Rereading Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) is a blatant act of homage. When I first heard Choy read from his work, he was promoting his memoir Paper Shadows (1999) at a Pride event. He was reading with Marnie Woodrow and Sky Gilbert: one, a curly-haired slightly messy young
Readers of Alix Ohlin’s fiction will not be surprised to find an introspective narrator in her second novel (following Inside, which was also longlisted for the Giller Prize). But what’s remarkable about Dual Citizens is how simultaneously intimate and distanced the narrative is. Readers feel like they are privy
In the generation before my own, Newfoundland became a province in the nation currently called Canada. It’s about 3,000 km away from me, but it feels like a world apart. For me, as a reader, Michael Crummey’s The Innocents (2019) makes it seem both farther away and closer. Historical
The title of Pasha Malla’s 2015 article in The New Yorker’s Page-Turner says it all: “Too Different and Too Familiar: The Challenge of French-Canadian Literature.” Because it is a challenge to locate French-Canadian literature within the landscape of Canadian Literature, even for those of us who devote a significant
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
