When I first came across Camilla Gibb’s memoir, This Is Happy, I had been struggling for nearly a year to finish any book I picked up, and my mental health had deteriorated to the point where I was forced to drop out of school and quit writing entirely. Despite everything going on in my life, I managed to read This Is Happy to the very end. It was the reason I showed up to work on less than two hours of sleep the next day, which ultimately resulted in me spilling very hot coffee all over myself.
I realize that, if the purpose of this column is to surface works its readers haven’t immediately heard of, picking the most recent Booker Prize winner misses the mark. That said, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is just that good. More critically, it’s an important artifact pointing up the exhaustion of the threadbare neoliberal consensus that dominates much of “developed” democracy.
When my friends recommend books, I borrow them from the library—my apartment remains infested with paperbacks despite my efforts to downsize, and books are an expensive vice—but I lasted a whole fifteen minutes into the audiobook of Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea before I caved and ducked into a bookstore to buy it while out on a walk. It was just that good.
It is a joy for a non-scientist like me to lose myself in descriptions of the exquisitely designed life cycles of pecan trees, maple trees, wild strawberries, witch hazel, black ash, and cattails.
This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.
When I arrived at my designated campsite on my first camping trip, I encountered a black bear. It was bent over a picnic table two camp sites over, its snout riffling through crumbs and crusts on abandoned paper plates. My childhood friend, a bear expert who was working at Algonquin Park that summer, was shocked. She said she hadn’t seen bears roaming this close to the campsites all summer. She assured me that the likelihood of it coming back was slim, but I wasn’t convinced.
Nucleus, a poetry collection by Svetlana Ischenko, published by Ronsdale Press.
Nucleus takes readers through a journey that traverses space (Ukraine to Canada) and language (Ukrainian to English) to arrive at an arresting and beautiful synthesis.
I've had Jeremie Albino's record Tears You Hide playing in fairly steady rotation at our place since seeing him at the StanFest musical festival in Canso, Nova Scotia in 2023. Albino wowed me with his strong, disarming voice and confident stage presence, and he's even better in the studio. I find the jaunty second track on this album, "Angeline," perfect for shaking off the day's stresses while I'm cooking supper in the evening. "Across the Hall" is easily the best pandemic-themed tune I've come across.
Bohumil Hrabal’s ninety-eight page novel Too Loud a Solitude opens with the following two sentences: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books…”
A paper baler is a closet-sized machine with a hydraulic plate that compresses the material into a block that is strapped with wires, ejected onto a pallet, and trucked to a processor where the fibre is extracted to make more paper.
Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a long poem—a total of 128 pages—that interrogates
