Ian Canon

At first, a savvy reader might place Michael Redhill’s The Trial of Katterfelto as a postmodernist work of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon. It is, after all, an epistolary novel set in the eighteenth century, consisting of letters penned by Roger Gossage, an alcoholic who repeatedly insists that his story is “entirely true.”…

Brian Thomas Isaac’s Bones of a Giant takes place during the summer of 1968 in Salmon Valley, British Columbia. It follows sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma and his mother, Grace, who are both reeling from the disappearance of Lewis’s older brother, Eddie. Readers of Isaac’s award-winning debut, All the Quiet Places, will recognize Eddie as that novel’s…

The American critic John Gardner once wrote, “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” In Chandelier, David O’Meara puts this claim to the test. An accomplished poet, O’Meara has a history of creating verisimilitude through vivid description, whether sketching a harsh autumn field in his poem “Field-Crossing” or moments of innocence and injury in “Recess.” But can a novel stand on expertly crafted images…

As one of the characters in Katherena Vermette’s Real Ones says, “You can’t shoot an arrow without hitting a pretendian in a university.” If you’re paying attention to Canadian academia and arts, that seems to be the case. A couple of times a year, someone is exposed for donning “redface” to gain personal,…

It was a crisp afternoon when Kyler Zeleny turned in to Maynor, Alberta. The roads were unplowed and almost as wide as they were long, his tires the first to break the surface in places. A winter storm had come through overnight and buried the area in a foot of flakes. It made the place look unnaturally…