If you are reading this post because you are part of the #1965Club, and you haven’t heard of Marie-Claire Blais, you are about to wonder how that can be true. (And if you also haven't heard of #1965Club, please visit Karen's and Simon's sites to learn more.) Blais has published
The family stories in contemporary CanLit are not all that different from the stories and novels read by my grandmother’s generation. The women in my family did not read obsessively, no, but regularly, yes. What else was there to do in the evenings when your favourite show was in reruns
Researching Dawn Dumont, to review her most recent collection, Glass Beads, this quote leapt out at me: "If you can laugh then you can survive until the solution arrives." (Room Magazine, interview with Theressa Slind) It's easy to dismiss funny books as light, insubstantial. To call them
Though set further north of the bluffs, David Chariandy's follow-up to his debut Soucouyant is every bit as family-soaked, its losses and sorrows cast against a remarkable and enduring landscape. In Brother, Michael introduces readers to the Rouge Valley, to his mother and to the memory of his brother
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life (2017) Arranged as though composed over a twelve-month period, this would seem to be the perfect book to read slowly, meditatively. To allow the pages
