Book Reviews

Doreen Vanderstoop’s debut novel, Watershed, is a disturbing glimpse into Alberta’s future: The year is 2058; the glaciers have dried up, the rivers run dry. Calgary, where the novel is partly [...]

If a photograph only captures reality for, let’s say, 1/500th of a second, how can it represent history? That’s the challenge of Borderlands, a new black-and-white collection from Calgary [...]

Hugh Segal’s Bootstraps Need Boots, much like its author, defies classification and is almost impossible not to like. Part personal memoir, part political history, the book is held together by [...]

The late, great Alberta naturalist and bear expert Charlie Russell wrote several compellingly transformative books—Spirit Bear, Grizzly Heart and Grizzly Seasons—each of them enriched with [...]

Morgan Murray’s debut novel, Dirty Birds, hints at being loosely biographical from the start, when the rural Alberta born and raised Murray introduces us to Milton Ontario, a diffident small-town [...]

Poetry is not an expression of the party line,” according to Allen Ginsberg. “It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what [...]

                      As the English novelist P.D. James once noted, literature is full of works driven by an unanswered question—often [...]

Given the popular myth that Alberta’s social landscape is dominated by political conservatism, Tessa Jordan’s comprehensive history of the periodical Branching Out, a feminist initiative [...]

Modern comforts such as home delivery of nearly anything imaginable, powerful search engines and computers on your phone have all come about in the past two decades. This technological sea-change [...]

The very thought of reading an anthology for pleasure triggers memories of microscopic font, monotonous white writers, all-nighter essays, MLA format and a sandwich-crushing weight in one’s [...]