Literary

First performed by a Regina dance company in 2002 and published as a book in 2003, the text draws on “several musical devices and techniques,” writes the author in his preface to this reprint. These include “retrograde motion” (lines spoken front to back, back to front) and “polyphonic speech” (usually “sustained” polyphony, meaning several voices […]

At first glance, George Elliott Clarke’s prose novel I & I seems to follow a familiar formula. Boy meets girl, girl’s family doesn’t approve, boy and girl run away, and after a seemingly accidental violent incident, both go on the run. And as the tragic romance of rich, white Betty Browning and the black boxer […]

In this novel of 195 pages (a novella?), the Australian author brings readers into a confined, uncomfortable space: a 15-year friendship between the characters Helen and Nicola at the moment of a great test: Nicola, gravely ill with cancer, arrives in Melbourne from Sydney, seeking a final and alternative treatment. Helen, her host, doubts the […]

In this, the fifth and penultimate Scott Pilgrim tome, Ontario-born former Mount Uniacke resident Bryan Lee O’Malley gently ushers his hero a step closer to manhood and taking on the Final Boss. What makes O’Malley’s scrappy, Manga-inspired comics so compulsive isn’t the stylishly disaffected urban tone, nor the primary plot thrust of having the eponymous […]

It’s been almost a decade since I first saw Kinnie Starr perform. Her resume now includes five albums, a Juno nomination, acting, Cirque du Soleil and The L Word soundtrack. Her latest creative endeavour, How I Learned to Run, is a patchwork of photography, illustration and poetry. To encounter Starr on the page is polarizing. […]

Jane Buss is tired. She sits in her dark, cubbyhole-like office, plastered with posters of literary events. “I have six little fires burning here,” she says, pointing to piles of papers on her desk from writers who need her help. “That’s in addition to building a library and running the programs and workshops. I’m never […]

For their latest compilation, Drawn & Quarterly heads north, with three stories set in northern lands from two Scandinavian artists and one American. North American publishers have been steadily putting out translations of work from the Franco-Belgian comics tradition over the past few years, but there’s some great work coming out of northern Europe these […]

Jane Buss is tired. She sits in her dark, cubbyhole-like office, plastered with posters of literary events. “I have six little fires burning here,” she says, pointing to piles of papers on her desk from writers who need her help. “That’s in addition to building a library and running the programs and workshops. I’m never […]

With this second edition of Native Song, Halifax author and painter David Woods goes all in and the result doesn’t show in his favour. Too often this finished book reads like a notebook (though it’s not identified as such), full of unfinished, unformed ideas—beginnings of larger ideas or expanded forms. For example, while the section […]

Thanks to scientific advances, we can predict certain phenomena: lunar eclipses, the orbital periods of comets, the weather in 40 years (to an extent). Predicting politics is a crap-shoot. That’s what makes Gwynne Dyer’s recent book, Climate Wars, so amusing and frustrating. In an attempt to take a crack at the “political and strategic consequences […]