Author: ALU Editor
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Character Study: Bluebirds
As each woman becomes accustomed to her duties and patients in the midst of war, they reveal more personal details to one another and through letters to loved ones. Read on to see who has been casted in this week’s Character Study based off of the play Bluebirds (Playwrights Canada Press) by Vern Thiessen.
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A fiction reading guide for the CanLit awards trifecta
Awards season, we hardly knew ye. With the Writers’ Trust awards last week (including Atwood-Gibson winner Some Hellish), the Giller Prize winner announced this Monday (including winner The Sleeping Car Porter) and the Governor General’s awards due up next week, it’s hard to believe one of the most wide-ranging, eclectic awards seasons in recent memory…
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Under the Cover: Amplifying the Stories of 60s Scoop Survivors
The 60s Scoop (sometimes written as “Sixties Scoop”) was a Canadian policy beginning in the 1960s that took Indigenous children without consent from their families and put them within the child welfare system, where they were either adopted by settler (usually white) families or remained in foster care. In the new anthology Silence to Strength: Writings…
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Beautiful Books: Bent Back Tongue
Both designer Tania Willard and Secwépemc poet Garry Gottfriedson take a moment to discuss the inspiration and meaning behind Gottfriedson’s cover for his latest collection Bent Back Tongue (Caitlin Press).
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If You Liked x, Read y: LGBTQ+ Coming-of-Age
If you were invested in the lives of queer teenagers in Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, be sure to check out Benjamin Lefebvre’s In the Key of Dale(Arsenal Pulp Press), which encapsulates a queer coming-of-age story of a music prodigy with a hint of mystery.
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First Fiction Friday: The Boy’s Marble
With overwhelming emotional power, in The Boy’s Marble (Guernica Editions), Nataša Nuhanović’s shows us that we need to keep choosing love, innocence, and hope, if humanity is to be given a chance to win against terror and the absurdity of war.
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Under the Cover: Dream Rooms
Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms (Book*hug Press) by River Halen is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Halen explains their editing process that was completed through long distance phone calls.
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Beautiful Books: Radioland
How does the cover design process change when you’re particularly close to the work, and author? Award-winning book designer Ingrid Paulson walks us through what it was like designing for Matt Cahill’s new novel Radioland (Wolsak & Wynn) – a book by her spouse, one she’d been reading from its earliest drafts. See early iterations of…
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Off/Kilter: Reads for the Day of the Dead
All Lit Up’s own Tan Light has compiled an Off/Kilter reading list for those celebrating The Day of the Dead, or for folks who just don’t believe the occasion to read scary books ends on October 31.
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Goose Lane Puts Us Under Their Spell
This Halloween, we’re getting a little witchy with four books from New Brunswick’s own Goose Lane Editions, books that cast spells, communicate with the dead, divine the future, and heal a family curse. You might say these picks are utterly enchanting.
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First Fiction Friday: Pine Bugs and .303s
Winning multiple awards for his Indian Ernie memoirs, Ernie Louttit turns his writerly hand to fiction for the first time with Pine Bugs and .303s (Latitude 46 Publishing). This historical novel, set during and after the Second World War, follows a Cree man and a settler man who forge a bond as soldiers serving together – one that…
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Beautiful Books: Fantastic Frights
Are You Afraid of the Dark, Freaky Stories, Tales From the Cryptkeeper… these iconic kids’ TV shows heralded in an entire generation of horror fans. Saluting the horror story for present-day middle-grade readers is a brand-new comics anthology, Fantastic Frights: A Beginner’s Guide to Scary Stories, from Cloudscape Comics. We talk to cover designer Braden Hallett…
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Character Study: Silencing Rebecca
In Nikki Vogel’s genre-bending YA novel Silencing Rebecca (Thistledown Press) Rebecca Waldmann’s first school year in Edmonton is scary enough: she’s plunged into secular life at a public high school after years of sheltered Orthodox Jewish upbringing. But, after transforming into a Golem – a clay creature from Jewish folklore – cliques and clothing seem like…
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Lit Locale: This Unlikely Soil
The five novellas that make up LAMBDA finalist Andrea Routley’s sophomore collection This Unlikely Soil (Caitlin Press) are each by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, and all are set on the gorgeous Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. Read on to discover why fall might just be beach season, after all.
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First Fiction Friday: Pacifique
Is Pacifique too good to be true? It’s the question Sarah L. Taggart’s protagonist Tia has to ask of her romance with the title character in her debut novel Pacifique (Coach House Books), and one upon which this taut, literary psychological thriller rests. Read on to find out why you should add Pacifique to your TBR.