Aaron Obedkoff

Think of any major novel from the nineteenth century and there’s a decent chance it first appeared as a serial in a newspaper or magazine. But by the end of the twentieth century, radio and television — along with the increased affordability of paperbacks — had made the widely popular form all but obsolete. Then, in the spring of…

Novels have long offered a forum for pondering the wonders and horrors of family life. Consider Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The…

Vincent Lam was just a few years out of his residency and working as an emergency room doctor when SARS hit Toronto in 2003. That experience informed Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which follows four characters as they scramble through medical school and begin their careers right before the outbreak. (It won the Giller Prize in 2006.) More…

Kevin Lambert’s young age would be less noteworthy if he were not such a skilled examiner of depravity. His 2017 debut, Tu aimeras ce que tu as tué, was published when he was twenty-five (the text was translated in 2020 by Donald Winkler as You Will Love What You Have Killed …