Ottawa — once a frontier logging town and since 1857 the capital of what would become Canada — is not London, and the intricacies of the Canadian psyche are not those of the imperial British twilight. It is a challenge, given the thin and fragmented culture of this country, spread over a vast space and afflicted with…
Gilbert Reid
Gilbert Reid is a writer for television and radio.
Articles by
Gilbert Reid
Published in 2018, Pamela Mulloy’s first novel, The Deserters, is the tragic love story of a lonely wife on a farm in New Brunswick and an American soldier who goes AWOL while on leave from Iraq. Whereas that slim book examines an aftermath of war, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder, Mulloy’s latest work explores how the prelude to war can dramatically transform the lives of everyone…
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the future’s not what it used to be. Inequality has soared, social mobility has stalled, and astronomical housing prices have forced young people to camp with their parents. Those young people could quite possibly end up poorer than their moms and dads. A pandemic — symptomatic of a biosphere crisis — has upended billions of lives and hammered the world…
Before Margaret Atwood the Icon was an icon, she was a little girl — born in November 1939, at the end of the Great Depression and two and a half months after Nazi tanks rolled into Poland. A little girl who spent her childhood shuttling between the wild summer bush of northern Quebec and the windy wintery landscapes of several nondescript 1940s…
In Honorarium, Nathaniel G. Moore deftly juggles a multitude of erudite and pop references, orchestrates a mash‑up of prose styles, creates an obstacle course for the less than hip reader, and offers an acute glimpse into two decades of desperate creative activity. He writes of people experimenting at becoming people: that is, he writes of the semi-underground world of Canada’s small…
It was the early 1980s. “There’s somebody you must meet,” rumbled the voice on the phone. It was Barry Callaghan — poet, writer, and man of letters extraordinaire — deploying his best imperious growl. “Yes, Barry!” I said, snapping to attention.
So it was that, a few hours later in a back-alley hole-in-the-wall Roman restaurant, I met Jacqueline…