This year, for Margaret Atwood Reading Month #MARM, we’re playing BINGO. (If you’re printing your playing card, don’t forget to select “Shrink to Fit” in your printer’s options, so your card will fill a single sheet of paper.) In recent weeks, looking ahead to November was like having a
If Bird doesn’t know Thumps Dreadfulwater, someone should introduce them. Both men are photographers, indigenous (they’d probably say ‘Indian), and diabetic. Both have had longterm relationships—with cats, as well as women, and they would consider dessert their favourite food group. They’re simultaneously interested enough in the world to strike
If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry. But what a
From the opening lines of Five Little Indians, debut author Michelle Good prepares readers. There are snares and ghosts, silvery and summery glimmers, and there is also warmth. (There’s also the requisite discussion of semantics—‘Indian’ or ‘Aboriginal’—reminding readers that nomenclature and self-identification is not a matter of consensus in
Originally inspired by the 1918-2018 centenary of the Spanish Flu, Emma Donoghue began writing this novel in the tradition of her historical novels like Slammerkin and The Wonder. Her author’s note includes this statistic: “The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3
