Book Reviews

Fire lookout narratives can almost be considered a niche unto themselves in literature. There’s something deeply compelling about the concept of being paid to disappear into the bush for several [...]

A brief introductory note by J. Mark Smith provides an explanatory framework for the poems in Jaspreet Singh’s first collection of verse, November: “November (1984) was the month of mass murder [...]

Greg Rhyno’s debut novel, which takes place in the mid-1990s and 10 years later, amounts to a painfully effective exercise in nostalgia. In keeping with a cassette-tape theme, the timelines are [...]

Throughout the history of the western plains, men and the frontier have been mythically and rhetorically aligned. Conquest, settler beliefs held, demanded brute force and rugged individualism. [...]

Gemma, the teenage anti-heroine of Lisa Murphy-Lamb’s debut novel, belongs in the pantheon of great YA protagonists. Part Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, part Margaret Simon from Are [...]

The median woman in Western democracies was for many years a married heterosexual mother. As a result, citizens tended to use family responsibility as a prism for evaluating political [...]

Studying a thriving labour union in Alberta is a bit like studying an organism that flourishes in scorching, sulfur-laden undersea vents. Until recently, Alberta’s labour protections have been [...]

Frank O’Connor, the great Irish author, described a writer as one who sets a mirror in the roadway and then goes about describing what he or she sees reflected there. Edmonton author Jasmina Odor [...]

Visits to art galleries can frequently be marred by semi-comprehensible curatorial statements with a tenuous relationship to the art. So it was with hesitation that I opened The Writing on the [...]

A woman dies on the operating table. Her spirit, untethered from her body, floats beyond the walls of the hospital. Once revived, she describes seeing a shoe on the roof. Doctors are skeptical of [...]