Is publishing in Canada broken? No, but dismissing an entire segment of the ecosystem certainly doesn’t help
Rather than farm teams, it's preferable to think of smaller publishers as craft breweries or artisinal vineyards.
Casey Plett will be everywhere in fall 2022 and spring 2023
Plett's own debut collection of short fiction, A Safe Girl to Love, is being reissued by her current publisher, Vancouver's Arsenal Pulp Press.
Controversial journalist and confessed “sex radical” Gerald Hannon’s memoir provides an overview of LGBTQ+ history over the past four decades
One need not agree with everything the author writes or believes in order to recognize the importance of his memoir as a document of the LGBTQ+ community's development in Canada.
Fawn Parker deconstructs male ego and the image of the great man in literature and academia in two angry, unflinching novels
Despite some missteps and shots at easy targets, Parker's novels combine to form a provocative riposte to a culture that valorizes a certain kind of profane masculinity.
Sex and death collide in Like Animals, the debut novel from Eve Lemieux
Like Animals has a modernist sheen, providing a chaotic surface reflective of its protagonist's conflicted and disaffected psychology.
Cultural reporter Elamin Abdelmahmoud talks about his memoir, Son of Elsewhere, his love of The O.C, and what the banjo has in common with the oud
"Even though I've been living in this country for twenty-two years and this is for all intents and purposes my home – it's where I intend to live the rest of my life – elsewhere is this notion that one or two pieces are missing," says Abdelmahmoud.
A tale of 2,058 timelines: Terri Favro tackles tropes from SF and comic books in her exuberant sequel, The Sisters Sputnik
In her imaginative sequel to Sputnik's Children, Favro comments on the nature and responsibility of storytelling.
What the body remembers: Naben Ruthnum examines corporeality and identity in his novella Helpmeet
Ruthnum's brief work of fin-de-siècle body horror reads like a mash-up of David Cronenberg and Henry James.
Come together: Conflicting notions of home and country are at the fore in Anita Anand’s novel A Convergence of Solitudes
The novel, which is structured to resemble a double album of interconnected tracks, follows a cast of characters searching for a sense of belonging.
31 Days of Stories 2022, Day 30: “The Alps” by Colin Barrett
Canadian-Irish writer Colin Barrett is a wizard with language that sings with the rhythms and cadences of the working class.