ALU Summer Book Club: What to read after The Rage Letters

If you want to dive deeper into what gentrification is doing to Montreal communities…

… try Our Lady of Mile End by Sarah Gilbert (Anvil Press)

The Rage Letters is a distinctly Montreal collection – and especially, one that looks at the lives of marginalized people in Montreal, like precarious or gig-economy workers or children in the foster care system. Sarah Gilbert’s collection Our Lady of Mile End also delves into the personal lives of Montrealers as they face renovictions and other encroaching signs of gentrification in the city.

If you want to visit more characters in “invisible” jobs…

… try Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah (Véhicule Press)

From call-centre operators to security guards to non-profit workers, The Rage Letters spotlights workers who otherwise go largely unnoticed by society. Likewise, Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline centres the story of Muna, a woman and recent immigrant to Montreal working at a call centre selling diet products. Muna’s tragic backstory, her struggles to care for her son, and her eventual friendships with others in Montreal’s immigrant community show, like The Rage Letters, that a person’s job is only one small facet of their life.

If you want to explore more experiences of queer artists of colour…

… try The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya (ECW Press)

The Rage Letters‘ sculptor character, Marie, goes up against toxic white exes and racist, exploitative curators in various stories in the book. Trading sculpture for music, Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet explores the tendency of predominantly white, straight, and cisgender arts industries that create false limitations on the people of colour operating within them, and what kind of art they’re “allowed” to create, inevitably pitting them against each other.

If you loved to hate the antagonists of The Rage Letters…

… try May Our Joy Endure by Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler (Biblioasis)

Orbiting the characters’ lives in the stories of The Rage Letters are wealthy antagonists: the “trauma-hungry” art curator; the dismissive, white Executive Director of a non-profit ostensibly benefitting people of colour… If you loved to hate reading about these figures, you’ll love the upcoming novel May Our Joy Endure, which centres a famous architect whose plans for a megacomplex in Montreal would most certainly displace and disrupt existing communities. When she’s called out, Céline Wachowski doubles down on her privileged position.

BONUS: If you simply need more of the literary brilliance of Valérie Bah…

… try Subterrane by Valérie Bah, (Véhicule Press)

It was a consensus in the ALU team’s book club discussion that we were all new fans of Valérie Bah’s writing after reading The Rage Letters, so you can imagine we’re delighted that they have a new book releasing this year. Their forthcoming novel Subterrane centres Black and queer characters living on the economic margins in the city of New Stockholm, and promises to be just as darkly funny and hilarious as The Rage Letters is.

* * *

Thanks for following along with our book club this summer!

Remember, you can get The Rage Letters (and July’s pick Anomia) for your own book club for 15% off with the code INTHECLUB2024 until August 31, 2024 (+ free shipping within Canada!).

And in case you missed out, catch up on all of our summer book club happenings here.