Grotesque TendernessDaniel CowperMcGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019 Review by Mark Grenon Flannery O’Connor wrote “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the...
Vic City ExpressYanis Tsirbas. Translator: Fred A. ReedBaraka books, 2018 Review by Sanad Tabbaa Vic City Express by Yannis Tsirbas is, above all else, a practice in world-building. Similar to the little maps on the inside cover of pop...
Bina: A Novel in WarningsAnakana SchofieldKnopf Canada, 2019 Review by Marisa Grizenko “Don’t arrive at the end of this tale insisting it was too long or too wide or too unlike you. I am not interested in appealing to...
Mouthful of BirdsSamanta SchweblinPenguin Random House, 2019 Review by Alexandra Valahu Sometimes, when you wake up from a vivid dream, a feeling or an emotion lingers on, even though you can’t remember the particular details and edges of what...
Bad Ideas Missy Marston ECW Press, 2019 Review by Kris Rothstein Missy Marston’s novel Bad Ideas oozes the atmosphere evocative of life in a small rust belt town in the 1970s. Trudy lives with her mother Claire and four-year-old...
Little Girls Nicholas Aflleje, Sarah DeLaine, Ashley Lanni-Hoye & Adam Wollet Image Comics, 2019 Review by Nikki Holmes Little Girls is a standalone horror graphic novel from the creative team of Nicholas Aflleje (writer), Sarah DeLaine (illustrator), Ashley Lanni-Hoye (colourist), and...
Severance Ling Ma Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Émilie Kneifel Brand names, and so many other unchosen memories, litter Ling Ma’s apocalypse in her debut novel, Severance. Their fluorescent logos—the seven, the eleven, that NY-loving heart—the epitome of...
The Collected Schizophrenias Esmé Weijun Wang Graywolf Press Review by Margeaux Feldman Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays begins with a proclamation: “Schizophrenia terrifies.” For Wang, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, the most terrifying thing...
Gingerbread Helen Oyeyemi Penguin Random House, 2019 Review by Will Preston There is a peculiar feeling, I believe, common to travellers in a foreign place. It arrives sometime after the initial jolt of finding yourself in a sea of...