The Journey Prize and Best Canadian Stories anthologies showcase strong offerings – and a few misfires
Each of these anthologies features a range of subjects and approaches, testifying to the richness of the landscape in Canada.
Violet Browne talks about Newfoundland’s influence, fragmenting fiction, and the real-life origins of her debut novel
"I think Quebec is Newfoundland writ large because we do have our own culture and that is so tied up in the language."
In The Fake, Zoe Whittall takes a blisteringly funny look at con artists and the people they target
Very much in the spirit of a good grift, the novel lures us in willingly before snatching all our assurances away from us.
Poetic form gets exploded and reshaped in two recent volumes from River Halen and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
The notion of making oneself "legible" to oneself and others is at the centre of Halen's project.
“You got yourself into a Lindsay Wong story”: The author of Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality talks about ghosts, Chinese families, and her idiosyncratic approach to fiction
"I'm interested in that idea: when we transform ourselves, are we transforming our pain?"
Queer fear: an anthology of fiction and poetry reimagines horror tropes from LGBTQ+ perspectives
"These stories ask the question What is a monster? and complicate the definition of 'monster' along the way."
Love and grief are the enduring forces in Violet Browne’s debut novel
This Is the House That Luke Built is a strong first novel, clearly adept at marrying its form and content.
Fail better: Stephen Marche on the one constant in a writer’s life
Failure is inevitable because perfection is unattainable.
DIY veteran Jim Munroe experiments with AI art for a short-run print edition of his latest novel, We Are Raccoons
"That kind of direct connection with readers and creators is probably the majority of why I make art in the first place."
In Lost in Canada, Lydia Perović reconsiders her adopted country’s status as a bastion of liberal democracy
Perović's ideal of Canadian nationalism based in universality and Enlightenment freedoms has always been chimerical.