In Review: The Week of December 10th

On the Blog

~ Paul Carlucci takes us through the real-life inspiration for the setting in his new short story collection High-Rise in Fort Fierce (Goose Lane Editions): “I play with its past and present, and give it a conclusive future. It’s a monument to paranoia, violence, isolation, addiction, and colonialism.”~ Author Martine Delvaux (White Out, Linda Leith Publishing) chats with us about her influences and writing  as rendez-vous: “Writing is like a ‘rendez-vous’ that I cannot miss. Everyday, for however long, I have to be ‘in contact’ with the book that I am working on. It’s something like a love affair.” ~ We served up some shockin’ good cookie recipes from Barry C. Parsons’s Rock Recipes Cookies (Breakwater Books) for your holiday-baking fun (also, for our tasting enjoyment). ~ This month’s ALU cocktail The Dirty Sock is best paired with Adrian De Leon’s TTC-inspired poetry collection Rouge (Mawenzi House) for obvious reasons.~ Our #fridayreads pick this week is Worry Stones (Ronsdale Press), a novel about one woman’s search to reconnect with her estranged, cult-following family while rekindling her creative identity.

Around the Web

~ When you’re book shopping over the holidays try to know what you’re after, always accompany your children, and four more ways to be kind to your bookseller. (Also good life advice, in general.)~ Those childhood hours spent reading Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club weren’t for naught according to Washington Post (not that we need convincing).~ “Make attendance mandatory for each meet-up and be passive-aggressive to the absentees” and other ways to kill a book club.  

via GIPHY

What Else We’re Reading

We’ve picked up Jen McNeil’s Ice Diaries(ECW Press), a travel memoir that The New York Times says is “stunningly written and should be on the shelf of anyone fascinated by the globe’s final geographic and psychic frontier.”