by Voltaire Candide follows its titular character through trials and tribulations that take him around the globe in pursuit of Cunégonde, the woman he loves. At a young age, his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, instilled an understanding in Candide of the concept of Optimism, or a universal good in the world, and the young man takes…
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by Kevin Hardcastle Once a successful mixed-martial arts fighter, an injury leaves Daniel unable to fight. Left with little options in a rural Canada struggling with widespread joblessness, he starts working as hired muscle for small-time drug deals, but the work’s getting bloodier and the crooks are getting more bloodthirsty. In the Cage explores Daniel’s…
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by Gary Barwin No TV for Woodpeckers is Barwin’s collection of experimental poetry. In the first section, “Needleminer,” the author takes a number of poems by other authors––representative of the industrial Hamilton landscape, from what he explains––and populates it with flora and fauna found throughout the area by replacing nouns from the source poems with…
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by Susan Payetta I previously discussed the importance of ensuring your readers come into your story with the right expectations, and the pitfalls associated with a failure to get into the heart of the plot in the synopsis. I wanted to extend the discussion a bit to a related topic: reader expectations that build during…
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by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell The Room is a bad movie, but it’s more than that. It’s a special kind of bad, an elite kind of bad, described as a modern Plan 9 from Outer Space or the Citizen Kane of bad movies––the kind of bad movie with a lasting legacy. The Disaster Artist…
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by Carolina Maria de Jesus Child of the Dark is the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, who lived in a favela, a slum, of São Paulo in the late ’50s. (Well, longer than that in truth, but this is at least the period recounted within these pages.) With only a second-grade education, she sold…
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by Tanya Talaga Here we are again: race relations in Thunder Bay. I’m really having a hard time determining where to start with this one, and probably not just because of its sensitive nature, but because of the uneasy feeling I’m left with when I dwell on it for too long. I think it has…
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by Terry Fallis One Brother Shy is narrated by Alex MacAskill, an Ottawa developer working on the latest and greatest face-recognition software. He takes care of his ailing mother and, because of a mysterious, traumatic event in his past, he suffers from an almost debilitating shyness, so bad he can barely look coworkers in the…
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by Grace O’Connell Be Ready for the Lightning follows the narrator Veda’s life before and after a traumatic event––being trapped aboard a Manhattan bus during a violent hostage situation. The story centres around the fractious relationship between Veda, her brother, Conrad, and their core group of friends as they all attempt to approach normalcy in…
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by Gary Barwin Yiddish for Pirates follows Moishe’s journey from being a young boy on the shtetl to captain of a pirate ship in the late fifteenth century. Narrated by Aaron, the African grey parrot who chose Moishe’s shoulder as his perch, the story tells of Moishe’s attempts to help Yids flee persecution during the…
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