Marisa Grizenko

Toward the end of Corinna Chong’s sophomore novel, Bad Land, six-year-old Jez asks her aunt Regina how the badlands, the region of southern Alberta dominated by towering sandstone hoodoos and sculptural rock face, got its name. Regina’s tentative answer: European explorers — no, Indigenous people — first called it that, and can you blame…

In Some Unfinished Business, Antanas Sileika employs several effective strategies for creating suspense. He sets the stage for a momentous encounter between two people and resists revealing its purpose — connection? clarity? revenge? — for as long as possible. He repeatedly uses the title’s phrase, “some unfinished business,” the vagueness of which suggests anything from a casual task to an ominous…

Why might one read the hist­ory of a city? For many of us, it’s to gain context and an understanding of how a place came to be. After whom are these streets named? Who was welcomed here — or excluded? How did a city’s social policies develop, its neighbourhoods form, its parks and public spaces take…

In the opening of Marie-Claire Blais’s Songs for Angel, a woman named Mabel walks along a beach accompanied by her talkative parrot and two younger men. Petites Cendres and Robbie belong to a community of queer and trans performers whose work and lives revolve around the vibrant Porte du Baiser Saloon. They carry a heavy…

Around my neighbourhood in Vancouver, it’s not uncommon to hear over the din of traffic a lone voice belting out arias. For decades, Opera Man, as he’s called by locals, has strolled the streets singing in Italian, and recently I heard an impassioned rendition of Aznavour’s “La Bohème.” Is this guy a delightful eccentric, dealing in whimsy and…

Even if Dublin’s Bloomsday Festival, the annual celebration of James Joyce and Ulysses, is cancelled this year, there’s a good chance the modernist masterpiece may still find its way to new and returning readers. After all, many have responded to the pandemic by formulating ambitious plans: baking sourdough bread, perhaps, or training for a…

In Sean Michaels’s The Wagers, Theo Potiris is thirty-six, working at his family’s grocery store, Provisions K, and trying to make it as a comedian. When the novel opens, he’s surrounded by family: his two older siblings, their spouses and children, and his mother, Minnie, the family’s matriarch, an almost saintly woman with endless reserves of love for her family and…

In recent years, water shortages around the world have prompted calls to action, often directed toward the individual: take fewer and shorter showers, launder clothes less often. Increasingly, environmental crises may force us to reckon with our choices — our culture of consumption, unequal distribution of resources, and environmental destruction — but they also prompt us to rethink deeply ingrained ways of…