For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce on my daily walks. I was walking in full summer, listening to descriptions of winter in Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. The clusters of cloud in the story were from the exhaust of snowmobiles in
Facts are only the random detritus of our lives until they are connected by story. Stories, to paraphrase Robert Kroetsch, make us real. If there is anything like truth accessible to us in the world, it must be through the ways we tell of ourselves to each other. Tomson Highway's
Neither small-scale farmers nor low-income communities have been invited to the table to make food policy on a global scale. The Stop illuminates this reality in matter-of-fact and unsentimental language, presenting facts both from a bird’s-eye-view and a grassroots perspective. Readers are acquainted with some alarming information on an international
Knopf, 2013 Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) “Naxalbari is an inspiration. It’s an impetus for change.” One brother in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel is a member of the Naxalbari movement, Udayan. His involvement with the far-left radical Communist group in Calcutta vitally impacts the entire family, even Subhash, who
Among other books enjoyed in September were some standout novels that will be featured later this month, including Michael Crummey's Sweetland and Magie Dominic's Street Angel. There was also Diversiverse and the launch of RIP IX, and much musing on future Read-a-Thon choices. Award longlists began appearing (including the Toronto Book
