Notes from a Literary Lad
To “unsettle” means to disturb or discomfit. But in post-colonial or anti-colonial terms, to “unsettle” means to dismantle the systemic and institutional mechanisms of oppression that have been put in place by an imperial or occupying power with the intention
Hangsaman Shirley Jackson Penguin Classics Shirley Jackson’s second novel was first published in 1951; what is remarkable (not to say distressing) is how relevant its themes and situations appear to a reader in 2017. Hangsaman represents something of a departure
from The Redemption of Galen Pike In her masterful story “The Quiet,” Welsh writer Carys Davies displays, among other things, an effortless ability to manipulate her readers’ expectations. This manipulation involves a carefully calibrated modulation of tone and point of
The U.S. has always had a conflicted attitude toward sex. While violence – for the country born in the crucible of revolution – has been historically sanctioned as an almost sacrosanct cultural value, the country has frequently come up against
Numéro Cinq, the online literary journal spearheaded by Governor General’s Literary Award–winning fiction writer and critic Douglas Glover, has added American critic Daniel Green to its masthead. Green is the author of the recently published volume Beyond the Blurb: On
How to Dance in This Rarefied Air Rienzi Crusz Mawenzi House Sri Lankan–Canadian poet Rienzi Crusz signals his stylistic affiliation in the title poem of his latest collection. In the lyric’s first third, Crusz presents a portrait of an antagonistic
BookNet Canada has released its latest survey of digital publishing in Canada, and found the sales of ebooks declined by slightly more than 2% from 2015 to 2016. According to the survey, ebook sales in Canada dropped from 19% to
From The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov is one of the 20th century’s great prose stylists – a philosophical, allusive writer whose fiction is characterized by a facility with metaphor, passion for wordplay, and ease in manipulating chronology, point
“Reading is a civic act.” So writes Montreal poet laureate Bertrand Laverdure in his novel Readopolis (in an English translation by Oana Avasilichioaei). This seems like an accurate assessment, all the more so in these days when the culture of
This weekend, The Handmaid’s Tale made the Globe and Mail bestseller list. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel is set in a future version of the U.S., which has become a totalitarian theocracy where women are enlisted into sexual slavery at the