Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, a snug little bookstore in the Plateau, welcomed four American writers—Mira Gonzalez, Elizabeth Ellen, Chloe Caldwell, and Chelsea Marti—to present their monotone yet dynamically comic collections in spoken word. The synergetic flow between the four writers is astounding, yet makes perfect sense. All four women write[Read More…]
Books
Lena Dunham’s new book offers insights, few surprises
Fans of Girls will rejoice that Lena Dunham’s recently published book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” offers readers the same self-deprecating humour, laugh-out-loud one liners, and stories almost too erratic to be true that made its author’s popular HBO show a megahit.[Read More…]
Edge of Eternity provides engrossing ending to historical trilogy
History has a bad rap for being a seemingly perfunctory field of study. As a history major, I certainly have gotten my fair share of skepticism when I profess my interest in our past. But history, more than almost any other subject, carries a certain humanity with it. It is[Read More…]
Revisiting a burdened and haunted past
It’s not always clear why horror is such a popular genre. After all, it intends to horrify—to inspire fear in shadows that seem to disappear the second we turn around. Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians reminded me of the reasons Stephen King novels and the endless slew of gory sequels do[Read More…]
Wilt the Stilt walks again
A collective of writers and artists known as “FreeDarko” rose to cult Internet fame with their essays promoting the concept of “liberated fandom” that is the idea that the modern basketball fan didn’t need to restrict him or herself to a single franchise but could, instead, enjoy the wide array[Read More…]
Animals go feral in Sedaris’s latest
There’s a clear reason why Ian Falconer, who illustrated David Sedaris’s latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, only uses shades of red and black in his illustrations. It’s because the stories, which tersely detail single events in the lives of animals, are often bloody and bleak. But it’s[Read More…]
Definitely decaf
The Lost Art of Gratitude is the literary equivalent of a warm cup of tea: it’s calming, unhurried, and a welcome escape. The plot meanders like a lazy river, driven by characters rather than action. The book is the sixth in the Sunday Philosophy Club series by Scottish author Alexander[Read More…]
Finding sanctuary in the written word
Jane Urquhart was born a writer, but she never envisioned that she would one day be considered among the ranks of the most widely read and respected Canadian authors. With the recent publication of her seventh novel, Sanctuary Line, Urquhart has been nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize: an award[Read More…]
Nancy Drew’s newest competition
When Alan Bradley set out to write his first detective novel he had no idea it would lead to the character of Flavia de Luce, or to a series about the young sleuth, in which The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag is the second novel. “I was writing another detective novel that I thought I had plotted very carefully for story and characters, then Flavia just materialized in it,” Bradley says.
Can-Lit chronicle picks the best
Part anthology of summaries and essays, part intro to Can-Lit survey, and part ode to reading, T.F. Rigelhof’s Hooked on Canadian Books is a tribute to English-language Canadian fiction writing since 1984. At first, the introduction and much of the tone of the book seems self-indulgent and self-important.
