Emily Mernin

While taking a bath one Sunday in 1953, Heinz Lehmann read a Rhône-Poulenc pamphlet for a new sedative, chlorpromazine. The Montreal psychiatrist was skeptical of the French pharmaceutical company’s sales pitch, which touted the drug as a “chemical lobotomy” that could calm hallucinations. But he was no stranger to high-risk research. He had been performing psychiatric experiments and clinical trials for almost two decades as the medical director of the…

Two women, Nat and Frankie, await the arrival of their dinner guests. It is an early spring evening, not yet dark. The “drills and hammers and music” that filled the streets of their “up-and-coming” Toronto neighbourhood all afternoon have been replaced by the distant sound of a brass band. They each take a shot of…

It may be hard for modern readers to imagine Manhattan as a rural island or New York City, now home to over eight million, as “a mere smudge along the shore far across the bay.” It might be difficult, too, for anyone who has travelled through New Jersey — the most tightly packed state, according to the…

In “An Elegy,” the final entry in André Alexis’s latest collection of stories, an autofictional narrator traces the origins of his literary preoccupations. “I had, without realizing it, become obsessed with the unhomely, with the strange,” he admits, while contemplating how immigration to Canada informs his art. Writing about the loss of his childhood — of how slippery memories of “my Trinidad” manifest in his work — he arrives at unheimlich…

A speaker wonders, “Is this beauty, all this grass?” Looking out on the prairies, at “grass-covered hill after grass-covered hill,” they ask their listener to “be quiet for once. Less / than your own boot print.” In her sixth collection, Wellwater, Karen Solie narrows her focus, looking to the ground and the “belowground” for what we can learn from…

There is a growth on the back of Kathleen’s neck. A mole is “flirting with the idea of becoming cancerous” despite the decades that the gardener has spent pulling on protective gear — collared shirts, hats, gloves — before working in the sun. She also feels a pain in her mouth, from “a molar that has been warning her off and on for years.” In Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road…

In December 1998, Chloe wanders through her aunt’s apartment in Toulon, France. She has only a few hours to herself before her father’s sister comes out of surgery. The small flat — which once belonged to the thirty-two-year-old writer’s paternal grandparents — has been the only constant familial home she’s known. It served as an immovable…

The unnamed narrator of Hides realizes his mother is dead by touching her. “It is not enough to say that the hand had grown cold, though it had, very cold, in fact,” he recalls, “but the veins themselves, the gentle throb of blood coursing across her papery, liver-spotted skin, seemed depreciated — flattened.” Rod Moody-Corbett’s remarkable debut is about the protective walls that go up as we…

An unnamed narrator opens the final chapter of Rachel Cusk’s novel Parade: “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did — the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” The balance consists, in part, of their revelations after the drawn-out death of their unknowable, distant parent. Months after her…