From the category archives:

BOOKS

BOOKS

Life During Wartime

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Hunger Journeys, by Maggie De Vries, Harper Collins

by Neil MacRae
08.11.2010

In the first months of 1945, having suffered more than four years of German occupation, the city of Amsterdam is a bleak and demoralized place.  Its streets and buildings, parks and schools are crumbling with neglect and despair.  Citizens have watched as friends and neighbours are brutally loaded on trains to oblivion, while some benefit [...]

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BOOKS

Intimate Commerce

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The Stream Exposed with All its Stones: Collected Poems, by D.G. Jones, Signal Editions

by Abby Paige
07.11.2010

“What shall we make of Leviathan?” asked D.G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock, his 1970 volume of critical essays. In the book, Jones argued against a “garrisoned,” colonial impulse he saw at the centre of Canadian literature, which favoured the masculine over the feminine, the rational over the natural, the intellect over the body. “The [...]

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BOOKS

Biography of a Friendship

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The Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das, by Merrily Weisbord, McGill-Queen’s University Press

by Katia Grubisic
01.11.2010

By contemporary Western standards, the poetry of the late Indian writer Kamala Das contains little that seems untoward. It all boils down to sex and death, we understand nonchalantly, we who are unshockable, who are most devout about our artistic impieties. But in a social and literary context of female erasure, Das eschewed thematic and [...]

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BOOKS

A Hometown Guide to the Eastern Townships

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Roads to Richmond: Portraits of Quebec’s Eastern Townships, by Nick Fonda, Baraka Books

by Kathleen Winter
31.10.2010

Roads to Richmond compiles stories Nick Fonda wrote for small newspapers like Quebec Heritage News, The Record, and The Townships Outlet, interspersed with other memoir the author calls “incidental woolgathering” born of traveling the small country roads of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. This is not a reference book in the sense of possessing linear organization, but [...]

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BOOKS

Fine Young Pyromaniacs

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Krakow Melt, by Daniel Allen Cox, Arsenal Pulp Press

by Mark Paterson
25.10.2010

For somebody who writes with a sledgehammer, Daniel Allen Cox is pretty damned eloquent. The Montreal author’s second novel, Krakow Melt, is rampage on paper. But for a few distractions, it scorches its way through 151 pages and, like all good fires, leaves a smoldering afterglow.

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BOOKS

Sarah Court and Spark

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Sarah Court, by Craig Davidson, ChiZine Publications

by Matthew Surridge
24.10.2010

The linked short story sequence is a powerful but challenging form. Done right, the structure can give you a multiplicity of views, styles, and approaches. Done wrong, it can be too elliptical or too episodic. Craig Davidson’s new book, Sarah Court, gets it right in spades.

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BOOKS

At the Speed of Light Lifting

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Light Lifting, by Alexander MacLeod, Biblioasis

by B. A. Markus
18.10.2010

Alexander MacLeod can write. That was obvious even before his debut collection of stories made it onto the Giller Prize shortlist this fall. In his early twenties MacLeod published his first piece of short fiction, and since then, the now thirty-eight year old has amassed a mitt full of award-winning stories as well as a [...]

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BOOKS

A Half-Turn into the Horrific

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The Hair Wreath and Other Stories, by Halli Villegas, ChiZine Publications

by Matthew Surridge
17.10.2010

There is a common, but mistaken, idea that genre writing is by definition plot-oriented. In fact, genre fiction can have strengths as widely varied as any other sort of fiction; it all depends on the way the material is handled, and on the nature of the writer telling the tale.

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BOOKS

Variations of the Elegiac Memory

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Indexical Elegies, by Jon Paul Fiorentino, Coach House Press

by Roger Sauls
11.10.2010

When poetry’s relation to consciousness was configured as a linear construct, a concurrent understanding of the poem was that it embodied a concordance between the language of the creative impulse and the real world into which the poetry was cast.  The aim was to achieve a harmony of results between the two arenas. Over time, [...]

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BOOKS

Flashes of Poetic Talent and An Eye for Lyricism

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Auricle & Icebreaker, by Alisha Piercy, Conundrum Press

by Neil MacRae
10.10.2010

Marie is born with “auricles”: a small ear-shaped growth on either side of her neck. The peculiarity they give to her appearance separates her from peers as such deformities regularly do among children. For Marie, who believes they also invest her with a kind of psychic gift, they become an emblem of her special isolation. [...]

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BOOKS

Having Sadness and Eating It Too

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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender, Doubleday

by Gina Roitman
04.10.2010

In her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender takes some simple ingredients—an appealing protagonist and a talent for storytelling—to concoct a delicate, richly nuanced narrative about an ordinary family with some extraordinary abilities.

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BOOKS

The Victimized and the Innocent

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Fauna, by Alissa York, Random House Canada

by David Homel
03.10.2010

Animals are the real heroes in Alissa York’s Fauna, as the title suggests. The animals are the ones that live (perhaps “who live” would be more appropriate) in Toronto, most specifically in that city’s Don River Valley. Animal life has become something of a fad in some recent fiction – fad or zeitgeist, it depends [...]

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BOOKS

Beautifully Written, Unabashedly Canadian

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Combat Camera: A Novel, by A.J. Somerset, Biblioasis

by Justin Scherer
27.09.2010

Though constantly sought by avid readers, it seldom happens: complete immersion into a novel, getting lost in the pages. It’s the benchmark for good writing. And after a long dry spell of books which, though good, didn’t seduce me into complete suspension of disbelief, I picked up Combat Camera by A.J. Somerset. His beautifully written [...]

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BOOKS

This Isn’t Your Father’s Canadian Notes & Queries

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Canadian Notes & Queries #79, The Short Story Issue, Biblioasis

by Mark Paterson
26.09.2010

With reports of the printed word’s imminent death arriving on a near daily basis, it is uplifting to see a magazine, rather than crumple before the seemingly inevitable, make a concerted effort to improve its physical package. With its 79th issue, Canadian Notes & Queries unveiled a smart redesign for which they entrusted the vision [...]

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BOOKS

I, Blogius

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Unleashed, by Sina Queyras, BookThug

by Leila Marshy
20.09.2010

Weren’t blogs supposed to replace books? They were the kick-ass, democratic, cutting-edge younger siblings to their so-called elitist, shelf-hugging counterparts. Tell that to I Can Has Cheezburger, or Stuff White People Like, or Awkward Family Photos, just a few of the blogs that made it to Chapters and Indigo. “Julie & Julia” went even further, [...]

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