by prfire | Apr 6, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Re-reading A Lover’s Discourse in 2017, it’s hard not to consider how Roland Barthes’ impatient Proustian temperament in love might stand to update. Surely Barthes would be hitting ‘refresh’ incessantly, texting with ‘Read’ receipts on, sitting on his hands.“The...
by prfire | Feb 20, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Like a demon wearing a porcelain mask that sits on your shoulder, whispering sweet crypticisms in your ear, Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet captures the alluring texture of nightmares. Though neither horror nor fantasy in any traditional sense, the stories that...
by prfire | Nov 27, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
As Andy Williams once sang in his holiday standard, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”: There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago. So what ever happened to the ghost stories? When did the telling of spine-tingling...
by prfire | Nov 1, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Lesley Krueger—A distant relative of the Victorian era painter Richard Dadd— creates a generous and thoughtful portrait of the once-promising artist’s descent into madness, murder, and imprisonment in London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital’s psychiatric facility,...
by prfire | Oct 12, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Alisa Smith’s Speakeasy tells the story of Lena Stillman’s past as a member of Bill Bagley’s Clockwork Gang of bank robbers, and her present occupation of elite codebreaker at the Esquimalt base during World War II. We are introduced to a thorough narrative of...
by prfire | Sep 11, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Suzette Mayr is an accomplished poet and novelist, based in Calgary. Her most recent novel, Monoceros, was nominated for a Giller Prize and won both the W. O. Mitchell Book Prize and the ReLit Award for Best Novel. Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall...
