During the summer, I teach a long, nerdy fiction course to teenagers that spans ten-weeks and saps almost all of my energy. Coming home to mega-novels like David Foster Wallace’s “Pale King” and Martin Amis’ “Pregnant W… — During the summer, I teach a long, nerdy fiction course to teenagers that spans ten-weeks and saps almost all of my energy. Coming home to mega-novels like David Foster Wallace’s “Pale King” and Martin Amis’ “Pregnant Widow” has been way too intense. Most nights, I just want to tuck those giant volumes under my tired head and snooze. What I’ve realized: during the summer, I need the perfect combination of light and devastatingly good to remind me of what I really love about fiction.

David Levithan’s slender little novel “The Lover’s Dictionary” is totally perfect. Written in dictionary-style excerpts, the story spans a relationship from conception to heartbreak and back to the beginning. The characters, genderless and frank and articulate, create and destroy a relationship not in order, but in fragments. This is how I remember things, and this is the way I dream of one day writing. Check Levithan’s tweet-feed here, and take note of a writer (usually a young-adult guy, author of Nick and Nora, etc) who manages to school us with definitions of words like **abyss** or **blemish**, each a small scene from the love affair, all of them gorgeous. Take this:

**aberrant,** *adj.*

“I don’t normally do this kind of thing,” you said. "Neither do I,“ I assured you. Later it turned out we had both met people online before, and we had both slept with people on first dates before, and we had both found ourselves falling too fast before. But we comforted ourselves with what we really meant to say, which was: "I don’t normally feel this good about what I’m doing.” Measure the hope of that moment, that feeling. Everything else will be measured against it.

July 30, 2011

Now that powells just blogged that they have an Advanced Reader’s copy of the upcoming Jeffrey Eugenides book, I have to share this moment of excitement, terror, and embarrassingly potent anticipation. Could this possibly be as good as The Vir… — Now that powells just blogged that they have an Advanced Reader’s copy of the upcoming Jeffrey Eugenides book, I have to share this moment of excitement, terror, and embarrassingly potent anticipation. Could this possibly be as good as The Virgin Suicides? I’ve read and reread his debut novel with a kind of obsessive/nerdly vigour, half hoping to copy his best work, half fearful of his skills. Now I’ve poured over the excerpt of this new novel, I’m trying hard to curb my expectations.

You can read the excerpt at The Millions.

July 11, 2011

Ask an artist: the wide majority of them–writers, painters, filmmakers alike–will relish in their childhoods’ tortuously low moments. We never seem to run out of tales of awkward love, of parental misunderstanding. No one remembers… — Ask an artist: the wide majority of them–writers, painters, filmmakers alike–will relish in their childhoods’ tortuously low moments. We never seem to run out of tales of awkward love, of parental misunderstanding. No one remembers being beautiful and leggy and thin. No. When we recount our teenage years, we tend to recall those heads full of bad acid, those feuds with vice principals, that deep loathing of the Career-and-Life-Management (the dubious CALM) a class that many of us had failed.

Sean Wilsey’s 2005 memoir “Oh the Glory of It All” takes a really long look at those teenage hurts. Born to self-obsessed super-wealthy society parents, Sean begins his memoir in the bosom of a family that prances around San Francisco in matching track-suits. But after his socialite mother Pat Mantadon is dumped by his bazillionaire dad Al Wilsey, ten-year-old Sean is crushed. The story doesn’t get crazy until Dad shacks up with his mom’s best friend, antagonist Dede Traina. She’s a dinosaur, an evil step-mother who pins $200 000 broaches to her bathrobe, then ships him off to a string of prison/boarding schools. His only redemption is the Skate-or-Die friends ripping around the hills of San Francisco in the late 1980s, the very first Thrasher kids in America.

For two weeks, you couldn’t pry this memoir from my hands. It is funny and horrible and shivering with truth. This is the kid who got rides to the arcade in Dad’s helicopter, who’s mom lives in a penthouse and goes to Russia to hang with Gorbachev. This is a kid who swears to be THE ENEMY OF EMOTIONS, and later is reduced to a puddle of snot and tears after a three-day Italian group therapy session. Insane family dynamics, gossip, and a list of REAL people who hurt him– this book lives strong, even a big five years since the hype has subsided.

July 1, 2011

The youngest and brightest of them all, Tea Obreht is garnering more-than-lavish attention for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. The novelist herself– a mere TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD– is what most of the buzz is about, because she&rs… — The youngest and brightest of them all, Tea Obreht is garnering more-than-lavish attention for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. The novelist herself– a mere TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD– is what most of the buzz is about, because she’s the youngest in the New Yorker’s Top Twenty Under Forty list, because she’s only published in the hugest of magazines and studied at the very best schools, because she’s a magical realist, and nobody’s a magical realist anymore.

If anything, that is what struck me as so sensual and unexpected about The Tiger’s Wife. Obreht writes in the slowest, most deliberate fashion, piling gorgeous descriptions one after another after another, and layering generational stories with fairytales. The through-line of the story is in fact a re-telling of the Grimm’s “Godfather Death,” one of the oldest tales in modern fiction.

So, is Obreht famous because she is a young person who writes like an old person? Her protagonist is a Serbian doctor whose most treasured memory is of an elephant marching through her war-thrashed city. There is a deaf-mute who is beaten by her husband the butcher. There is a plagued family of gypsies who digs up a body in a suitcase. And there is a grandfather, whose fascination with tigers stems from his life in the old village. This is old timey stuff, but somehow, Obreht keeps it feeling young. All the critics expect great things, but I’m not as eager for Obreht to smooth her style. I liked this book, and I’ll recommend it, mostly because in The Tiger’s Wife, I still saw evidence of Tea Obreht’s young, sometimes uncontrolled ways.

June 8, 2011

Let It Come Down
Druggies are everywhere I go these days: from the stoners puffing a spliff in the sunshine, to down-and-out zombies that grunt and limp around the Public Library. A middle-aged woman wanted to sell me drugs yesterday at Victory Park… — **Let It Come Down**

Druggies are everywhere I go these days: from the stoners puffing a spliff in the sunshine, to down-and-out zombies that grunt and limp around the Public Library. A middle-aged woman wanted to sell me drugs yesterday at Victory Park: Pot or Speed, she said. Her blonde hair was shorn in a kind of homemade haircut, and her crooked teeth were turning gray. I sell, she told me, and I nodded. Everyone in the park seemed high. Nobody in the park was reading but me.

I was leafing through an old copy of Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles, a kif smoker and ex-pat for life. Paul Bowles left New York City in 1955 as a composer and musical prodigy, only to hide out for the next thirty years in Morocco, a serious writer. His friends William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg brought him attention, mostly because of their own taste in narcotics. But more than for drugs, Bowles was known for some of the best ex-pat writing about Africa—The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down are both gorgeously detailed novels about men swimming through their detached, if somewhat doped-up lives.

It isn’t easy to write convincingly about drugs. So often in a Bowles novel, a character gets lost in the labyrinth medina, or gets too drunk and bawls about something the other characters don’t care about. And so often, a character meets a serious, heart-breaking climactic moment with a cool, terrifying calm. A stoned calm. This is the kind of drug-prose that I am learning from, passages like this, from the hallucinogenic climax of Let it Come Down:

“Dyer shut his eyes. A terrible motor had started to throb at the back of his head. It was not painful; it frightened him. With his eyes shut he had the impression that he was lying on his back, that if he opened them he would see the ceiling. It was not necessary to open them—he could see it anyway, because his lids had become transparent. It was a gigantic screen against which images were beginning to be projected—tiny swarms of colored glass beads arranged themselves obligingly into patterns, swimming together and apart, forming mosaics that dissolved as soon as they were made. Feathers, snow-crystals, lace and church windows crowded onto the screen, and the projecting light grew increasingly powerful. Soon the edges of the screen would begin to burn, and the fire would be on each side of his head. “God, this is going to blind me,” he said suddenly; he opened his eyes and realized he had said nothing.”

Above all of the hype and drug talk, Bowles teaches me to write about place. He wrote poignantly and honestly about North Africa– its camel caravans, its markets and consulate parties, its Kasbahs and cool water springs. This is the way I want to write about Victory Square, about the old blonde junkie and her graying teeth. His command over detail is what makes his prose so fucking brilliant. Paul Bowles had the lightest touch of anyone, anywhere, like this passage from his debut novel, The Sheltering Sky:

“During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above — the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat. The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky. They took to traveling only at night, setting out shortly after twilight and halting at the first sign of the rising sun. The sand had been left far behind, and so had the great dead stony plains. Now there was a gray, insectlike vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.”

This is his charm: Bowles’ writing seems to float along, unaware of the great peril that surrounds it, independent of everything, of everyone. I suppose that is what it is like to live in Africa for so many years, an outsider. I suppose that is what it is like to live your life, just a little bit high.

May 19, 2011

Super Sad True New York City Love Story

May 12, 2011

Right before we got to New York last week, a youth party wave of U.S.A. craziness washed over America. Yes, it was the celebration of one dude’s death, but all the kids were feeling it: University campuses, city halls, and New York’s tenderest touchstone— Ground Zero— swarmed with youth people partying over you-know-who’s demise. It was something big. Lots of people, particularly under-thirties, really felt relieved. Everybody in New York was talking about it.

Now, after reading three insanely connected New York novels, I think they were simply looking for something, anything, to shush the incessant buzzing in their ears about “the End of the American Empire.” The literature coming out of New York right now is obsessed with it: China rising, the Dollar losing, American greatness withering to a depleted shell. The three books I accidentally read before New York had this thought, and only this, in mind: America is Going Down.

I admit, it was very strange reading three novels in a row with the same theme. In all three, New York City turns into a place where publicists and “Medias” rule and where tweeny adults are attached to “äppäräts” or “handhelds” (aka IPhones.) In all three, people stream and flaunt and judge their lives online. And in all three, loneliness pervades. If you love New York, and you’re freaked about what is to come, this is necessary shit:

1. Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” is a super-quick, biting satire weighted with real heart. We follow poor, sappy Lenny Abromov, son of Russian parents and a failing immortality salesman, as he falls for a girl of impossible youth and vigour. Around them, the Chinese are calling on their debt, the war with Venezuela is crashing down, and the “Low Net Worth Individuals” are rioting in the streets. Amazing candour in the love story part, insane imagination in the future part. This is the best American novel of the year.

2. Jennifer Egan’s “Visit from the Goon Squad” won the Pulitzer Prize, and it is an edgy, well-deserved win. It tracks linked characters Sasha and Bennie (a music producer and his assistant) from 1979 to the future, looking at the rock and roll publicity machine through an almost photographic lens. Though the disconnection/fake powerpoints/jump-around timeline seems fancy, this is a beautiful clear read. Her vision of the future is still heartfelt, if a little autistic. Egan rocks.

3. Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask” is about a loser, pure and simple. We follow this loser through his New York life as it falls apart and reassembles itself, as he is used by millionaire college friends, by his job, and even by his four-year-old kid. Lipsyte’s writing is the best of this trio; each sentence is a hilarious joke that could make you cry as soon as laugh out loud. You’ll fly through it, and feel crazy about it, and then you’ll worry that it’s really about you ten years from now. Only the raddest of New York writers could so acerbically and astutely pinpoint this malaise, this End of an Empire mortality-fear. Maybe this is New York’s way of facing its uncertain future: not by partying in the streets, but with humility, wit, and endless jokes.

Salt of the Earth

April 27, 2011

You would think I’m only into urban drug mythologies or post-conflict Africa– considering my two big projects at the moment. But in my reading life, this week, anyways, I am dwelling in the salty, seductive world of the Irish immigrant. I’m also setting a sort of wager between these two books, both short-listed for this year’s IMPAC Dublin Award, with the biggest cash prize for a literary work: $157 000 for the top novel. Besides winning all those literary smackers, the thing I love about the prize is the gaggle of librarians who nominate the short-listers, with their quiet, yet discerning ways.

If the IMPAC were up to me, I’d vote for Michael Crummey’s Galore, a gorgeous, sprawling family epic, this time on the craggy shores of Newfoundland. The setting is the protagonist here: a pair of outport hamlets where boys become fishermen, girls become their stout wives, and occasionally something miraculous is birthed from the belly of a giant fish. It happens more than once. A long time ago, I heard Crummey open for M. Atwood at a huge auditorium-style reading; his lithe little sex scene had the moms in the audience all a twitter. After the show we played Truth or Dare at the bar and he told us he would sleep his way to the top of the literary world if he had to. HA! You don’t have to sleep to the top any more Michael Crummey!

Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is another heart-tugging bet. This one follows a charming little Irish nobody, Eilis Lacey, as she ventures far from her post-war Irish home to a lonely life in NYC. She is the quintessential country mouse with a boatload of Catholic guilt and a penchant for new stockings. Her cute Italian boyfriend can’t even loosen her up, and maybe that’s what I found refreshing– a girl who isn’t bursting out of her girdle to get dirty in New York, but a shy type who contains multitudes. I also like the shop-girl antics, and the sluttier Irish girls around her and the warty old Irish marms hell-bent on ruining their lives. Though it might not be as epic as Galore, I’m calling for this one to win the IMPAC Dublin this year. Brooklyn is a surprising, sweet girl story told by a man… and an Irish charmer at that.

To the Debutants

April 12, 2011

The cult of the debut novel is enough to make a debut novelist want to cower and hide. According to the experts, we only have one shot at a debut, and people keep saying, Make it count! Don’t blow your load on something that doesn’t totally rock! America in particular can be obsessed with a writer’s first novel, and there is mega-pressure to pitch your first experimental scraps for something expansive, something indicative of your million talents, you whole imagination, your voice.

In the past few weeks, I’ve read two super-ambitious debuts. The first is Shane Jones’ Light Boxes, quirky, sure, but it caught Spike Jonez’ attention when he weirdly bought the movie rights right after he made wild things. He quickly reneged. You can kind of see why he didn’t want to make the film Light Boxes; in this book, the bad guy is February and he’s stealing the children in a really freaky way. This ‘short, massive book’ was a Publishing Genius production, the totally rad chapbook and experimental fiction publisher with all the best stuff. This little hipster is really talented. You can tell.

The other debut I’m into is Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado– a super intense literary romp around the Philippines. This book is jerky, and frenetic, and it never lands on one location or era or bit of writing for more than a couple of pages. This puts me on edge, but mostly because this is the way we think: bits of journal, a noir novel, blog. It starts with a dead body and somehow covers two hundred years of Philippine history, parts of it through the dead guy’s memoir “The Autoplagiarist.” It is sort of writerly in its fancy ways. It is about a writer. But c'mon, as if this kid doesn’t completely GIVE IT on this book. He writes his freaking heart out in this one.

Luckily, a bit of news is trickling in about some publications. I was just nominated for my second Alberta Literary Award, this time for short nonfiction, more writing about West Africa. Anyways, I am totally honoured, and this year I’m in som… — Luckily, a bit of news is trickling in about some publications. I was just nominated for my second Alberta Literary Award, this time for short nonfiction, more writing about West Africa. Anyways, I am totally honoured, and this year I’m in some very fine company. Hope to meet them at the Writers Guild Gala in June, where I’ll drink wine in a dress and hang with the big-timers. Yes!

Second, I am a finalist for the SLS Fiction Contest, a kinda big deal only because this means I could end up at the seminar in Kenya in December. (See the photo above… This is Lamu, man do I want to go back to Kenya.) These are the people who sent me to St. Petersburg! Tons and tons of entries get read for this bizzotch of a contest, and I’m super stoked to be considered, even as a finalist. Props to the SLS team, including Mike Spry, my pal and the coordinator of this year’s seminars.

Finally, just found out I have a new essay coming out in this year’s “Truth About the Fact,” a journal of nonfiction out of Loyola University in LA. This is hot times, as it is an annual journal of international nonfiction. I’m totally stoked to be in its pages.

Overall, not a bad March! Thanks to all of these peeps for liking my work. xoL

April 8, 2011

Patti Smith’s book “Just Kids” is conceivably saving me, and my work. Certainly, Smith’s life-long friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is tender, if arcane. Their years as lovers and then friends are documented intimately in … — Patti Smith’s book “Just Kids” is conceivably saving me, and my work. Certainly, Smith’s life-long friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is tender, if arcane. Their years as lovers and then friends are documented intimately in Smith’s memoir. But it is when she recalls her years as a poet and bohemian – sharing plates of food from her Chelsea Hotel hot plate, dressing in Salvation Army cast-offs, brushing shoulders with Warhol’s gang, with Janis and Jimmi – that I am moved. The artist’s life in New York in 1971 was exhilarating, if a little terrifying.

In Patti’s time, there were no artist grants, no slush-piles. Smith was just a “country mouse” from New Jersey, a girl who slept in Central Park for two weeks before she landed her first apartment in Brooklyn. But Patti never turned back. She stayed in slums and worked in bookshops and feverishly wrote poetry, for herself, and for her friends. She said she had everything she needed: there was burgeoning rock and roll. There was Bob Dylan, a man she revered and reveres still. And there was a whole posse of derelicts and hustlers and leather boys and poets that gathered in New York to make art because they needed to. They had each other.

Here in Vancouver, I often feel isolated in my writing. I compile my manuscript pages in the giant downtown public library, surrounded by diligent strangers. I attend film screenings and plays and gypsy jams with close friends, but we are not like Smith’s strange society of artists, drawing and writing “like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fall into bed.” Now we type solitary tracts in sacred scraps of time, between grant proposals and theatre shifts, teaching gigs and cubicle assignments.

And still, somehow, my greatest pals are finding ways to quit the cubicle, to downsize apartments and sell cars and travel on their own dime to get the good story. We are still making weird art, and not for the chance to sell it but the chance to make it, to share it with each other. We look to Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe as our idols, the way she looked to Dylan, they way he looked to Rimbaud. Amid grumbles of not getting paid for publications, we still submit. Without a patron to buy our paintings, we still paint. And we are learning to treasure most our days between teaching gigs and theatre shifts, so that we may, for even a few hours a day, return to our feral, child-like states.

March 17, 2011

March 8, 2011

“Permit anything – Touch everything.
-Dave Hickey”

March 8, 2011

Yes, it is soap-opera addictive. Yes, it is totally American in its hatred/obsession with the modern “family." Yes, it is makes you chuckle at the (somehow) failing liberalism of your parents and their friends. And yes, it is a great big splash for the American novel, one of the largest in hype and Oprah-love and page-count this year.

As a result, the American reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s nine-year mega-novel are extremely generous. Freedom is called a "masterpiece” by the New York Times. He made it to the cover of Time Magazine under the capricious headline “Great American Novelist.” But Canadians, as usual, tend to think his “cover-boy” fame should be shared with heavyweights like Rick Moody and Jeffrey Eugenides, who have penned a few Great American novels of their own. Zsuzsi Gartner thinks as much in this review. British reviewer Keith Miller opines that Franzen is dabbling in some “watered-down experimentalism,” but admits Freedom is “achingly sad.” Both reviewers point to David Foster Wallace as a stronger, more experimental, and obviously influential “Great American,” who’s work we’ve only seen in too-small doses. Now that is achingly sad.

As for Freedom, Jonathan Franzen, I’ll give you quirky and character-driven and funny (in moments) and hard to put down. I read your 562-page novel in a week. But in that week, I wondered why this all seemed so important to everyone: do Americans really care that much about family? About the inferiority complex of Mid-Westerners? Does a novel’s theme need to be pounded out so thoroughly? Does long mean good? Does readable mean great?

Dave Hickey will hate Freedom, and that gives me a profound sense of relief. This week, I’m turning to Infinite Jest for a taste of the Great American Novel. And in future, I’ll turn to Franzen for a good beach read… pleasant and gossipy and modern in just the right watered-down way.

Tom Rachman was making major headlines when his book “The Imperfectionists” first blew up the New York Times Book review. People were all, “Can it be that good?” and I was really sceptical, because during the CBC interview he… — Tom Rachman was making major headlines when his book “The Imperfectionists” first blew up the New York Times Book review. People were all, “Can it be that good?” and I was really sceptical, because during the CBC interview he put on a fake British accent. What a wanky ex-Vancouverite thing to do! But now I know he deserves to be a wank because he wrote this sickeningly well-crafted novel.

Chronicling the birth and death of a newspaper in Rome, the prose drifts through the lives of reporters and editors who lead pathetic lives in the name of true journalism. Gorgeously easy writing, super-freaky sad characters, and a novelist who both loves and despises the newspaper business– The Imperfectionists was disgustingly perfect.

February 28, 2011

In small news, but good news: I just found out I won second place in the Vancouver International Writers Festival Contest for my story “The JimJam Club.” This is yet another Vegaboy Chronicle, which probably means that I should pull thes… — In small news, but good news: I just found out I won second place in the Vancouver International Writers Festival Contest for my story “The JimJam Club.” This is yet another Vegaboy Chronicle, which probably means that I should pull these together to make a real collection, or a chapbook at least. Other Vegaboy Chronicles have appeared in Hobart and Pank and in Bodog Nation. More proof that people sort-of-like/sort-of-hate junkies and their hysterical ways.

January 15, 2011

Jonathan Dee was my teacher in Russia. And lately, I’ve been teaching, and thinking about my old teachers while I put in hours and hours and hours teaching fiction. I’ve been teaching to beginners, people who are just learning about the … — Jonathan Dee was my teacher in Russia. And lately, I’ve been teaching, and thinking about my old teachers while I put in hours and hours and hours teaching fiction. I’ve been teaching to beginners, people who are just learning about the very tinsy beginnings of making a story. And like some new radical textbook of ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY FUCKING CRAFTED FICTION I want to read these students long passages from Jonathan Dee’s new book, “The Privileges.” I’m so into this right now because 1. it is a glorious soap opera that turns heady and 2. it is about young rich miserable perfect people. Here’s to the New Yorkers that rule the planet.

January 13, 2011

December 23, 2010

Dave Hickey’s book on beauty “The Invisible Dragon” is the bomb. It started as four essays in the 1990s when Dave was so famous, he was touring around to all the amazing art centres just lecturing, and people started asking him: “Can you explain beauty to us?” and he did. When his editors at University of Chicago Press wanted to republish last year, Hickey wrote a manifesto at the end of the book called American Beauty. It’s absolutamente perfecto.

Maile Chapman is the classiest lady in fiction. Her stunning first novel, “Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto” is the creepiest kind of gothic: it is medical, wintery dark and terrifying–and yet somehow the language is poetic an… — Maile Chapman is the classiest lady in fiction. Her stunning first novel, “Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto” is the creepiest kind of gothic: it is medical, wintery dark and terrifying–and yet somehow the language is poetic and lovely, like Maile. Based on research conducted during a Fulbright year in Finland, Maile managed to sew the near-arctic landscape into every scene. The book is daunting in its scope, mirroring the Bacchae in its structure, and unflinchingly examining the complex (and sort of disgusting) world of women’s medicine. The best part of this book is the suspense; the whole time you’re thinking SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN OH MY GOD> and then it does. Buy this for your chilly auntie who secretly appreciates the bleak and beautiful.

December 19, 2010

This bit of brilliance by friend-of-a-friend Sheila Heti is my vote for Novel of the Year/Novel of the Future/Novel of my Dreams. “How Should a Person Be” is radical. It is fiction that does not feel like fiction. It is a novel without a… — This bit of brilliance by friend-of-a-friend Sheila Heti is my vote for Novel of the Year/Novel of the Future/Novel of my Dreams. “How Should a Person Be” is radical. It is fiction that does not feel like fiction. It is a novel without a boring character, a boring climax, even a boring moment. It is a story of girl friends (not lovers, not frenemies, but true friends) and art and sex and marriage and ugliness– all pointing to the question of our generation, How should we be? Dave Hickey, my cheerleader and the resident genius of the state of New Mexico, says with some authority that Sheila Heti is the rock-star of the new writing, and I believe it. Buy this for your artist-in-crisis best friend, and in the card write, “See, it’s fucking hard for everyone.”

December 15, 2010

This incredibly sad, incredibly funny debut novel by my pal Craig Francis Power won all the Newfoundland prizes this year, and is making waves across the country with its indie publishing house Pedlar Press. Craig is an insane visual artist and a cu… — This incredibly sad, incredibly funny debut novel by my pal Craig Francis Power won all the Newfoundland prizes this year, and is making waves across the country with its indie publishing house Pedlar Press. Craig is an insane visual artist and a curator, and a bloody masterful writer too. Blood Relatives feels dark and smoky and damp and cold and slightly drunk, just like my few days on the Battery in St. John’s. My favourite chapter so far is called “The Asshole of Death.” That is when things really get sad and drunk and smoky and dark. Buy this for your down-on-his-luck drinking buddy, but keep your eye on him while he reads. This brilliant book is not afraid to venture to a few low-down places.

December 14, 2010

MY FRIENDS’ BOOKS ARE THE BEST BOOKS!
Luljeta Lleshanku’s miraculous collection “Child of Nature” brings serious poem-tears to my poemy eyes. In her second translated collection and her ninth book of poetry, Luljeta cleaves y… — MY FRIENDS’ BOOKS ARE THE BEST BOOKS!

Luljeta Lleshanku’s miraculous collection “Child of Nature” brings serious poem-tears to my poemy eyes. In her second translated collection and her ninth book of poetry, Luljeta cleaves you open with tales from her broken country Albania, then fills you up with sweet little snippets from our shared humanity. “Two people form a habit, writes Lleshanaku; Three people make a story.” In Las Vegas, Luli invited me to join their family! They cooked Albanian food and told me everything. I miss my “adesh”, her daughter Lea, and her stunning daughter Lodia– a threesome to be reckoned with. Buy this for your whimsical granny, pining for the old country.

December 10, 2010

News

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A fiction writer from Canada, Leah is also a book club facilitator, radio documentary producer, playwright and professor.

2023
- Jun 5, 2023 La Leña Residency Jun 5, 2023
2022
- Nov 30, 2022 First Place: CRAFT First Chapters Contest Nov 30, 2022
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2021
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2020
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2019
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2018
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2017
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2016
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2015
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2014
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- Feb 16, 2013 Feb 16, 2013
- Feb 4, 2013 Huge Books, New Year Feb 4, 2013
- Jan 17, 2013 Jan 17, 2013
- Jan 11, 2013 Jan 11, 2013
2012
- Dec 15, 2012 Dec 15, 2012
- Dec 1, 2012 Dec 1, 2012
- Oct 30, 2012 Oct 30, 2012
- Aug 7, 2012 Aug 7, 2012
- Aug 7, 2012 Aug 7, 2012
- May 15, 2012 May Showers = Read Your Face Off May 15, 2012
- Apr 24, 2012 Apr 24, 2012
- Apr 1, 2012 Apr 1, 2012
- Mar 18, 2012 Mar 18, 2012
- Mar 12, 2012 Mar 12, 2012
- Feb 13, 2012 The Year So Far: Reading to Stay Sane Feb 13, 2012
- Jan 13, 2012 Jan 13, 2012
- Jan 5, 2012 Jan 5, 2012
2011
- Dec 15, 2011 Dec 15, 2011
- Dec 11, 2011 Dec 11, 2011
- Dec 7, 2011 Dec 7, 2011
- Nov 29, 2011 Nov 29, 2011
- Oct 9, 2011 Oct 9, 2011
- Sep 27, 2011 Sep 27, 2011
- Sep 23, 2011 Sep 23, 2011
- Sep 9, 2011 Sep 9, 2011
- Aug 25, 2011 Aug 25, 2011
- Jul 30, 2011 Jul 30, 2011
- Jul 11, 2011 Jul 11, 2011
- Jul 1, 2011 Jul 1, 2011
- Jun 8, 2011 Jun 8, 2011
- May 19, 2011 May 19, 2011
- May 12, 2011 Super Sad True New York City Love Story May 12, 2011
- Apr 27, 2011 Salt of the Earth Apr 27, 2011
- Apr 12, 2011 To the Debutants Apr 12, 2011
- Apr 8, 2011 Apr 8, 2011
- Mar 17, 2011 Mar 17, 2011
- Mar 8, 2011 Mar 8, 2011
- Mar 8, 2011 Mar 8, 2011
- Feb 28, 2011 Feb 28, 2011
- Jan 15, 2011 Jan 15, 2011
- Jan 13, 2011 Jan 13, 2011
2010
- Dec 23, 2010 Dec 23, 2010
- Dec 19, 2010 Dec 19, 2010
- Dec 15, 2010 Dec 15, 2010
- Dec 14, 2010 Dec 14, 2010
- Dec 10, 2010 Dec 10, 2010
- Dec 8, 2010 Dec 8, 2010
- Dec 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010
- Dec 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010
- Dec 7, 2010 New Dirty Poem in Hobart Dec 7, 2010
- Oct 21, 2010 Oct 21, 2010
- Oct 18, 2010 Oct 18, 2010
- Oct 18, 2010 Lingerie Poetry in Diagram Oct 18, 2010
- Oct 18, 2010 Hot Stuff Fiction in PANK Oct 18, 2010