poverty could be plunked down anywhere. Part of Heliopolis‘ pleasure is its South American location, underrepresented in contemporary Anglo lit, but Scudamore’s Brazil safely lacks the […]

Vancouver-based Richard Van Camp is arguably one of the leading short story writers in Canada. Van Camp, in his first collection of stories since 2002's Angel Wing Splash Pattern, has so clearly listened to how people talk, the music and spirit of their language becoming his. These characters are his people, the Dogrib, living regular […]

Beth Powning has the gift of drawing her readers into a work. The characters in The Sea Captain’s Wife are enduringly memorable. Set in the 1800s, Powning paints scenes of sea life and its pains, fears, wonders, joys and tragedies. Azuba Bradstock, a young woman from the Bay of Fundy, has recently married Nathaniel, a […]