The subtle art of selling out: Adam Hammond investigates DIY gaming culture in his new book The Far Shore
Hammond has written a text that is frankly unclassifiable: part biography, part critical exegesis, part hipster manifesto.
“I think everyone in some way is an outsider”: Kate Cayley on short stories, literary tradition, and why she would be hesitant to read a novel she had written
“Art is a way of remembering what it is like to be alive when you may have forgotten,” says Cayley.
The things we carry: Michelle Berry examines the confluence of personal and geopolitical trauma in Everything Turns Away
The risk in writing a domestic thriller with 9/11 as backdrop is that the geopolitical material comes off as a gimmick rather than an integral story element.
“I want to be able to go in and out of hell with grace”: Shawn Hitchins on death, queer transformation, and the astonishing bass line in Boney M’s “Rasputin”
In his new memoir, the author contemplates his life and community in the wake of two significant figures dying within five months of each other.
Nic Brewer’s debut novel uses body horror as a means of interrogating the artistic process
The book uses Grand Guignol techniques to literalize the process of tearing oneself open in the act of artistic creation.
The Horror Show: A.C. Wise channels unease and melancholy in her story collection The Ghost Sequences
In this suite of sixteen uncanny tales, memory and loss are manifest in the spectres that haunt various characters.
“White folks get to erase or occlude parts of their history”: Ian Williams on race, language, and his new essay collection, Disorientation
For the author, the titular condition involves those moments when one is just trying to live one’s life and is suddenly reminded of one’s race.
The annual anthology series Best Canadian Stories celebrates fifty years of showcasing Canada’s proficiency and variety in the literary form
“The function of it was the pleasure of the work for readers, and the value to writers was to show them how good they had to get,” says longtime series editor John Metcalf.
The Horror Show: Adam Pottle on how the CanLit establishment’s preference for literary realism downplays the value of horror writing
Horror doesn’t gel with those who’ve propped up CanLit respectability – that is, chiefly cishet, nondisabled white people, Pottle writes.
Horror is as horror does: Susie Moloney on the genre’s ability to ease real-life pain
“Horror movies really, really distracted me from the most painful time of my life. Alone in the theatre for a couple of hours, being manipulated into screaming, swearing, and tossing my popcorn, I was transported.”