Even though the challenge officially begins on July 1 -- and ends on the last day of the following June -- it's not too late to join The Book Mine Set's Canadian Books Challenge. This year is the tenth event, and John has calculated thousands of books reviewed for past
In which I discuss some of the skinny volumes, which have nestled into my bookbag (while longer works, like Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, were left at home. Vivek Shraya's God Loves Hair is illustrated by Juliana Neufeld, a full-page image introducing each of
"I've always conceived of language as music," says Tomson Highway: musician, playwright, novelist. "I play Chopin still, but in Cree," he continues. Then, more than a decade later, it is as though he continues this conversation, in A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance. This slim volume is subtitled on "Imagining Multilingualism", which
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
