The Colophon

Maillard says he was “moved … humbled and grateful” to find out he had received the award.

For a writer who notably eschews the aesthetic approaches involved in social realism, Kilworthy Tanner is his most reader-friendly work to date.

The two other nominees for this year’s prize also appear on the Giller longlist.

The most blazingly unforgettable tale in the anthology has to be EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth.”

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.

The campaign of intimidation has led to the Giller Foundation taking the extraordinary step of releasing a public plea for the harassment to end.

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.

As a commercial novel about the ultra-rich, The Plus One wants to have it both ways.

Siebert’s empathetic approach to her material is admirable and she has the capacity for cutting observation.

The chimes between Europe of the 1930s and American in the 2010s and early 2020s are clear and persuasive.

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 Newfoundland of Vigil is an unforgiving place, and Taylor treats it, along with her cast of characters, without an ounce of sentimentality.

Owen is a lyric poet who delights in working within traditional forms.

The subtextual question in each of these stories – Where, exactly, does the true horror reside? – is a provocative and pressing one.

Giller will operate with a three-person jury for the first time since 2014.

Dismantling systems of arts funding in a capitalist society is notoriously difficult.

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.

The article in the Star is heartbreaking.

Both volumes contain references to the Hebrew word “hineni,” translated as “here I am.”

The stories in Dance of the Happy Shades establish many of the characteristics that would come to be associated with Munro’s oeuvre.

Ontological queries pervade the novel, which is, at least in part, about the inability to outrun violence or harmful past experience.

The plot, which unfolds at a frantic pace, comes to resemble an M.C. Escher sketch.

Canadians have a choice between a hyper-partisan Trumpian polarizer and a performative, gaffe-prone incumbent.

The irony in the volume stretches across stories, a number of which are linked.

“I’ve always been interested in why people make the choices they make,” Botha says.

Segriff’s preferred mode is realism.

The real, physical world is ever-present in these stories, most particularly in a recurring theme focusing on women’s bodies.

One need only read a few sentences of Munro’s writing to understand that one is in the presence of literary genius.

The best stories in the book are less assiduous in cuing their reader as to how to react in any given moment.

Characters in Blaise’s fiction are constantly on the move.

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.

Governmental intransigence has been fuelled, Lane believes, by the mainstream media

The approach to poetry and the world is tinged with surrealism and not a small dollop of humour

Blue Runaways is the first fiction publication from Stonehewer Books, a new independent press out of Victoria, B.C.

The stories in Last Woman have their finger on the pulse of the current zeitgeist.

Broadly speaking, the novel operates in the mode of metafiction.

What this amounts to is less fiction than a kind of erasure poetry.

Rowland suggests we need to re-emphasize our human predilection for moral action and goodness.

These are stories that are honest enough to meet their characters on their own terms.

The stories here are entertaining enough, provocative enough, and spicy enough that their ultimate provenance doesn’t really make any difference.

I have come down with Covid. New posts will resume once I’m feeling a bit better.

The individual entries are linked by characters that drift in and out among them.

These are books that made an impression on me.

Regardless of the narrative mode Verghese chooses, her thematic focus remains relatively constant.

Sam Wiebe and S.A. Cosby are among the leading practitioners of a new strain of noir fiction.

Protesters gathered outside 52 Division in downtown Toronto to call for the charges against the eleven to be dropped.

In addition to the prizes for individual works, several prizes for a body of work were also handed out.

The Giller protesters also received support on social media.

Estima infuses her writing with sensitivity for the barbed points of human interaction.

Yara represents Berger’s most fully realized vision yet.

One of Lamey’s qualities in this volume is a willingness to entertain multiple sides of a debate.

Toronto independent House of Anansi Press did very well at this year’s awards.

Egg Poets is the collective name of a quintet of writers.

Whittington-Hill incisively illustrates the various double standards women face as figures in the public eye.

“We feel now is the perfect time to develop and publish this anthology.”

The last of the big three shortlists to be announced, the GGs will be the first to unveil their winners, on November 8.

“The intent of the book felt very particular.”

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.

“My next task is to figure out how to do audiobooks.”

Other considerations aside, this represents one of the strongest Giller shortlists in years.

The more obviously generic elements of the story are less unsettling than the very real horrors of racism and family strife.

Only one writer on this year’s list, Emma Donoghue, has won the prize previously.

Indigo can’t fail, but it also appears less and less interested in operating primarily as a bookseller.

Twelve titles in total made the 2023 longlist, which was culled from a record-setting 145 submissions.

City in Flames and Camp Zero address societal discord via imaginative scenarios that only slightly exaggerated from the evening news.

The Marigold is a quintessential urban horror tale; The Handyman Method relocates the terror to the suburbs.

The stories display a surface placidity that belies their deeper structure.

LeBlanc’s short fiction is refreshingly resistant to closure.

The Canadian situation is in stark contrast to other Western countries that have more robust copyright protections.

“He was profoundly intelligent, but quite quiet. It was sometimes hard to know what he was thinking.”

“It’s very important to me that we look forward and thrive and that we signal stability to the market,” says Anansi president Semareh Al-Hillal.

“I look forward to putting my own stamp on a storied house,” says Brochu.

Troll is not a book liable to find a wide mainstream audience.

The core of the novel has a propulsion and a dramatic weight that works in its favour.

If there is a God hovering over Harmer’s narrative, it is of the Old Testament variety.

As a poet, Cayley is particularly good at juxtaposition often manifested as subtle or not-so-subtle shifts in tone and tenor.

Plett is not content to let her story act as a didactic tale about cis intolerance.

In describing fire – its properties and its behaviour – Vaillant is at his most enthralling.

Porter’s story is as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

Imagery involving implicit threat is threaded throughout the story.

“Doi Moi Beans” is a story about exploitation; not the obvious kind, but the subtle version.

The story operates in the subgenre that has typically become known as folk horror.

Camille Hernández-Ramdwar’s story addresses the nuances involved in the anti-vax movement via the eponymous character.

Barth, like Ross, writes in a highly ironic mode.

The key symbol for reclaiming something of youth’s vigour and potential is the rhubarb that serves as the story’s title.

Bruneau’s story is about human suffering and the willingness of people who witness it to intervene

As much as it is a story about sex, “A North American Education” is also a story about fathers and sons.

Bátiz’s story examines the class divides that permeate the city through the prism of a Mexican immigrant.

Faith is, to those who don’t subscribe, a kind of pandering to scared people.

Hill’s short story was first published in the Walrus in 2011.

A detailed and propulsive true crime story, Clara at the Door with a Revolver is also a work of social history.

The brief novel’s overall structure is frequently at odds with the specificity of the narrative that is unfolding.

Each of these anthologies features a range of subjects and approaches, testifying to the richness of the landscape in Canada.

“I think Quebec is Newfoundland writ large because we do have our own culture and that is so tied up in the language.”

Very much in the spirit of a good grift, the novel lures us in willingly before snatching all our assurances away from us.

The notion of making oneself “legible” to oneself and others is at the centre of Halen’s project.

“I’m interested in that idea: when we transform ourselves, are we transforming our pain?”

“These stories ask the question What is a monster? and complicate the definition of ‘monster’ along the way.”

This Is the House That Luke Built is a strong first novel, clearly adept at marrying its form and content.

Failure is inevitable because perfection is unattainable.