“I wanted to stimulate people”: Canadian playwright Brad Fraser on provocation, the theatrical establishment, and his new memoir
“I realized the adult world was every bit as fucked up as anything else."
Fundraiser to rebuild largest English-language bookstore in Gaza raises more than $210,000 to date
“Even under the blockade, it made us feel as a part of the world,” says one writer and translator about the cultural significance of the demolished store.
Stolen goods: metafictional wheels within wheels abound in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s thriller The Plot
The novel is among a series of recent thrillers that focus on writers behaving badly.
While mainstream publishers wage internal wars, a new upstart threatens to import online polarization into the print sphere
The potential for importing internet and cable news level divisiveness into publishing appears more dangerous than the tradition of publishing across the political spectrum.
“They don’t see it until they see it”: Cheryl Thompson on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kevin Hart, and the legacy of a complicated literary figure
The through-line in Thompson’s book involves a historical inability on the part of Western culture to see Black people as fully human.
“Literally, we just started Googling”: Shelley Youngblut on Calgary Wordfest’s new online streaming service, Imagine on Air
The Calgary literary festival’s streaming service is one part of an ecosystem that will include online content and live events.
Running in the family: Jordan Abel’s multimedia, polyvalent memoir addresses issues of identity and cultural heritage in the face of intergenerational trauma
Griffin Poetry Prize winner Abel has crafted a cross-genre work that addresses questions of identity and the ways we are affected by past hurt.
“I try to avoid labels”: Jeff VanderMeer on his new novel, ecological disaster, and why he won’t run for public office
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
No future, or, the submerged punk ethos of Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake It So Real
In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
Novelist Kim Echlin ventures into dark territory in Speak, Silence, a Bosnia-set novel about rape as a war crime
“For 2,000 years or more, women in literature have been represented as the spoils of war,” says Echlin about one impression she wanted to correct by writing this novel.