Something called the “CanLit generator” became a minor sensation on social media recently. Go to the latter’s website and click on a button and you get a series of random, non-sequiturish plotlines based on clichés about our national literature: “An unnamed protagonist becomes involved with the fur trade to make peace with the parents they never knew”; “An archivist absent-mindedly buries a memento in the dirt outside their childhood home to rediscover themselves at the family cabin.” Read more…
Fiction
THE PIANO TUNER
by Kurt Palka
Starting in the early eighties, Kurt Palka published four novels over the course of roughly a decade. They were historical sagas and Len Deighton-ish wartime thrillers set in locales ranging from the Canadian author’s native Austria to imperial Mexico. Equinox, one of two published under the pseudonym Kurt Maxwell, focused on the then-hot topic of contract terrorism. All are currently out of print. Read more…
THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL
by Yann Martel
Though set decades apart —“Homeless,” “Homeward,” and “Home” — the three interlinked panels of The High Mountains of Portugal, Yann Martel’s triptych of a novel about grief and origins, have a series of elements in common: a bereaved man, a chimpanzee, people who walk backwards, and the titular mountains. Read more…
THE HOTELS OF NORTH AMERICA
by Rick Moody
Rick Moody is primarily famous for two things at opposite ends of the desirability spectrum: his popular 1994 novel the Ice Storm, which became a successful film, and for having been labelled “the worst writer of his generation” by the ostentatiously venal critic Dale Peck in 2002. Read more…
THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO
by Anthony Marra
With its complexly interlinked characters (among them a ballerina exiled to Siberia and a Chechen war-veteran-turned-drug-dealer); recurring objects passed, like a series of batons, from tale to tale (an unplayable mixtape, a painting of a Chechen landscape); and near-century-long narrative arc (from the Stalin-era Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia) splayed against a backdrop of systemic corruption and personal futility, Anthony Marra’s new book presents as if it were the love child of David Mitchell and George Orwell. Read more…
THE GOLD EATERS
by Ronald Wright
International headlines recently reported that one of Earth’s last uncontacted tribes, Peru’s Mashco-Piro, appeared to be attempting to communicate with the world outside their Amazon home. Visions of civilizational oneness sealed with pox-thwarting fistbumps dissipated, however, when it became apparent that what the Maschco Piro actually wanted was metal cooking implements, which they grabbed from a nearby tourist resort before retreating back into the jungle.
SLEEP
by Nino Ricci
The protagonists of Nino Ricci’s newest novel, Sleep, and his last, The Origin of Species, are both intellectually blocked academics who have problematic relationships with women and skeletons in their closets. But where Origin’s Alex Fratarcangeli eventually finds redemption through empathy for a series of people who enter his life, Ricci has deemed that neither conscience nor outward interference will impede Sleep’s David Pace in his journey down a path of moral depravity and self-sabotage. Read more…
UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR
by Patrick deWitt
Patrick DeWitt’s struggling-author anonymity vanished with the publication of his mock-Western second novel, The Sisters Brothers, which won two major prizes (the Rogers Writers’ Trust and the Governor General’s awards for fiction) and was shortlisted for two others (the Man Booker and the Giller). After he bought film rights, the actor John C. Reilly promised to play the languid assassin Eli Sisters, a bit of typecasting so perfect it makes my hands flap uncontrollably. Read more…
ACT NORMAL
by Greg Hollingshead
When at one point, the narrator of “Sense of an Ending,” a story smack in the middle of Greg Hollingshead’s crackerjack new collection, Act Normal, announces “It’s in a reader’s interest to close down on the meaning as soon as she can. She needs to be able to move on as soon as possible to the next story,” it’s hard not to take it personally. That’s because in these twelve non-sequiturish tales of miscommunication, uncanniness and altered states, Hollingshead (currently director of the Banff Centre Writing Studio and a G-G Award for Fiction-winner for his 1995 collection The Roaring Girl) makes a sport of denying exactly this to his readers, as if “meaning” were a piece of fantasy real estate and he were Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross urging us, minus the verbal abuse, to “always be closing.” Read more…
THE BLACK SNOW
by Paul Lynch
Paul Lynch’s The Black Snow is, like its predecessor, Red Sky in Morning, a fierce and stunning novel written in chiaroscuro; its darkness always threatening to absorb its light. The Irish author’s gnarled, lustrous prose style is peppered with local vernacular; his literary sensibility an ornate version of the American Gothic of McCarthy and Faulkner. Throw in an elastic attitude to grammar and all of this has a thrillingly defamiliarizing effect: though he’s writing in English, Lynch makes you feel like you’ve magically acquired the ability to understand a foreign language. Read more…
ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES
by Graham Swift
It’s been a recent trend in filmmaking to withhold the picture’s title until the very end, as if the audience had been entirely in the dark about what it was watching until the credits rolled. The title story of England and Other Stories, Graham Swift’s first book of short stories in 30 years (all of them previously unpublished), functions similarly—but less coyly. It is the collection’s caboose, but also its coxswain. Read more…
UNDONE
by John Colapinto
John Colapinto’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-nominated first novel, About the Author, was a metafictional tale about a blocked writer named Cal who discovers that his roommate has secretly written a great novel based on his (Cal’s) life. When the roommate suddenly dies, Cal pilfers the manuscript and becomes a bestselling author; his time in the limelight coming to an end when he fails to produce a follow-up and when a former flame, aware of his secret, tries to blackmail him. Read more…
THE NIGHT STAGES
by Jane Urquhart
Set mostly in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, Jane Urquhart’s new novel is dedicated to three real but unconnected people who inspired some of its characters: the English World War Two aviator Vi Milstead Warren, the Irish poet Michael Kirby and the Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead, famous for the massive mural, Allegories of Travel, that has presided over Gander, Newfoundland’s airport lounge since 1959. Read more…
THE MAN WHO SAVED HENRY MORGAN
by Robert Hough
Over the course of five novels, Robert Hough has shown a liking for the nooks and crannies of his preferred genre, historical fiction, as well as for characters at the far ends of the fortune spectrum: his wild cat tamers, stowaways, charlatans and conmen tend to be either down on their luck or flush with success. If you’re looking for tales of simmering middle-class disenchantment, in other words, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Read more…
THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K
by Rachel Kushner
When we’re in love, we want to learn every little thing about the object of our love: childhood dreams, adolescent heartbreaks, chips versus chocolate. Since the publication of her two remarkable novels, 2008’s Telex from Cuba and 2013’s The Flamethrowers, the American writer Rachel Kushner (who is the only author to have a first and second novel nominated for the National Book Award) has earned legions of fiercely adoring fans. It’s no surprise then that the three stories collected in this slim, sub-hundred-page volume, The Strange Case of Rachel K, all of which appeared previously in various literary journals, have suddenly been made available to a love-struck readership hungry for origin stories. Read more…
A MEASURE OF LIGHT
by Beth Powning
Beth Powning has produced six books to date, including two critically acclaimed works of historical fiction (The Sea Captain’s Wife, The Hatbox Letters) and three memoirs in which she writes, evocatively, of her rural New Brunswick home—where she has lived since the early ‘70s—and, achingly, of the experience of giving birth in her twenties to a stillborn child (Shadow Child). Read more…
THE ILLUMINATIONS
by Andrew O’Hagan
Art, memory, love, war: Andrew O’Hagan’s fifth novel, The Illuminations, tosses familiar enough novelistic tropes our way. What makes it remarkable, in part, is a bravura performance in which O’Hagan moves seamlessly between a seniors’ complex in coastal Scotland and the baked landscapes of war-torn Afghanistan. If O’Hagan were an R&B singer, he’d be Mariah Carey in her octaval heyday. Read more…
OUTLINE
by Rachel Cusk
It’s become a book review cliché to describe plain but effective prose as “deceptively spare,” the implication being that some form of legerdemain has been used to conjure deep thoughts from simple words. The bromide could be applied to Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Outline, about a UK writer who comes to Athens to teach a summer writing course; Cusk’s placid, measured writing certainly seems at odds with the sense of exhilaration we get reading it. Read more…
ETTA AND OTTO AND RUSSELL AND JAMES
by Emma Hooper
Etta and Otto, the first two characters in the title of Emma Hooper’s debut novel, are a childless, elderly couple from rural Saskatchewan. On page one, Otto wakes to find a note from Etta: “I’ve gone. I’ve never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry, I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back.” Read more…
HER
by Harriet Lane
There’s a little-known codicil to the maxim “time heals all wounds,” which is “except those inflicted in adolescence.” How else to explain why the social slights of teenage-hood stick with us in a way, alas, that trigonometry formulas do not?
It is, at any rate, a premise key to Harriet Lane’s crackerjack new novel. Her has been dubbed a domestic thriller, but might just as aptly be called a class thriller—“class” meant here not as a short form of “classy,” though I suppose that shoe fits too, but in the socio-economic sense. Read more…