John Ford and Clyde Barrow on the road to Key West: The rugged melancholy of Michael Blouin’s Hard Electric
These are not a young man's verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
Goodreads and prior restraint: Bloom Books pulls an upcoming romance novel after criticism from early readers
Most often, what these censorious online voices demonstrate is not moral rectitude but a complete inability to understand how to read fiction.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: The Washington Post vs. Jeff Bezos
If a billionaire is in a position to dictate how the media does its job, there is no free press to speak of.
Walking the tightrope: Mélikah Abeldmoumen uses the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron to comment on race, writing, and appropriation
The text is a valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: Ulysses by James Joyce
Joyce's novel is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid
Barbara Kay took to the pages of the National Post to complain about the government having "wasted tax dollars on this values-void novel."
Freedom to Read Week 2025: On the enduring importance of standing up against attempts to suppress books
As we are witnessing on a global scale, it is all too easy to lose the essential freedoms we in a democratic society take for granted.
In Clay McLeod Chapman’s savage new novel, digital wellness gurus and a far-right news channel serve as linchpins for the apocalypse
Chapman's book is about as far from subtle as it's possible to get.
Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror story The Night Guest uses spare language and elision to heighten the feeling of creeping dread
Knútsdóttir places the reader in close proximity to Iðunn's psyche via an unreliable first-person narration.
Up in smoke: Ben Kaplan’s new book captures the chaotic and character-filled early days of legal weed in Canada
It's a wild, unconstrained tale that brings together, somewhat improbably, politicians and scofflaws, Bay Street business types and countercultural rebels, the Tragically Hip and Snoop Dogg.