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March-April 2017

Bad Detectives

Short story by Liz Harmer

Liz Harmer@lizharmer

One way to examine a marriage is to look at the pattern of jokes. Fourteen years ago, when Heidi started her daily running practice, when Marley was two, terribly two, Heidi used to joke that she ran because she could pretend she’d keep running and never come back. Sometimes she ran for an hour, for […] More »
March-April 2017

REVIEW: New novel explores survivors’ realities in the Second World War

The Water Beetles was inspired by author Michael Kaan's own family history

Pema Tsering@PemaTsering1

The Water Beetles By Michael Kaan Goose Lane Editions, $22.95 At times graphic and disturbing, The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan tells the heroic and poetic story of a young boy living in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of Kaan’s father, the narrative follows 12-year-old Chung-Man […] More »
January-February 2017

REVIEW: Collection of short stories examines the way death changes our lives

Date with Destiny's stories evoke sadness, sympathy, hilarity, and even awkward discomfort

Samantha Sobolewski

Date with Destiny By Hélène Rioux, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky Guernica Editions, $20 Ten grisly but rich descriptive short stories, Date With Destiny by Hélène Rioux glimpses at the many ways death affects our lives at any given age. From a mother with a suicidal son, to an overzealous funeral sales telemarketer, each character experiences […] More »
November-December 2016

REVIEW: New novel explores unusual family dynamic and commentary on grim realities

Lisa de Nikolits's The Nearly Girl follows Amelia and her family as she's forced to confront her issues

Maria Siassina @musingwithmasha

The Nearly Girl By Lisa de Nikolits Inanna Publications, $22.95 The Nearly Girl by Lisa de Nikolits is many things, but predictable isn’t one of them. Broken into a few chapters, The Nearly Girl tells the story of an unusual family, including a daughter named Amelia, who inherited her father’s peculiarities and is confronted with […] More »
March-April 2016

We could be heroes

Epic fantasy and sci-fi are today’s bestsellers and blockbusters. But in a world that can imagine magic and dragons, why is diversity so hard to find?

Nicole Abi-Najem@NajemNorth

I was maybe, what, eight years old? There I was, standing in my literal cave of a stinky basement—a carved-out hollow of dark, dank stone under my rickety old house—scrounging through books piled high into mountains of dust. I whipped out one book. The cover stood out: A woman with flowing ebony braids is striking […] More »

The South Asian daughter stereotype

Nashwa Khan

I frequent a lot of progressive feminist spaces. I also love pop-culture. If I were to make a Venn diagram the two would overlap easily, and in that overlap would also lay a stereotype—that of the “oppressed South Asian daughter”—which has affected me multiple times. I used to laugh it off, or even make jokes […] More »
May-June 2015

Whitewashed

Nashwa Kahn@nashwakay

From our education system to our literary community, why is CanLit so white? Nashwa Khan challenges the default narrative JUNOT DÍAZ UNLEASHED A BOMBSHELL on the writing world when he published his essay “MFA vs. PoC” in the New Yorker last spring. The Dominican American author is a creative writing professor, a fiction editor for […] More »
May-June 2015

A sneak peek at our May/June issue!

This Magazine Staff@thismagazine

Straight, white, men still dominate the technology industry. In our May/June issue, This Magazine contributing editor RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change. Also in this issue: Sam Juric tells us why we should stop painting foreign adoption as a Brangelina fairytale, and instead focus on the  […] More »

WTF Wednesday: Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente steps up to defend David Gilmour

Vincent Colistro

By the time Friday rolled around last week there was a veritable anthology of jokes to which “David Gilmour” was the punch line. The paper-bag jowls and complacent half-smile of his face pasted on News Feeds and blogs like an advert for a public flogging. Everywhere that CanLit went, so too went the name David […] More »
May-June 2009

Dear CBC: Review more books

Darryl WhetterWebsite

Professional book reviewing is dead in this country. The CBC could revive it. If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in […] More »
March-April 2009

Let’s Get It On

Darryl WhetterWebsite

Canadian fiction prefers the joinery of farmhouses — not farmhands The preference among Canadian literary awards for historical fiction has created a national literature devoted to burlap sacking instead of life in the sack. The repeat shortlisting of historical fiction, in which a rural or foreign yesterday is somehow more important than today, contributes to […] More »