In Review: The Week of September 24th

On the Blog

Art by Hana Shafi

~ Poet and illustrator Hana Shafi and designer Kate Hargreaves talk about Shafi’s debut collection It Begins With the Body (Book*hug): “When Kate Hargreaves, the designer of the book, first sent the finished cover I was blown away by it. It encapsulated everything I had written, the journey I wanted to take the reader in and beautifully embodied the way that combining text and illustration is an art form itself.”~ We compared the troubled and unreliable narrators in Hummingbird by Devin Krukoff (Freehand Books) and Martin John by Anakana Schofield (Biblioasis) in this edition of Read This, Then That.~ We wrote about why we love being at Word on the Street: “The WOTS attendee shows how literature in Canada, despite our small size, can work: it’s built on unbridled interest and pure curiosity.”~ After binging The Good Place in its entirety, we wondered what some of its characters would read in the afterlife.~ Our First Fiction pick this week was Anubha Mehta’s debut novel Peacock in the Snow (Inanna Publications), a cross between a family immigration story, suspense thriller, and magic.

Around the Web

~ The finalists for the 2018 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize were announced with two indie books on the list: Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale (ECW Press) andDear Evelyn, Kathy Page (Biblioasis)~ This visual ode to libraries makes us feel all the book-loving feels.~ Get your short stories ready! The CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions.

What Else We’re Reading

Christen finished Caroline Szpak’s Slinky Naive (Anvil Press), calling it “full of lively, surprising, witty language and literary devices. A poem that calls on the title sums up the experience of reading the work: ‘it is almost impossible to pry yourself / from the hypnotizing jaws of Slinky” … “Tangled, Slinky is like a code, / words trapped in the throat.’”