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From the archives

Claim Game

The high stakes of fraudulent identity

But Blind They Were

The fallacy of an empty continent

The Canadian Conversation

A Polish journalist’s perspective on residential schools

Alex Good

Alex Good published Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction in 2017. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

Articles by
Alex Good

Mark My Words

A new collection by Elise Levine September 2019
The conventions of orthography evolve as language itself changes. Some developments are accidental while others are more directed, but there’s no telling which will last. There have been novelties in punctuation, for example, that have never been fully adopted (like the “irony point” and the “question comma”). And the jury is still out on emojis and the interrobang (a combination of question and…

The Case for Dissensus

In a time of mass agreement, a call for oppositional thinking December 2018
Negative criticism—its utility, ethics, and cultural politics—is one of those subjects that keeps on giving to essayists and newspaper columnists. I know this because that’s how a column I wrote ten years ago for the Globe and Mail started off. Since then I’ve been asked on several other occasions to write at length about “going negative.” It’s a debate that some of us need to keep…

Widening the Real

Short fiction, genre, and the New Weird July | August 2018
Given their marginal place in today’s publishing world, one wonders if short stories are in danger of becoming an exotic and insular form of literary life. Separated from a larger breeding population in the cultural mainstream their development has begun to take on the characteristics of island biogeography, spawning giants, dwarves, and other freaks. Various labels have been forwarded to describe where this development has brought…