Horrible landlords and abrasive seas: The sombre and fleetingly optimistic vision of Karen Solie’s Wellwater April 11, 2025 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 April 8, 2025 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 April 3, 2025 Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment.
Keep the godwit flying: More on the Sutherland House/Fitz & Witz amalgamation March 28, 2025 In his SHuSH newsletter of March 21, Kenneth Whyte, owner and publisher of Sutherland House, took exception to former University…
Read more: Keep the godwit flying: More on the Sutherland House/Fitz & Witz amalgamation
“It has broken me completely”: Omar El Akkad talks about disillusionment, the West, and finding space to grieve with his new work of nonfiction March 27, 2025 “There’s the one book I write, and then there are the million different books that people read.”
A chilly chamber quartet: Four Canadian writers craft uncanny tales in different registers March 20, 2025 Each entry in the book contains, perhaps unsurprisingly, references to at least one dead writer.
New thoughts on the oldest profession: Lauren Kirshner examines recent film treatments of sex workers in her new study March 18, 2025 Kirshner mounts a cogent and persuasive argument in favour of reevaluating the way society, and the popular culture that reflects it, considers sex work.
“Any truth has a paradox within it”: Sarah Selecky on creativity, deep noticing, and her new book about tapping into your full writing potential March 17, 2025 “I’m just giving voice to the part I haven’t read yet.”
Casualties of war: Poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s debut novel focuses on the girls kidnapped by the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army March 11, 2025 Otok Bitek uses local folklore as a metaphorical way of bringing the girls’ experience into relief.
How do we get people to care about the arts? In The Audacity of Relevance, Alex Sarian has some ideas March 10, 2025 It’s not the idea of relevance itself that gives one pause, so much as where Sarian chooses to place the emphasis.
Internationally bestselling author Louise Penny announces she will not travel to the U.S. due to tariff war March 7, 2025
John Ford and Clyde Barrow on the road to Key West: The rugged melancholy of Michael Blouin’s Hard Electric March 7, 2025 These are not a young man’s verses; they are the ruminations of someone in the twilight of middle-age.
Walking the tightrope: Mélikah Abeldmoumen uses the friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron to comment on race, writing, and appropriation February 27, 2025 The text is a valuable examination of certain points of dissension or disagreement ongoing in our culture.
Freedom to Read Week 2025: When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid February 24, 2025 Barbara Kay took to the pages of the National Post to complain about the government having “wasted tax dollars on this values-void novel.”
Up in smoke: Ben Kaplan’s new book captures the chaotic and character-filled early days of legal weed in Canada February 13, 2025 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.
The sounds of silencing: In a new polemic, Ira Wells argues that censors are active on both the left and right February 5, 2025 Moral certitude makes for strange bedfellows.
Giller Prize drops Scotiabank, loses two jurors February 3, 2025 Two jurors – Jordan Abel and Aaron Tucker – have been quietly scrubbed from the Giller Prize website.
Independent Canadian publishers respond to Trump’s tariffs with caution, confusion February 3, 2025 The chaotic nature of the tariff rollout, while not surprising from the Trump administration, is nevertheless a challenge in trying to determine how best to respond.
House of Anansi’s Spiderline imprint is undergoing a rebrand, branching out into other genres January 22, 2025 The inaugural title in Spiderline’s “new direction” was An Ordinary Violence by Adriana Chartrand.
Remembering Andrew Pyper, the bestselling author who shattered boundaries between literary and genre fiction January 6, 2025 “When you look back in fifty years on the great writers in Canadian literature, I think he’s going to have to be included in that.”
Fifteen worthy reads from a tough year December 24, 2024 Even in a year fraught with anxiety and discord, writers connected with readers to provide succour, solace, entertainment, and provocation.
Charges withdrawn for four of five protesters arrested after 2023 Giller Gala disruption December 6, 2024 Maysam Abu Khreibeh, a Palestinian writer and organizer, called the 2023 protest the “bare minimum” that could be done to push back against the ongoing conflict in Gaza
Students at Sheridan College launch a campaign to rescue the Creative Writing and Publishing program December 4, 2024 “I think the preservation of administrative salaries at the upper echelons is the priority.”
Sheung-King wins Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Batshit Seven; Martha Baillie takes nonfiction award November 20, 2024 Sheung-King’s win completes the trifecta for Penguin Random House Canada, which published each of the three big fiction prize winners this year.
Anne Michaels wins the 2024 Giller Prize while protesters stage a “counter-gala” outside the Park Hyatt in Toronto November 19, 2024 The counter-gala was organized by CanLit Responds and the activist group No Arms in the Arts.
“We’re going to buy The Porcupine’s Quill”: Gordon Hill Press publisher Jeremy Luke Hill on how the Guelph publisher purchased one of Ontario’s most storied small presses November 15, 2024 Gordon Hill purchased PQL and will become a vertically integrated unit – a single company with two imprints.
Griffin Prize winner Jordan Abel takes the 2024 Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction November 13, 2024 M&S had a good day, also taking home the nonfiction prize in English.
Rage farmers and agents of chaos: Carol Off on political polarization, emotion versus reason, and her latest book, At a Loss for Words November 11, 2024 “I think the majority of us – left, centre, right, whatever – are interested in finding a way out of this.”
Beyond death and grief, Molly Peacock finds colour and calm in her new poetry collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box November 6, 2024 There is ambiguity here, but also a plaintive recognition of very human emotions that are often denied or ignored by people frightened by their complexity or contradictions.
Leaked emails point to a thorny trail of assertions, accusations, and in-fighting behind the scenes at the Giller Prize November 3, 2024 “It’s clear that the lines between what is public and what’s private has been blurred,” said Elana Rabinovitch.
Elana Rabinovitch breaks silence over the ongoing Giller Prize controversy, gives interview to Toronto Life November 2, 2024 “I would turn your attention back to the role of literature in situations like this, which is to interrogate hate and certitude and ideas that people are conflicted about.”
In Bog Myrtle, author and illustrator Sid Sharp delivers a sharp rebuke to capitalism with a side order of comic folk horror October 29, 2024 Sharp shares with Jon Klassen an affection for macabre conclusions in which the story’s villain gets an exaggerated, though not unwarranted, comeuppance.
“The language drives the story”: Caroline Adderson on process, Chekhov’s influence, and the importance of laughter in short fiction October 23, 2024 “The problem in this country is that people seem to feel that if it’s funny it’s not serious.”
Anne Michaels and Deepa Rajagopalan are among the five authors shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize October 9, 2024 With fully three-fifths of the nominations, the Giller shortlist continues the hot streak for Penguin Random House Canada.
Canisia Lubrin and Kent Monkman among five nominees for the Governor General’s Literary Awards October 8, 2024 Also of note is the publication dates of these books, none of which was published after February 2024.
Novelist and mentor Keith Maillard awarded the B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence October 4, 2024 Maillard says he was “moved … humbled and grateful” to find out he had received the award.
Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and CanLit pettiness collide in Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s latest novel October 1, 2024 For a writer who notably eschews the aesthetic approaches involved in social realism, Kilworthy Tanner is his most reader-friendly work to date.
Three of five Atwood Gibson Prize nominees are writers who pulled their books from Giller contention September 26, 2024 The two other nominees for this year’s prize also appear on the Giller longlist.
Naben Ruthnum, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Camilla Grudova are included in an anthology perfect for shorter days with chillier temperatures September 24, 2024 The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth.”
Rescue mission: Dionne Brand’s latest work of nonfiction examines what the English literary canon leaves out for readers like her September 12, 2024 A reader like Brand, we understand, is someone who has never felt represented in the literature presented to her as the great and enduring work of the past.
Authors longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize subject to targeted attacks online September 10, 2024 The campaign of intimidation has led to the Giller Foundation taking the extraordinary step of releasing a public plea for the harassment to end.
A dozen books longlisted for a 2024 Giller Prize that has changed its name in the face of ongoing protests September 4, 2024 The refusal to cut ties with Scotiabank but merely suppress its name in public is likely to further inflame those who feel the association with the bank is a moral stain on the prize.
S.C. Lalli’s latest mystery represents an example of a burgeoning subgenre focused on critiques of the ultra-rich August 29, 2024 As a commercial novel about the ultra-rich, The Plus One wants to have it both ways.
The worlds of therapy and nature operate in tandem in Melanie Siebert’s long poem Signal Infinities August 16, 2024 Siebert’s empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.
Worrisome 20th century antecedents preoccupy Ken McGoogan in his new work of biographical history August 14, 2024 The chimes between Europe of the 1930s and American in the 2010s and early 2020s are clear and persuasive.
A new volume of interviews provides an interesting – if proscribed – view of Canadian poets and poetry August 9, 2024 Jones’s preference for selecting elder statesmen and women generally omits a broad range of voices that have helped push Canadian poetry out of the confines of its colonial past.
The harsh realities of rural Newfoundland provide the backdrop for Susie Taylor’s debut story collection August 7, 2024 The Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.
Grief, memory, and formal playfulness combine in new poetry from Dallas Hunt and Catherine Owen July 19, 2024 Owen is a lyric poet who delights in working within traditional forms.
Three new novels apply a postmodern lens to horror cinema and its practitioners July 17, 2024 The subtextual question in each of these stories – Where, exactly, does the true horror reside? – is a provocative and pressing one.
Megha Majumdar departs Scotiabank Giller Prize jury amid spiralling protest July 17, 2024 Giller will operate with a three-person jury for the first time since 2014.
The Giller foundation sticks with Scotiabank, while losing one juror and the number of writers pulling their books rises to nineteen July 11, 2024 Dismantling systems of arts funding in a capitalist society is notoriously difficult.
A group of fifteen authors pull their books from consideration for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in protest of its main sponsor’s investment in an Israeli arms manufacturer July 10, 2024 The signatories are calling for the Giller to lobby Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems and for the prize to sever ties with the Azrieli Foundation, Indigo, and Audible.
Revelations that Alice Munro stayed with the man who sexually assaulted her nine-year-old daughter force a reckoning with the Nobel prize winner and her art July 8, 2024 The article in the Star is heartbreaking.
Two veteran poets explore the ineffable by way of the tangible and everyday July 5, 2024 Both volumes contain references to the Hebrew word “hineni,” translated as “here I am.”
Alice Munro’s debut collection, newly reissued, demonstrates an artist fully formed from the start July 3, 2024 The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades establish many of the characteristics that would come to be associated with Munro’s oeuvre.
The debut novel from Montreal author Nour Abi-Nakhoul is an hallucinatory descent into existential horror June 26, 2024 Ontological queries pervade the novel, which is, at least in part, about the inability to outrun violence or harmful past experience.
A story that began life on Reddit becomes one of the most original, nerve-shattering horror novels in memory June 14, 2024 The plot, which unfolds at a frantic pace, comes to resemble an M.C. Escher sketch.
Two new books on Pierre Poilievre and Justin Trudeau offer readers, and voters, a Hobson’s choice for Canada June 10, 2024 Canadians have a choice between a hyper-partisan Trumpian polarizer and a performative, gaffe-prone incumbent.
Violence and hope collide in Vincent Anioke’s eloquent and powerful debut collection June 4, 2024 The irony in the volume stretches across stories, a number of which are linked.
Short story month 2024: Danlia Botha’s third collection mines persistent subjects and charts new ground May 31, 2024 “I’ve always been interested in why people make the choices they make,” Botha says.
Short story month 2024: Kate Segriff offers up a tough new voice in her debut collection May 23, 2024 Segriff’s preferred mode is realism.
Short story month 2024: Shashi Bhat on short stories, autofiction, and her debut collection, Death by a Thousand Cuts May 17, 2024 The real, physical world is ever-present in these stories, most particularly in a recurring theme focusing on women’s bodies.
Short story month 2024: Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner and giant of the short story, dies at 92 May 14, 2024 One need only read a few sentences of Munro’s writing to understand that one is in the presence of literary genius.
Short story month 2024: The struggles of immigrant characters are at the heart of Deepa Rajagopalan’s debut collection May 11, 2024 The best stories in the book are less assiduous in cuing their reader as to how to react in any given moment.
Short story month 2024: The peripatetic, restless fiction of Clark Blaise May 10, 2024 Characters in Blaise’s fiction are constantly on the move.
Short story month 2024: Sara Power navigates the emotional terrain of wives and mothers in her debut collection May 2, 2024 A number of these stories focus on military families. But the broader theme is the status of women and their struggle for independence and autonomy.
Sally Lane, whose memoir details her years-long struggle to rescue her son from legal limbo in a northeast Syria prison, presses her case with the Supreme Court of Canada March 26, 2024 Governmental intransigence has been fuelled, Lane believes, by the mainstream media
Toronto poet Matthew Walsh’s second collection is a fragile negotiation with the confusion and worry of how to be fully human in our modern world March 25, 2024 The approach to poetry and the world is tinged with surrealism and not a small dollop of humour
The characters in Jann Everard’s sensitive and precisely calibrated stories have profound relationships with the natural world March 18, 2024 Blue Runaways is the first fiction publication from Stonehewer Books, a new independent press out of Victoria, B.C.
Vancouver writer Carleigh Baker’s sophomore collection is a piquant examination of the way we live now March 12, 2024 The stories in Last Woman have their finger on the pulse of the current zeitgeist.
In The Double Life of Benson Yu, Kevin Chong investigates the potential for art to overcome trauma February 21, 2024 Broadly speaking, the novel operates in the mode of metafiction.
Sheila Heti takes autofiction to its logical extreme in Alphabetical Diaries February 5, 2024 What this amounts to is less fiction than a kind of erasure poetry.
In The Storm of Progress, media and communications expert Wade Rowland posits a way to avoid the potentially existential crises confronting us January 26, 2024 Rowland suggests we need to re-emphasize our human predilection for moral action and goodness.
A declarative kitchen-sink realism pairs with themes of yearning and befuddlement in Allison Graves’s debut story collection January 18, 2024 These are stories that are honest enough to meet their characters on their own terms.
Canadian writers let loose in an anthology of anonymous sexytimes stories January 16, 2024 The stories here are entertaining enough, provocative enough, and spicy enough that their ultimate provenance doesn’t really make any difference.
Literary links from around the web: A new director for Quill & Quire, an actual writer defending a Canada Reads title, and more January 11, 2024 I have come down with Covid. New posts will resume once I’m feeling a bit better.
Valérie Bah and Kama La Mackerel “creolize” language in a story collection that examines the interstices between its characters and their identities January 5, 2024 The individual entries are linked by characters that drift in and out among them.
Books of the Year: 2023 in reading December 22, 2023 These are books that made an impression on me.
Transition and stasis operate in tension throughout Anuja Varghese’s debut short fiction collection December 20, 2023 Regardless of the narrative mode Verghese chooses, her thematic focus remains relatively constant.
Hardboiled, with heart: two tough-guy crime novels add a social conscience to the violence and mayhem December 18, 2023 Sam Wiebe and S.A. Cosby are among the leading practitioners of a new strain of noir fiction.
Toronto police lay charges in the vandalism of an Indigo store earlier this month November 23, 2023 Protesters gathered outside 52 Division in downtown Toronto to call for the charges against the eleven to be dropped.
Kai Thomas, Christina Sharpe, and Helen Humphreys among the winners of seven Writers’ Trust awards November 22, 2023 In addition to the prizes for individual works, several prizes for a body of work were also handed out.
Canadian authors and publishers sign open letter in support of Giller protesters; Anne Boyer resigns as poetry editor at New York Times Magazine November 16, 2023 The Giller protesters also received support on social media.
Christine Estima’s debut collection mines the experience of Arab immigrants to Canada November 15, 2023 Estima infuses her writing with sensitivity for the barbed points of human interaction.
In Yara, Tamara Faith Berger addresses fraught questions about sexuality, consent, geopolitics, and religion November 13, 2023 Yara represents Berger’s most fully realized vision yet.
Atwood, Gallant, and Dany Laferrière are among the writers and thinkers examined in Andy Lamey’s new book of essays November 9, 2023 One of Lamey’s qualities in this volume is a willingness to entertain multiple sides of a debate.
Anuja Varghese, Hannah Green among the winners of the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Awards November 8, 2023 Toronto independent House of Anansi Press did very well at this year’s awards.
Anxiety, identity, and illness characterize three recent books of poetry by Canadian authors November 3, 2023 Egg Poets is the collective name of a quintet of writers.
In two new books, journalist and essayist Lisa Whittington-Hill examines the perils facing women in pop culture November 1, 2023 Whittington-Hill incisively illustrates the various double standards women face as figures in the public eye.
The Spooky Season: Forthcoming anthology Northern Nights looks to showcase dark fiction by Canadian authors October 30, 2023 “We feel now is the perfect time to develop and publish this anthology.”
Iain Reid and Suzette Mayr find themselves included in a surprising GG shortlist for English-language fiction October 25, 2023 The last of the big three shortlists to be announced, the GGs will be the first to unveil their winners, on November 8.
Andrew Pyper’s new novel, a short, read-in-one sitting thriller called William, will appear under the pseudonym Mason Coile October 19, 2023 “The intent of the book felt very particular.”
Naomi Klein gets personal, travels down the rabbit hole in her new book, Doppelganger October 12, 2023 Klein’s sprawling, anxious, scattershot approach to her material offers an objective correlative of what she claims was her mental state leading up to the writing of the book.
Newfoundland lit journal Riddle Fence announces first short fiction collection under its Debuts publishing imprint October 11, 2023 “My next task is to figure out how to do audiobooks.”
Sarah Bernstein, Eleanor Catton, and CS Richardson find places on a Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist that highlights multinational presses October 11, 2023 Other considerations aside, this represents one of the strongest Giller shortlists in years.
The Spooky Season: The past weighs heavily in a supernaturally inflected first novel from Adriana Chartrand October 10, 2023 The more obviously generic elements of the story are less unsettling than the very real horrors of racism and family strife.
Debut writers from multinational publishers dominate the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize shortlist September 27, 2023 Only one writer on this year’s list, Emma Donoghue, has won the prize previously.
Canadian publishing’s dilemma: Indigo has abandoned books; it’s also become too big to fail September 22, 2023 Indigo can’t fail, but it also appears less and less interested in operating primarily as a bookseller.
Eleanor Catton and David Bergen are among the twelve writers on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist September 6, 2023 Twelve titles in total made the 2023 longlist, which was culled from a record-setting 145 submissions.
Climate change and political unrest at the end of the world in novels by Tomas Hachard and Michelle Min Sterling September 1, 2023 City in Flames and Camp Zero address societal discord via imaginative scenarios that only slightly exaggerated from the evening news.