Christina Turner

Well into Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves, one character remarks to another, “That’s the thing about stories about the end of the world, I guess. . . .You just got to worry about yourself. At first, anyway. But then, if you wanna see the future, if you wanna survive, you gotta find…

What might guarantee “a gustatory climax without the mess and aggravation of sex”? For the first character we encounter in C. I. Matthews’s short story collection, Took You So Long, it’s mushrooms. Specifically, morels, which Kathryn Maxwell seeks out on her farmland, desiring the “anatomical perfection” of Morchella and flavours that “titillated the taste buds.” She pursues the elusive fungus as a balm against her complicated relationships with other…

Autobiography always entails a distance between two figures. There’s the narrator — the voice recounting the story of a life. And there’s the character — the person who is experiencing that life within the narrative. Yet the autobiographical act can also shape a life to come, which is a major theme running through Harold R. Johnson’s The Power of Story…

Mona Awad has a thing for concretizing metaphors. Her second novel, Bunny, featured a cohort of MFA students who conjured lifelike automatons based on their male literary heroes. But the students took the cliché “Kill your darlings” a little too seriously and dispatched their defective drafts with an axe. In Awad’s latest…

This past spring , while working from home in our downtown Toronto apartment, my husband and I began noticing a large raccoon that would waddle across the street and sometimes lounge on the roof of a nearby house. Fat raccoon sightings soon became our antidote to pandemic-related anxiety. “It’s huge!” we’d giggle. “Think of all the garbage it must eat.”…

Rivers don’t flood, wrote Toni Morrison; they remember, because “all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” The damming of a river, then, is an act of enforced forgetting, an unnatural intervention, when forests are inundated, animal habitats obliterated, and lakes created where none existed before. So it is in a scene that unfolds late in Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s Blue Bear Woman as the…