“He’s the eye at the keyhole,” writes Margaret Atwood in the introduction to the career-spanning anthology of Clark Blaise’s fiction This Time, That Place. “He’s the ear at the door.” It’s perhaps as good a…
A few years ago, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. I worked at a grocery store then, at the hot food counter. A friend of mine named Jake was apoplectic that morning, asking why a…
As the song goes, everybody wants to rule the world. But if you can’t rule the world, how about a small portion of it? Indeed, cults are on the rise here in North America. The…
Tune in, turn on and drop out, as the kids once said. It used to be possible to try and divest oneself from society and try to live a different kind of life. Then came…
I live next door to a house that’s divided into apartments. Downstairs there’s a few people: a woman with a dog, a guy who smokes skunky weed. Upstairs is a couple with a kid: they…
A charmingly told coming of age tale, Emme Lund’s debut novel The Boy with a Bird in His Chest is a treat to read and bound to win over most readers. It follows Owen Tanner,…
An intriguing collection of interconnected stories, Sophie Ward’s debut book Love and Other Thought Experiments makes for a good introduction to the English actress-turned-author. Told primarily through the eyes of married couple Rachel and Eliza,…
Sometimes it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. There’s the buffet one overeats at, leaving one with a terrible stomach ache. There’s the baseball game that runs to 19 innings and one…
A roller coaster of a novel, Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen (published by Little, Brown) starts off in one direction, takes four or five sharp turns and winds up being something else completely from…
