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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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 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 Steven Martin I think I’m far too impressionable, and arguably for the wrong reasons. I mean, if I was picking up good habits and useful knowledge it’d be one thing, but it was only in the midst searching up opium pipes on eBay that I really had to stop and think about what I…
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by Micah Pawluk While Pawluk covers a range of topics in his debut poetry collection, A Boy from the Woods, the vast majority of the book concerns his thoughts on love. The author often groups poems with similar ideas and themes together, occasionally growing and building off of the previous ones in a narrative fashion,…
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by Denise Chong An unforgettable photo of a child––running naked, crying, and badly burned by a napalm strike––was not only influential in turning public opinion during the Vietnam war, but kept an enduring legacy as the embodiment of the senselessness and cruelty of war. Kim Phuc was the child, and The Girl in the Picture…
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by Peter Wohlleben It’s amazing how seemingly little things can really ruin something. While I’ve spoken previously about how a synopsis with a poor focus can hurt a story before it even starts, the foreword written by Tim Flannery from The Hidden Life of Trees made me feel that it at least warrants a bit…
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by Aziz Ansari Modern Romance, as a concept, seems like something I could really get behind. I mean, a comedian tackling a subject such as the culture of discovering love in the modern age on his own would lead me to think that the strength of the book would rest solely on the author’s ability…
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by Ronald Wright A Short History of Progress consists of Ronald Wright’s Massey Lecture series on the dangers of the very modern ideal of progress and runaway growth. The idea is that we may be on a course to our own downfall, and learning from the errors of the past is the key to saving…
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