BY RACHNA CONTRACTOR Last year Arsenal Pulp Press published Vivek Shraya’s first novel, She of the Mountains, which elegantly juxtaposes two love stories, one based in Hindu mythology and one loosely based on Shraya’s life. With only two main characters and a handful of secondary...
Andrew Binks (Vancouver) “One of my most memorable early influences as a novelist was Patrick Roscoe. When many people open a book and are hooked by plot (and, as writers, we are told to hook our audience with plot), I was, and still am hooked by prose. On the continuum from fancy to spare, I...
Amber Dawn I watched your breast which was fuller than the night on my porch when I first undid your buttons. The sheet beneath you was green It was almost our anniversary –“Epiphyte 2: Moss,” Jane Eaton Hamilton I watch your breast which is fuller than when we met I thought...
Kamal Al-Solaylee (Toronto) “I don’t remember how I got hold of Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots in Cairo of the mid-1980s. Perhaps my friend Omar, on whom I had an embarrassing crush in my early twenties, lent it to me. He was educated in the United States of America in the late 1970s and...
Davey Davis [mks_dropcap style=”square” size=”35″ bg_color=”#505556″ txt_color=”#ffffff”]T[/mks_dropcap]he Falcon is caged into its lot by prickly pears and a queue of stunted palms. Beyond it sprawl the fallow rice fields, and beyond those the...
BY LISA TIMPF Since I enjoyed many of Brown’s earlier works, including Sudden Death, I decided to check out one of her more recent offerings, a mystery entitled Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Released in November 2014, this book is the ninth in a series that revolves around silver-haired...
Deborah Ellis (Simcoe) “I continue to be impacted by From Anna, a novel by acclaimed Canadian children’s author Jean Little. She takes big topics — war, immigration, disabilities — and breaks them down into a story about an awkward girl trying to find her place in her family...
Claire Matthews I Like ferns in the desert, you said we were impossible. I drew you a giraffe, a frond in its mouth, taped it to the fridge, said, Use your imagination. Around your neck hung the patron saint you wore when you saw your mother. In the living room, the only photo of her turned...
Shawn Syms (Toronto) “For me, queerness signifies difference, including an expansive notion of sexual difference, rather than a strictly limited notion of ‘gay identity.’ “Exploring — and exploding — the limits of sexual and social identities has long been part of the...
