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Author: ALU Editor
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Short and Sweet: Silmy Abdullah + Home of the Floating Lily
Shortlisted for the 2021 Danuta Gleed award for debut short fiction, Silmy Abdullah’s Home of the Floating Lily (Dundurn Press) follows characters between Bangladesh and a Bangladeshi neighbourhood in Toronto, navigating the meaning of culture and home.
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Poetry in Motion: ky perraun + Miraculous Sickness
Shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Poetry Award, ky perraun’s Miraculous Sickness (At Bay Press) is a poetic history and contemporary critique of society’s view and treatment of people with schizophrenia, and how far we have left to go. ky shares her hopes for enlightening readers about severe mental illness, and how poetry – in its defiance…
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The Clock Tower of Jaffna: Frozen and Unfrozen Times of History
In observance of Tamil Genocide Education Week in Ontario, translator Geetha Sukumaran shares a conversation with Tamil poet Ahlian (her translation of his book, Then There Were No Witnesses, was published in 2018), about the Jaffna Clock Tower as a conduit of childhood memory, a symbol of colonial rule, and a witness to destruction.’
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Short and Sweet: Alex Pugsley + Shimmer
“…in the age of TikTok, [short stories are] probably a good thing” says Alex Pugsley, author of the collection Shimmer (Biblioasis). We learn about his book and meet Twyla in an excerpt, the mouthy title character from a short story in the collection.
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Short and Sweet: Terry Doyle + Dig
Author of the upcoming novel The Wards, we chat with writer Terry Doyle about his short story collection Dig (Breakwater Books) – featuring St. John’s, NL-ers struggling amidst the everyday, and read an ominous excerpt from his story, “Squat.”
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Under the Cover: Letters to Singapore
Kelly Kaur’s novel Letters to Singapore (Stonehouse Publishing), brings to life Simran, who after a close escape from an arrange marriage, attends university in Calgary. The letters she writes to her mother, sister and friends reveal life is fraught with conflict, hilarity and peril. In this week’s edition of Under the Cover, Kaur shares the…
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Poetry in Motion: Tolu Oloruntoba + The Junta of Happenstance
Author Tolu Oloruntoba’s debut collectionThe Junta of Happenstance (Palimpsest Press), is a compendium of dis-ease. This Poetry in Motion feature introduces Tolu’s Griffin-prize nominated collection, and he shares how his poetic style is influenced by encounters earlier in his life.”
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Short and Sweet: Katie Bickell + Always Brave, Sometimes Kind
Called “a loving portrait of the people you think you know, but don’t really” by Omar Mouallem, Katie Bickell’s Always Brave, Sometimes Kind(Brindle & Glass) is a collection of linked short stories following a network of people throughout Alberta. We chat with Katie on the challenge and economy of short story writing and read some of…
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Short and Sweet: H Felix Chau Bradley + Personal Attention Roleplay
H Felix Chau Bradley’s collection Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press) was recently named a finalist for the 2021 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short stories. Read on to see why Felix says “writing a short story often feels like solving a puzzle” and catch an excerpt from their story “Surface Dive.”
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Short and Sweet: Sofi Papamarko + Radium Girl
Writer Sofi Papamarko says the “immediacy and instant gratification of short stories” is what draws her to the form. We learn more about her collection Radium Girl (Wolsak & Wynn) and read some of the title story for Short and Sweet.
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“Bringing love to the children of war” – Excerpts from Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl?
With Mother’s Day this weekend, we look beyond the flowers and platitudes to a celebration of fierce motherhood, embodied in the grandmother of writer Anvi Hoàng and recounted in her book, Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? (Guernica Editions). Hoàng’s grandmother Cam escorted her three children – including her mother, Cúc – over 250…
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Short and Sweet: Aaron Schneider + What We Think We Know
Short story writer and lit mag editor Aaron Schneider shares his collection What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press), its play with the medium in the form of diagrammatic stories, stories in the form of questions, stories that break apart and metastasize. Including the Journey-nominated “Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence)”, excerpted below.
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Short and Sweet: Chih-Ying Lay + Home Sickness
Taipei-born author Chih-Ying Lay’s collection Home Sickness (published by Linda Leith Publishing and translated by Darryl Sterk) hearkens back to his youth. Says Jade Colbert in the Globe & Mail of the collection: “Psychologically, this is as high stakes as you can get. These stories can be hard to look at sometimes, but it is also hard…
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Short and Sweet: Short Stories for All Tastes
May is Short Story Month, and this year All Lit Up celebrates this under-appreciated form with Short and Sweet, a little series featuring 12 short story collections and their authors, who share brief thoughts on the short form.
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Poetry Muse: Adrian De Leon + barangay: an offshore poem
Adrian De Leon talks about the other poets that inspire him, and how with his latest collection barangay (Wolsak & Wynn), he was urged to “write in the broken language of diaspora,” all in this instalment of Poetry Muse. Learn more and read the poem “dung-aw” from the collection below.