edited by Rosalind Maki and Deborah de Bakker Coming from humble beginnings in 1997, The Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop has grown over the years to become the largest literary organization in the region––definitely cause to celebrate. Twenty Years on Snowshoes is a fitting celebration, a collection of winning entries from the short fiction and memoir…
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by Homer The Odyssey continues the story immediately after the sacking of Troy by the Greeks, so you can imagine it’s at least a bit exciting, picking this up so soon after finishing The Iliad. The hero, Odysseus, attempts to return to Ithaca, to his patient wife and son whom he left as an infant….
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by Homer What a time to be alive, the era of glory and warfare recounted within The Iliad. Life gave no room for softness was we know it today: You were forced to cruelty, or else be left to the whims of those without mercy. A more modern discussion of peace and harmony among men…
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by Greg Rhyno I hate it when I’m right. I mean, it feels fine being right in general sense, but, in the context of a book that tries to surprise you, it tends to bring things to an unsatisfying conclusion, especially when the twist is presented as though it should have shattered your world. But…
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by Terry Fallis After five demoralizing years in Canadian politics, Daniel Addison decides to quit his job as speechwriter to the leader of the Opposition Liberals to start teaching English at the University of Ottawa. (The decision came shortly after unintentionally witnessing his girlfriend’s late-night “political discourse” with the House Leader.) But, as a last…
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by Stephen Hawking Well, here’s another one that’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. And I think I can be excused for being a bit intimidated by this one. I mean, it’s not that long or anything, but I was well concerned that opening A Brief History of Time would be…
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by Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Wolfe’s account of the psychedelic adventures Ken Kesey, the author, and his band of “heads” (acid heads), the Merry Pranksters––often in their crazy hippie bus. Having met Kesey in the midst of his drug possession trials in the late ’60s, Wolfe cobbled his book together from…
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by Margaret Atwood It’s interesting to me when similar techniques employed by different authors elicit vastly different responses from me. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is reminiscent of one such technique I loved from Omar El Akkad’s American War, in that the whole final chapter reads like a transcript from a…
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by Diane Schoemperlen First Things First is a collection of early short stories by Schoemperlen, published from the mid-’70s––while studying English at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University––up to the early ’90s. This wide breadth of publication gives a reader a bird’s-eye-view of the evolution of an author. And this isn’t to suggest the writing’s poor early…
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