The shortlist for the Toronto Book Award nearly always introduces me to the work of one writer whose work I did not know. (This year, I "discovered" Kevin Irie's poetry.) • Kamal Al-Solaylee, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (HarperCollins Canada) Harper Collins, 2012 Much of this memoir speaks
So many of my favourite writers will be appearing at this year's International Festival of Authors. Over the years, the festival and reading series have involved over 8,000 authors (from more than 100 countries), and the names below are certainly not the only authors appearing at this year's festival. These are
Take Tanis Rideout's Above All Things or Mary Novik's Muse: history is stuffed with stories begging to be retold. "Fiction and nonfiction both have to be true, but nonfiction has to be fact-checkable as well." So says Phllip Gourevitch. Indu Sundaresan's The Mountain of Light might not be fact-checkable, but
I've read some remarkable short story collections this year: Théodora Armstrong's Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, Ayelet Tsabari's The Best Place on Earth, Saleema Nawaz's Mother Superior, Richard van Camp's Godless But Loyal to Heaven, Miranda Hill's Sleeping Funny, and Paul Headrick's The Doctrine of Affections. Three more collections have captured
Rupert Thomson's Secrecy is suffused with deliciously disturbing images and scenes. A thin, dark ribbon of sky. Bared teeth with clumps of hair. A dead bird that dangles from a girl’s first like a flower needing water. A snake skin shed in a doorway. A secret passage. A stabbed countess. A
