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From the archives

American Judge

The normal is gone

The Trust Spiral

Restoring faith in the media

Lax Americana

What happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House?

Pasha Malla

Pasha Malla is the author of six books, most recently Fugue States, a novel. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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Pasha Malla

The Silver Scream

On heebie-jeebies past and present October 2023
The images are indelible: The ­silhouetted vampire slinking upstairs in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Knife-wielding, wigged-out Norman Bates whipping back the shower curtain in Psycho. Regan MacNeil’s revolving demon head in The Exorcist. Jack Torrance hacking through the bathroom door in The Shining. All among the most iconic moments in cinema — and all from horror…

Screen and Roll

Dribble like someone is watching November 2022
Of all the sports, basketball is the most difficult to re-create, so that’s the reason why there have been so few satisfying basketball movies.— Spike Lee I love going to the movies. I love the ritual of it, from sneaking in my own snacks and the inane pre-show trivia to the ceremony of settling into silent communion with a bunch of strangers in the…

Which Books Do We Need?

Literary now-ness, and an anachronistic, exquisitely fashioned novel November 2018
Does the world, wonders the jaded book reviewer, need another epic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Second World War—a novel one might dismiss, in the clichés of blurb parlance, as “a portrait of a marriage” set amid “the devastation of twentieth-century Europe” in a “paean to the human spirit” (whatever a “paean” is) by a “writer at the height of her…

CanLit’s Comedy Problem

Pardon My Parka, and other humorous Canadian initiatives June 2018
Derek McCormack did not win the 2016 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and its accompanying $15,000 cash prize. Susan Juby did, for Republic of Dirt, a sequel to The Woefield Poultry Collective, which introduced readers to Prudence, a Brooklynite fish-out-of-water who chances into running a derelict farm in interior British…

Against Originality

Plagiarism, and the cipher of literary shame December 2017
For post-secondary instructors, catching a student plagiarist inspires a range of feelings: dismay; fatigue at the impending paperwork; sometimes a facetious kind of glee; and, if the offending text is especially obvious and Google-able, forehead-slapping incredulity. Plagiarism can feel like an insult not just to the writer whose work is stolen but to the reader targeted as the potential…