The man who played the theremin for Lenin is the unlikely hero of Sean Michaels’s first novel
October 2014
Since Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel, Coming Through Slaughter, and Timothy Findley’s 1977 work, The Wars, historical fiction in Canada has no longer been considered a species of genre writing. Following the publication of those two works in particular, many historical novels are counted among the best of literary fiction. More recently Guy…
Smugglers and undercover cops in Newfoundland's amateur drug trade
September 2013
In a start appropriate to a thriller, Caught, Lisa Moore’s latest novel, opens with young David Slaney escaping from a Nova Scotia prison in 1978 where he has been serving a long sentence for drug smuggling. Some years before, Slaney and his old friend and fellow smuggler, Hearn, had been caught in an unexpected fog off the coast of Newfoundland and had failed in their attempt to bring to shore two tons of marijuana from…
Canadian writers drive in search of the American identity
December 2010
Most Canadians will admit to considerable ambivalence in their feelings about America. As a former American (I became a Canadian citizen in 1976), I share that ambivalence. A complex nation, America is also a land riddled with contradiction. In Breakfast at the Exit Café, an engaging travelogue by two of Canada’s esteemed writers, we gain a front seat…
A mystery that mixes dark humour with Victorian grit
March 2008
The German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin once wrote: “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.” The theatre is a familiar medium for John MacLachlan Gray, who is the author of Billy Bishop Goes to War, one of the most popular Canadian musicals ever produced for stage. Billy Bishop garnered Gray the 1981 Los Angeles Drama Critics’…
