News & Extras
Bread & Water: Essays by dee Hobsbawn-Smith
Dec 15, 2022
Dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s Bread & Water is a bittersweet love letter to the prairies, her Hutterite ancestors, her family, and the deeper hungers they satisfy. The essay collection, which won the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ Non-Fiction Prize, includes Prairie Fire’s 2018 non-fiction contest winner “Wiebo’s Way” about a newly divorced Hobsbawn-Smith’s visit to the compound of fundamentalist […]
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The Quiet Is Loud by Samantha Garner
Nov 28, 2022
As a book reviewer and editor, I try to approach new books without grand expectations or assumptions about their content or style. But, since I’m also a tarot reader and fan of speculative fiction, it was inevitable that I would draw conclusions about Samantha Garner’s debut novel The Quiet Is Loud before I even read […]
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Biblioasis’s 2022 A Ghost Story for Christmas Collection
Nov 15, 2022
Another year, another collection of ghost stories to add a little eerie fun to the holidays. Biblioasis and illustrator Seth’s offerings this year are a little on the tamer side than in year’s past, but still provide a nice, creepy reprieve from all the holly and jolly of the holidays. Seth’s black and white illustrations […]
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A History of the Theories of Rain by Stephen Collis
Oct 13, 2022
There is a telling line in Stephen Collis’s 2021 collection, A History of the Theories of Rain—in fact, there are many. But for me, the line that captures the book’s central concern, the daunting, infuriatingly impersonal disaster of climate change bearing down upon us, appears in the title poem: “… maybe the cosmos doesn’t do […]
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The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont, translated from French by J.C. Sutcliffe
Sep 27, 2022
The Music Game would have shattered me when I was twenty-five. At thirty-two, this book still stings me like salt in a wound that hasn’t truly closed. Originally published in French in 2017 and winner of several prizes including the prestigious Ringuet Prize, Stéfanie Clermont’s debut story collection The Music Game follows childhood friends Céline, […]
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Stoop City by Kristyn Dunnion
Aug 23, 2022
In Stoop City, novelist and short story writer, Kristyn Dunnion, has accomplished every writer’s goal, delivering thirteen fully realized stories that feel for all the world like real life. Set mainly in Toronto, they feature a remarkable range of styles, voices and characters. We meet college students, activists, upscale strivers, homeless kids, junkies, prostitutes and […]
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