Allan Peterkin

  Never love a writer They’ll take you To the brink   They’ll tell your story As their own And make you Swallow ink   There’s beauty In the work But seldom in the life   Woe betide the husband Woe betide the wife  …

What is it like when someone who works in health care becomes a patient? Two new books, one written by an intensive care nurse, the other by a health policy analyst and patient advocate, provide personal narratives of going under the knife. One story goes well and the other does not. Tilda Shalof, author of A Nurse’s Story: …

These days, one tends to approach first novels about coming out with trepidation. They mostly ended tragically in the 1950s (think James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) and in the decades following, often took adolescent navel-gazing and self-realization a bit too far. Brett Josef Grubisic, a University of British Columbia English professor, has managed literally to deconstruct the genre (his…