Hiding Edith by Kathy Kacer (Second Story) is a novel for children based on the childhood of Edith Schwalb, who fled Austria with her family to escape the Nazis, and was only able to do so because her father had been a popular soccer star. The family relocated to Belgium and then France, where her father was arrested (he did not live through the war).
Amy Nelson is a privileged Chicago teen who doesn’t know anything about Israel or about being Jewish. Simone Elkeles’s young adult novel, How to Ruin a Summer Vacation (Flux), describes what happens when Amy’s Israeli father, who has stayed out of her life, takes her to meet a foreign family she has never even known about.
The story of Esther Brandeau, the first Jew to set foot in New France, could have been a dull historical re-creation, but Esther, by Sharon E. McKay (Penguin), is an action-packed story about a feisty, unusual and believable heroine.
Early in 2006 the Western Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver mounted a daunting one-man show, Will Eno’s new play Thom Pain (based on nothing), at Performance Works on Granville Island. Scott Bellis starred as Thom, a rumpled neurotic loser who spills his guts while peppering the audience with jokes and stunts, and teasing us with the spectre of audience participation.
Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival in October. He managed to make geology sexy, and he discussed rocks, continents, seismology, a rude joke he once told Queen Elizabeth II, and his most recent book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperPerennial).
Vikram Seth made a name for himself with the conventional epic A Suitable Boy, but most of his publishing ventures have been strange and surprising. Two Lives (McArthur & Company) is the non-fiction story of his great uncle Shanti and great aunt Henny.
Portable Altamont by Brian Joseph Davis (Coach House) is an astounding book of comic genius for slackers and Gen X-ers the world over. Davis has created strange, outlandish riffs on popular culture, paying homage to our literary and musical icons, by lying through his teeth: Margaret Atwood is a gangsta-rapper and Mick Jagger is the size of a pea.
The short stories in Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Asthmatica (Insomniac) tickle the funny bone every time, from hypothetical essay titles to a story about the tactics a kid might use to shame the son of a mediocre Swedish hockey player. In these yarns Fiorentino travels between social commentary and joyous descriptions of bad behaviour.
Young James Laxer prayed for a normal life. He grew up in a committed Communist household, an experience he describes in Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism (Douglas & McIntyre).
During World War II, Gunda Lambton and her two young children left England to live in Canada. In Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal 1942-1945 (McGill-Queen’s), she tells her story: a precarious life with no family allowance, subsidized daycare or social housing.
