reviews

Michał Kozłowski
Reviews
From the Heart

Michal Kozlowski on From the Heart of It All: Ten Years of Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Reviews
A Cockney in China

At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Reviews
Amor Aeturnus

Britt Huddart reviews Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch, not your average anguish and fangs vampire movie.

Reviews
Anti-Poverty Connection

In 1997, when Internet connections were dial-up and most of us were just trying to figure out how the World Wide Web worked, a group of people had the foresight to see that the Internet could be a powerful tool for the anti-poverty movement.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Another Way of Saying Goodbye

Those who were close to the late John Berger have spoken of his generosity, praising Berger’s collaborative nature and his ability to establish and sustain creative friendships throughout a long and productive life.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Artists Behaving Badly

Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.

Thad McIlroy
Reviews
Baskets Case

Thad McIlroy thinks you should watch Zach Galifianakis' Baskets.

Michael Hayward
Dispatches
Beatnik Glory

Michael Hayward reviews The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico and Peter Orlovsky: A Life in Words, works for "only the most dedicated fans of Beat literature."

Reviews
Bird Metal

Roni Simunovic investigates Hatebeak, a death metal band with an African Grey parrot vocalist.

Reviews
Cake Fails

Kristen Lawson on Nailed It!, a Netflix Original

Columns
Canada’s Dark Depths

Sex, suicide, Nelson and Cabbagetown—Patty Osborne reviews The Modern World and The Secret Life of Fission, two hard-hitting story collections.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Clouds of Intrigue, Rays of Hope

"Like most people who have seen the stand-up comedy and other stage-work of Charles Demers, I sure couldn’t pass up a book of his personal essays."

Michael Hayward
Dispatches
Coastal Memories

Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Cycling Innocently Into the Arctic

I Cycled into the Arctic Circle: A Peregrination by James Duthie and Matt Hulse (Saltire Society) is a “newly revived and revised edition of deaf Scotsman James Duthie’s rare journal.”

Reviews
Elixirs

Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.

Reviews
Express Recycling Depot

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Lily Gontard
Dispatches
Everything is Illuminated

Lily Gontard reviews The Luminaries and The Douglas Notebooks, two award-winning novels you might not have heard of.

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Folly of War

Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Following Wind, Following Water

Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Reviews
Free to Be

Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.

Thad McIlroy
Reviews
Gathering Dust

Thad McIlroy on Brian Busby's The Dusty Bookcase.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Graphic Heroism

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Doubleday Canada) is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel offering feminist adaptations of folk tales wrapped in an epic-feeling love story.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Half-Blood Blues

Review of Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. Edugyan's novel was the winner of the 2011 Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Governor General's Literary Award and Roger's Writer's Trust Award.

Dylan Gyles
Reviews
Heavy Reading

Dylan Gyles embarks on a quest to read all of literature's most difficult tomes, starting with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Reviews
Hidden Life

Patty Osborne reviews Last Dance in Shediac by Anny Scoones.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Ignored or Unknown Worlds

Jill Mandrake on City Poems by Joe Fiorito.

Dispatches
Jamaica on Ice

Jennesia Pedri reviews A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.

Reviews
Marginal

Stephen Osborne finds a copy of Francoise Sagan's Those Without Shadows at the bus stop, complete with margin notes that create a new sort of text.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Martel’s Mountains

In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
New Spinsters Smash the Patriarchy

Mallory Ortberg's subversive dark fairy tales.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Reviews
News in a Nutshell

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Notes on Navigation

"This Accident of Being Lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (House of Anansi) is a sharp collection of short stories and poetry that resists the colonialism of contemporary Canada.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Of Cats and Men

Kelsea O’Connor on Manfried the Man by Caitlyn Major and Kelly Bastow.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Old Cobblers

Michael Hayward on "Autumn" by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Mandelbrot
Reviews
Ordinary Bodies

Together the images in Bathers constitute a supreme study of ordinary bodies, and demonstrate in visceral ways just how unique is the ordinary body: no two alike, each an expression of itself.

Reviews
Out and About

Roni Simunovic reviews Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King, a collection of interviews about gender and sexuality, and how to make art, make rent and survive.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Page's Pages

The poet and artist P.K. Page wrote Mexican Journal (Porcupine’s Quill) from 1960 to 1963, while posted in Mexico with her husband, Ambassador W. Arthur Irwin.

Reviews
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Mandelbrot
Reviews
Reaching Out

Mandelbrot schleps a pen around for a week to feel it out.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Seabrook Adventure

In The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, Joe Ollmann begins with a reflective preamble called “Me and Mr. Seabrook,” part of which reads, “I realized that no one knew about Seabrook’s work—all his books were out of print at the time…”

Reviews
Shackled

Stephen Osborne discusses the notion that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future.”

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Shipwrecked Lily

Kelsea O'Connor on "The Case of the Gilded Lily," a film by Shipwrecked Comedy.

Reviews
Small Victories

Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Sometimes the Review is Longer Than the Story

Jill Mandrake reviews There Can Never Be Enough by David Arnason, a combination of dreamscape and tragicomic monologue.

Dispatches
Soviet Dynamite

A gaggle of kids team up with a crazy hippie named Sea Foam and an array of Angolan grandmothers in Granma Nineteen, reviewed by Patty Osborne.

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Toronto The Good

Daniel Francis reviews Toronto: Biography of a City, a book bound to irritate readers who live outside Toronto—the "centre of the Canadian universe."

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VQFF 2016: Lovesong
The VQFF program called Lovesong a story about two women “on the edge of something exciting,” but the most enjoyable parts of the film were the little things.
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