31 Days of Stories 2025, Day 5: “Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?” by Elyse Gasco
Gasco has endowed her story with something that is terribly unfashionable in book club circles and social media feeds: an unlikable narrator.
31 Days of Stories, Day 4: “The Mummers Parade” by Bridget Canning
The shifting ground of motivation and relationship between the two characters is brought out metaphorically in the mummers' costumes.
31 Days of Stories, Day 3: “A Degree of Suffering Is Required” by Christine Estima
The speaker in the story is Azurée Ghiz, the descendent of Arab immigrants in Toronto.
Future (un)certain: An unconventional POV undercuts the emotional force in Jean-Phillippe Baril Guérard’s You Crushed It
Guérard's novel gives the impression that the author is impatient with traditional narrative forms.
“Mondays are bait days”: The harsh landscape of Chris Bailey’s rigorously unsentimental second collection
In Bailey's case, his subject is virtually inexhaustible, because the setting is inexhaustible.
Continental drift: Rob Goodman’s Not Here, written before Trump 2.0, provides glimpses of Canada’s resilience
That democratic erosion, well underway when Goodman published his book in summer 2023, has only accelerated under a second Trump administration.
David Stones, Stratford, Ontario’s first poet laureate, has plans to bring poetry to the people
"The poet laureate role to me is to bring poetry to the people and the people to poetry."
Horrible landlords and abrasive seas: The sombre and fleetingly optimistic vision of Karen Solie’s Wellwater
If there is any obvious hope to be found in the sombre and desolate poems on offer in this collection, it is in the perseverance of nature in the face of violence and peril.
Gothic tropes and lush language characterize A Song for Wildcats, the debut story collection from Caitlin Galway
Galway's rich feel for language and her ability to inhabit a wide range of characters and milieus is impressive.
Pulling at the seams: Mark Bourrie’s Ripper examines the rise and popular appeal of Pierre Poilievre
Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment.