The Inquirer
The Inquirer is a tabloid that mysteriously appears at the local convenience store in Kingsley, Alberta. Rather than detailing the lives of celebrities, however, the paper turns up the latest [...]
By Jay Smith
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems
As the title suggests, Edmonton poet Tim Bowling’s 14th book of poetry, The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems, revisits the lost salmon-fishing culture of British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. Originally [...]
An Honest Woman
Calgary writer JoAnn McCaig’s latest novel, An Honest Woman, has a matryoshka doll structure: It layers the story of a single, middle-aged woman who is writing a novel about a single, middle-aged [...]
Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up
A warlike parliament. Infantile legislatures. “My way or the highway” leaders. Legislation-by-lobbyist. Ignored grassroots. Unrepresentative governments (Canada has had a female PM for all of 132 [...]
By Evan Osenton
Ice and Other Stories
Ice and Other Stories is an anthology put out by the UK house PS Publishing, celebrating the career of one of Canada’s greatest science fiction innovators, Candas Jane Dorsey. The release of the [...]
Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers
Erin Emily Ann Vance’s first novel, Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers, reads like a Wes Anderson movie set in a Robert Kroetsch small town. Clocking in at a brisk 97 pages, the book [...]
Rising: Becoming the First Canadian Woman to Summit Everest
In her memoir Rising: Becoming the First Canadian Woman to Summit Everest, Sharon Wood writes that she never expected this one climb to so fully permeate her life. “[Everest] has often preceded [...]
By Elaine Morin
Pressure Cooker Love Bomb
With a title like Pressure Cooker Love Bomb, this collection makes the reader both eager and a bit hesitant to crack the book open (will it explode in our hands?). Sharanpal Ruprai’s new poems [...]
Looking Back, Moving Forward
Looking Back, Moving Forward is an anthology focused on the voices of Canadian immigrant writers. Edmonton-based editor Julie C. Robinson, the former program coordinator of the Writer’s Guild of [...]
Exhibit
Exhibit is a disorienting yet beautiful book. A collage of found poetry assembled from sources as diverse as child psychology textbooks, a Three Stooges autobiography and hours of research in the [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
Kenney’s War on Workers
My wife and I spent our last day of our summer vacations in 2019 on a picket line with healthcare workers at Edmonton’s old General Hospital. Most of the cleaners, healthcare aides and nurses at the information picket were women of colour. Like public-sector workers across the province, they were ...
The Story of Joseph Lewis
In 1799 Joseph Lewis, a Hudson's Bay Company employee, arrived in what is now Alberta. He was 27 years old but his life had already been crammed with adventure.
Born in 1772 in Manchester, New Hampshire, at 20 he’d made his way to Montreal, where he joined the North West Company ...
Just Transition
There were times when I was taking home about $3,500 a week.” That was in the oil sands, during the boom before 2014. Lliam Hildebrand was a young welder who had come to the Athabasca oil sands for work.
Before that, the Victoria, BC, native spent his first eight years after high ...