It's with a subtle touch, but Nadia Bozak solidly roots the reader in time and place. House of Anansi, 2016 This is not an easy task, because Shell only grows to the age of seventeen in Thirteen Shells -- across thirteen stories, and childhood is inherently rootless. So the details
It's a bright sunny day, when I snap this photo. I'm even more optimistic when I think of a month's reading, when the sun shines. More hours with good reading light. And, in February. What could be better. You can see the sheen of it in the image, the veil
If the idea of experimental or innovative short stories makes you squirm, even though you are simultaneously bored with more traditional structure, Not Anyone’s Anything belongs on your bookshelf. Ian Williams puts relationships at the core of his work and this fiction collection exhibits this tendency as well. I also
I pulled André Alexis' Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994) off my shelf when Fifteen Dogs was nominated for the Toronto Book Award (since then, FD has also been nominated for the Giller Prize and the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Award). There aren't any notable four-legged characters, but the collection is fascinating.
From my discovery of Neil Bantock's Griffin and Sabine books, I have sought out books that play with form. (Even earlier, I fell hard for Anastasia Krupnik's To-Do lists which appeared as handwritten notes on lined paper in Lois Lowry's books.) Recently, Kim Belair's and Ariadne MacGillivray's Pure Steele (2013) struck
