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Books

Books

Here is where we’ll bring you coverage of books. General criticism, reading lists, editorial picks, and much more!

Stop! Look! Listen! Alex Boyd's Book Recommendation

I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Conor Kerr's Book Recommendation

Was it a coincidence that Jason Purcell’s debut poetry collection Swollening arrived in the mail two hours before I tested positive for COVID19? I’d like to think that this was their way of easing me into a week of fever/hacking cough/burning throat and making things just a little bit better. I’m not a person who isolates easily. I thrive in constant companionship and surrounding myself with people who have to put up with my inane ramblings about writing. That’s where Swollening became my friend.

Brian Bartlett's Reading Recommendation

For many years I’ve immediately re-read poetry books. Some collections pull me back for a deeper appreciation of their language, music and structures; others I find disappointing and frustrating, yet I remain curious enough to give them a second go. Immediate re-reading, however, rarely carries over into my experiences of novels or books of non-fiction (now and then I do read back through short-story collections right away).

J Brooke's Reading Recommendations

My wife and I moved during the pandemic, from the historic house in a former whaling village where we raised our kids to a late 20th Century human terrarium along a river. Every day since moving-in four months ago, I take advantage of the myriad pathways that wind through the woods along the side of our new habitat not facing the river, traversing a couple miles per wander in bucolic bliss. I have seen fox, heard coyotes, come upon wild turkeys congregating in groups larger than I’d imagined turkeys mingled. Neighbors report black bears, but I’ve so far been spared those encounters.

Shirley Harshenin's Book Recommendations

Shirley Harshenin writes from her home in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. She believes in angels, caffeine, and the human spirit’s extraordinary resilience. Her work has been published in Room Magazine, Contrary Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Entropy: Woven, Nailed, Crack the Spine, The Nasiona, and others. Her "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" was published in the 2022 creative nonfiction issue of The Fiddleheadwww.shirleyharshenin.ca 

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