Lauren Groff’s novel, Fates and Furies, is the first novel I was compelled to finish based almost solely off my fondness for the language. Never mind the story. (Which, by the way, is brilliant in its own right. I will get to this shortly.) Groff’s prose reads like poetry and the diction is precise, sticking to the tongue when spoken aloud:Continue reading Magnified and Shrunk: A Review of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies
Reviews by Esther Chen Tell Everybody I Say Hi by Tess Liem Anstruther Press Tess Liem’s first chapbook opens with a short piece that sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Liem writes “I, a compartment & careful, ...
Olga Holin sat down with our PRISM international Creative Non-fiction Contest judge Jonathan Kemp and spoke to him about his writings and what he is looking for amongst the entries.
Review by Taryn Grant To the Back Of Beyond by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hoffman Other Press, 2017 At first pass the title reads with a satisfying punch and clarity: To the Back of Beyond. On further scrutiny,...
Raina von Waldenburg’s play 12 Minute Madness starts simply: a janitor sweeps the bare stage before the MC, one face of protagonist Marlena von Twattenburg, makes introductions. It’s a gentle introduction to a show that very quickly, and with...
We are happy to announce that our annual PRISM international Non-Fiction Contest is now open for submissions. We are absolutely delighted to introduce our judge from across the pond: Jonathan Kemp! Jonathan Kemp’s debut novel London Triptych (Myriad, 2010) was acclaimed...
Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.
In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).
The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.
Chelene Knight’s debut poetry collection, Braided Skin, was celebrated as a vibrant telling of mixed ethnicity and urban childhood poverty. Her sophomore book Dear Current Occupant, a creative nonfiction memoir, is a nuanced account of growing up in Vancouver’s Downtown...
