Amanda Perry

These days, Canada’s literary scene seems to depend upon prize culture almost as much as upon government grants. Making the long list of a major award is one of the few ways that writers secure media coverage, and the effect seems particularly strong when consecration comes from the old imperial metropoles. The English-language press here thus discovered Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience after it was considered for the…

Inciting incident, rising action, climax, denouement: these are terms that might make anyone with an advanced degree in literature roll their eyes. Freytag’s Pyramid, a basic diagram for plot structure that resembles a lopsided triangle, has been drawn on so many middle school chalkboards that it is easy to sneer at. Surely we have moved beyond such simplistic ways of telling…

Earlier this year, Quebec’s National Assembly unanimously adopted a motion declaring the province no more racist than anywhere else. It was a strange move, as though politicians were magicians whose words sufficed to make theirs “among the most open and welcoming nations in the world.” Of course, this attempt to shield the population from slander was really a defence of state…

In the wake of countless films and TV series, the very word “gang” evokes an entertainment subgenre with standard features: theft, drugs, prostitution, internal rivalries, crooked cops, murder, and tons of male ego. Out to Defend Ourselves, which charts the evolution of Montreal’s first Haitian street gang, the Bélangers, contains all of these…

In June, the government of Quebec introduced Bill 31, a measure designed to address the province’s housing crisis, marked by low vacancy rates and spiralling rents. To the outrage of affordability advocates, the proposed law would eliminate lease transfers, which allow tenants to pass on their apartments to new occupants for the same rent. (Currently, landlords need a serious reason to refuse a…

The day after 2,400 homes in Fort McMurray burned down in a forest fire, I was at a wine and cheese reception in New York City. A fellow graduate student, from Toronto, brought up the news. “It seems like karma for climate change, doesn’t it?” I wanted to slap her. I’ve never been to Fort…

At first glance, Augustino ou l’illumination (Augustino or illumination) is a melancholy finale to Marie-Claire Blais’s oeuvre. The slim volume contains seventy pages left behind by the Quebec writer, who died suddenly on November 30, 2021. Yet, even in fragmentary form, the text testifies to the fact that Blais’s career was never going to wrap up…

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick may contain some of the most stunning prose poetry in the English language, but it also owes its status as a masterpiece to the fact that it is long and weird. Melville begins his opus with pages of epigraphs. He then launches into an unstable mixture of an adventure story, a psychological…

Last August, the residents of Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighbourhood were treated to a curious scene. Librairie du Square was hosting a reception to welcome the poet and novelist Emmelie Prophète, who had been appointed Haiti’s minister of culture a few months before. On the sidewalk outside the bookstore, a sole protester rolled out a banner that declared Prophète a kolabo — or…

When strangers in Montreal ask me what Edmonton is like, I often respond, “There’s lots of parking.” It’s the kind of potshot one can take only against one’s own hometown. But my answer is also rooted in architectural despair: Alberta’s capital is a place of urban sprawl and strip malls, shaped by decades-long zoning rules that required new developments to provide a minimum number of parking…

In 1975, the celebrated Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe shook the world of English literature with a declaration: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is irredeemably racist. Granted, the 1899 work condemns colonial violence in the Congo Free State, then under the control of King Leopold II of Belgium. But according to Achebe, Conrad portrays Africans as a frenzied mob and the continent “as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity.” To demonstrate the corrupting effects of colonialism on…

The Omicron variant caused plenty of drama for Quebec’s theatre industry. On December 20, 2021, the premier, François Legault, shuttered all performance venues with four hours’ notice. They were permitted to reopen in February at half capacity, with the ironic result that the most popular shows were cancelled, as there was no fair way to distribute the…

Albertans are keenly aware of our reputation. We are undertaxed pipeline fanatics who drive pickups, vote Conservative, and care less about climate change than about stopping Ottawa from stealing our oil money. This half-truth persists, in part, because even we sometimes see our largest industry as a stand‑in for Alberta itself. But the land existed before the fossil fuel…

The 2021 English-language leaders’ debate set off a familiar news cycle about race in Quebec: Someone from another part of Canada characterizes a development in the province as racist. The francophone media responds with allegations of “Quebec bashing.” The premier issues a statement. Commentators from elsewhere shake their heads and feel morally superior, while those here close ranks in…

In spring 2020, as the world shut down, we all learned that William Shakespeare penned King Lear while hiding out from the plague. Some contemporary artists responded to the 500-year-old news with anger: oh, the pressure to be productive! Angry or not, people certainly wrote during the first wave of COVID‑19 — a …

The media sounds the alarm as ­asylum seekers descend upon Quebec in unprecedented numbers. The federal government promises to step in. But how to balance Canada’s ethical and legal obligations toward refugees with control over the border? No, it’s not 2016, when a wave of people began arriving via Roxham Road. It’s 1986, the year Caroline Dawson’s family decides to flee…

Let’s get this out of the way: Réjean Ducharme’s Swallowed is an absolute classic in Quebec. The 1966 novel is widely taught in high schools and universities, and the fact that an English translation wasn’t available in Canada until last year is scandalous. But too much focus on Ducharme’s canonical status is misleading. It makes reading him sound like an…

The snowbirds are revolting. On the one wing, the migrating seniors are challenging Ottawa’s mandatory hotel quarantine in the courts, balking at paying thousands for a few days in “hotel hell.” On the other, they have become targets of popular disgust. Who do they think they are, the righteous want to know, basking in the sun while the rest of us have been told to stay…

Say the word “maroon” and most people will think if not of the colour, then of being stranded on a desert island. They might imagine a Robinson Crusoe scenario, where an interchangeable tropical location provides a backdrop to a (usually male, usually white) struggle for survival. But there is an older, Caribbean genealogy to the word that takes us back to the history of…

Researching Cuba as a Canadian living in New York was a disorienting experience. When I would describe my work, most people would react with surprise, curiosity, and even envy: Had I actually been there? At times, it seemed like views were as polarized as in any Israel-­Palestine debate. Back in Alberta, Canada’s supposed conservative…