by Maya Ombasic Mostarghia starts in the days surrounding the death of Ombasic’s father. Told that she can only recover his body from the hospital morgue if a religious authority prepares it for its final resting place, we bear witness to the callousness the author is met with when church after church after church refuses…
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by Marius Kociejowski I’m a fan of Kociejowski’s writing. And I tend to keep my eyes open for anything of his during my travels, though historically the exercise often has proved fruitless. Part of the issue, I feel, is that I always have associated him with his travel writing, which seems to have little in…
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by André Alexis Days by Moonlight concerns the young botanist Alfred Homer’s journey across Southern Ontario. Alfred comes along to drive and assist Professor Bruno, a close friend of his late parents, as he interviews friends and family members of a mysterious poet––the subject of his biography-in-progress. Along the way, the pair bears witness to…
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by Kazuo Ishiguro When reading, I tend to explore everything laid out on and within the copy of the book at hand before getting into the story proper––you know, synopses, blurbs, forewords, introductions. And I’m aware of vast differences of opinion about how you should and should not proceed in this respect, especially with regard…
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by Kris Bertin Use Your Imagination! is a short story collection that very immediately put me in mind with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, both because the majority of the stories deal with misfits behaving badly––or just strangely––and because they’re built upon a solid foundation of exceptional writing. This is happily one of those cases where…
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by Kurt Vonnegut After taking control of the Rosewater Foundation, Eliot Rosewater dedicates his time and the copious amounts of money in his trust to helping average Americans, no strings attached. Some people––including his father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater, the man who started the Foundation as a way to prevent tax collectors from getting at…
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by Marcus Aurelius Not long ago, I was reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors to Perception with the full intention of reviewing it, but I was struggling to come up with anything meaningful for discussion. I found the book to be extraordinary in many ways, even important enough to help me through some difficult times, but…
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by Anakana Schofield Bina––pronounced Bye-na, not Bee-na––is the latest non-traditional story by Giller nominated Schofield. Told as a series of warnings scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and receipts, the titular septuagenarian bluntly describes her dangerous encounters with men. Because Bina’s convinced that he’s largely to blame for ruining her life and turning her…
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translated by Coleman Barks Jelaluddin Rumi was a sufi mystic who lived in Persia and Anatolia in the thirteenth century. I’ve read not only that his works have been hugely influential on Middle Eastern literature, but also that translations of these poems remain extremely popular in the West––as I feel they should be after experiencing…
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by Kayla Czaga Dunk Tank is a collection of poetry of the sort I quite enjoy, in form, specifically. Though Czaga writes free verse, she maintains a structure through the repetition of similar sounds rather than tight rhymes, and this is used to great effect within her work in at least a few ways, all…
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