Emily Latimer

In 2016, Rolling Stone observed that “punk rock began as a kind of negation — a call to stark, brutal simplicity.” The magazine was referring to the frenetic, raw sound developed by the Ramones in the late 1970s: loud guitars converging with anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment lyrics. Over the following two decades, the movement splintered into dozens of…

Shortly after leaving Canada for Brooklyn half a decade ago, Tree Abraham responded to a Craigslist ad for an opening in a four-bedroom apartment. A week after moving in, one roommate joined her for the first of many craft nights to come. The book designer recalls their early friendship with nostalgia and curiosity. Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom…

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith has trouble crossing the street. Set over the course of one day, the narrative follows the shell-shocked veteran as he battles with flashbacks to the First World War. His wife, Rezia, chaperones him around London in search of a distraction. When a car backfires, pale-faced Septimus feels everything stop: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.” Adam…

As a teenager in the 1990s, Rosalind Fisher had a slippery relationship with the truth. She slung embellishments and fabrications and even pawned off other people’s stories as her own. Now in her forties, she regrets that behaviour. Genevieve Scott’s latest novel, The Damages, is told through the older woman’s perspective. It’s a two-part…

In her memoir and guide to fiction writing, Bird by Bird, from 1994, the best-selling author Anne Lamott explained that she kept an empty one-inch picture frame on her desk as a reminder to focus on small details: “The river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the…