ArticlesMargaret Goldik
Margaret Goldik is a Montreal writer and editor, but currently is constantly wearing her editor’s hat as a lot of people have been writing feverishly during the pandemic.
-
FictionShort-story collection challenges everyday reality, comfort levels
Winnipeg author Patricia Robertson’s third collection of short stories, Hour of the Crab, challenges readers to re-evaluate their ideas of everyday reality. -
FeaturesShort-story collection picks up where Annie Muktuk left off
Norma Dunning’s latest short story collection, Tainna (The Unseen Ones), continues the powerful work she began with Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, for which she won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2018. The same year she won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for the short story “Elipsee,” and was a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Award. -
Non-FictionWeaving together the threads of writing and gender
Keith Maillard grew up knowing nothing about his father. On his father’s death, Maillard was given his scrapbooks, and set out to capture everything he remembered or knew about him, writing a first memoir, Fatherless, published in 2019. Maillard had generated a lot of text, not all about the senior Maillard. -
FictionObsessive nature of artists examined through triangle of characters
Su Croll is an acclaimed poet and now, in her debut novel Seeing Martin, she turns her observant eye on Mira – an art student grieving the death of her father – along with photographer Marie Claire Zorn and Martin Zorn, Marie Claire’s brother. -
FictionLike a jigsaw puzzle, novel’s series of stories follows theme of broken parental relationships
Katie Bickell’s debut novel, Always Brave, Sometimes Kind, is a series of stories reminiscent of a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces that interlock and build into an extraordinary, complex picture of Alberta through two decades. -
FictionTyler Enfield aims for the feel of a western in a ‘puzzle-box’ story
Tyler Enfield’s Like Rum-Drunk Angels is a magical, fun novel about Francis Blackstone setting out to seek his fortune and win the hand of his lady in Nowhere, Arizona, 1883. -
FictionStories of doubt, faith, grace, and the grey areas in between
Winnipeg-based David Bergen’s Here the Dark is a collection of short stories and a novella, breathtaking and stop-you-in-your-tracks good. The settings range from the Prairies, to Honduras, to Vietnam, but the themes are a bit more fixed – good and evil, doubt and faith, and the grey areas in between. -
FeaturesNovel revisits missionaries’ mandates with more cross-cultural understanding
In Five Wives, Winnipeg-based novelist Joan Thomas takes a clear-eyed look at a true incident, Operation Auca. This was an attempt by American evangelical Christians to convert the Waorani, an isolated tribe in Ecuador’s Amazonian jungle. In 1956, after dropping gifts from their small plane, five men land and try to make contact. The men are massacred, and their wives are left to continue the mission. -
FictionMind-bending debut novel tackles issues of identity and progress
Bruce Cinnamon doesn’t put a foot wrong in The Melting Queen, his fantastical debut novel. In addition to providing humour and a surreal plot, the author examines some serious themes: identity, friendship, betrayal, and politicians creating alternative histories. -
FeaturesNo easy choice in the face of unforgivable crimes
Miriam Toews’s latest novel, Women Talking, packs a wallop. Based on a true incident, deeply felt and timely, here Toews probes topics ranging from migration to redemption.
