Author: ALU Editor
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Test Kitchen: French Apple Cake
We’re back in the kitchen again with a new dessert recipe, thanks to our pals at Book*hug Press! This time we’re getting fall cozy with a tasty French apple cake, inspired by the traditional French Apple Cake from a sweet moment in Anne Cathrine Bomann’s charming novel Agatha, translated by Caroline Waight. Scroll on for…
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Indie Reading Room: Peter Dubé
Montreal-based poet and surrealist Peter Dubé is this week’s Indie Reading Room author with his newest The Headless Man (Anvil Press), a gothic, picaresque prose poem, laced with horror and humour, that concerns itself with queer challenges to identity and sexual boundaries. Scroll down for our Q&A with Peter where he tells us about the intriguing impetus behind his…
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Beautiful Books: Acha Bacha
Debut playwright Bilal Baig of the emotional heavy-hitter Acha Bacha (Playwrights Canada Press) — a play about the intersections between queerness, gender identity and Islamic culture in the Pakistani diaspora — sits down with cover designer Harmeet Rehal to talk about how they captured the essence of a “sacred queer relationship at the forefront of this cover” and the weight…
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Under the Cover: Poet Phil Hall on the evolving art of self-portraiture
Poet Phil Hall discusses the cover artwork on his latest collection Niagara & Government (Pedlar Press) and the evolution of his own self-portrait and artwork – from edgy, ’80s Elvis Costello vibes to watercolour and collage – and the eternal nature of a pair of classic black-framed glasses.
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Writer’s Block: Katia Grubisic
Montreal-based writer and translator Katia Grubisic—whose most recent translations include Daughter of Here and Little Girl Gazelle (Linda Leith Publishing)—sat down Q&A-style with us to chat about her ideal writing day in a pandemic (a forest, water, books), her upcoming translation (A Cemetery for Bees), and a standout writerly moment at the age of three.
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In Review: The Week of September 28th
With the chaos of the presidential debates in full swing, we turned our sights to things that soothe us: books! Scroll on to find out what we were up to this week.
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In the height of quarantine, I reverted to my teenage self: An essay by Hana Shafi
After a trip to see my grandparents in Dubai was cancelled—a wise decision by my mother—just days before Ontario went into a state of emergency, I opted to stay with my parents in Mississauga during quarantine instead of in my small one bedroom apartment in Toronto. In doing this, I found myself feeling sixteen-years-old again. Stuck…
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Indie Reading Room: Heidi Wicks
This week in the Indie Reading Room is Newfoundland-based author Heidi Wicks whose debut novel Melt (Breakwater Books) is one our top picks this year for anyone looking for a story about friendship growing pains and the ups and downs of being an adult. In the novel, we follow the lives of best friends Jess and Cait…
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Character Study: The Lightning of Possible Storms
Jonathan Ball’s The Lightning of Possible Storms (Book*hug Press) is a collection of short fiction that blends humour, horror, and straight up sci-fi in a multi-faceted literary ride that’s pretty perfect for a wonderfully weird trip on the big screen. That’s why we collaborated with author Jonathan Ball who imagined a celebrity cast to make this adaptation a…
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Beautiful Books: Forgotten Work
We think you’ll agree that book designer Ingrid Paulson’s work on Jason Guriel’s rock ‘n’ roll cli-fi novel Forgotten Work (Biblioasis) is off the charts: a peek into a time-tripping work of spec fiction, this is a cover that is anything but forgettable. Below, Ingrid tells us about the creative process and inspiration behind her cover and why she…
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In Review: The Week of September 21st
This week on the blog: the ALU Indie Reading Room, author interviews, a stunning debut, and more.
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First Fiction Friday: Always Brave, Sometimes Kind
Katie Bickell’s debut novel Always Brave, Sometimes Kind (Brindle & Glass) is a loving, gritty ode to everyday Albertans through an era of social and political change in the province. Told in a series of interconnected stories that span the cities and rural reaches of the Wild Rose Country, Bickell’s debut is for anyone in need of…
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Indie Reading Room: Mark Sampson
This week’s Indie Reading Room features Mark Sampson, author of All the Animals on Earth (Wolsak and Wynn), a satirical post-apocalyptic novel that imagines a world both like and unlike our own that has been severely depopulated simply because people aren’t having children anymore. An entertaining and wry social commentary, All the Animals on Earth sweeps you up…
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Treetalk: An interview with Ariel Gordon
For National Tree Day, we chatted with Ariel Gordon about her latest collection TreeTalk (At Bay Press), a project born out of a two-day poetry writing spree at downtown Winnipeg’s Tallest Poppy that assembles 234 poems—111 by Gordon, 107 written by passersby, and 16 from other sources—into a long/found poem that asks: what does it mean to live…
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Writer’s Block: Kate Braid
Drawing from her own lifetime of experiences as a construction worker, Kate Braid brings us her newly published collection Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman (Caitlin Press). We welcome Kate to the ALU blog and chat more about how working in construction sparked her initial interest and desire to write, having tough conversations with Fear, finding…