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Fallout Book Review

Peter Such
A clumsy mashed-together story set in the 1950s uranium boom towns of Northern Ontario. Sparse sentences, meant to evoke a more poetic Hemingway, fail to stick the landing and end up feeling like a novel written in bullet points. The characters don’t have romantic tension so much as surprise horniness. Unsatisfying all around.

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Learning from 20 years of high-density development in Kitchener

When I have conversations with friends and neighbours about new housing being built in Kitchener, I see a strong sense of bewilderment — especially when they haven’t been downtown in a while. “I don’t even recognize Kitchener anymore with all the new condo towers.” “With these high-rises popping up all over to…

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Seven Japanese Tales Book Review

Junichiro Tanizaki
If this collection is meant to showcase the best of Tanizaki’s work, it is a disappointingly uneven reading experience. Sometimes, as with the 6-page short story “Terror”, or the 10-page “The Thief”, he successfully plunges you into a character’s visceral experience. Other times, and especially with women characters, he is coolly distant. He may describe the softness of someone’s skin, but in such a detached way that you’d think he was describing a sculpture and not a living human being. If there’s one overarching theme, it seems to be his characters’ inability to grow or change — they are doomed to let their singular fixations pull them along the journey of life.

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No One is Here Except All of Us Book Review

Ramona Ausubel
“I almost remember you.” Every single sentence lands with poetic grace. I couldn’t stop mouthing “wow,” as this book grabbed my hand and led me, running, through a dreamlike and devastating fantasy world. For the residents of a tiny Jewish village, the fantasy is a self-imposed coping mechanism: a new creation story that wipes generations of pain away and allows them to start fresh. While World War II rages around them, the village of Zalischik is spared… for a while, at least. Safe as long as their luck holds, the residents must re-invent everything, re-imagine their relationships, and learn to make a new world together.

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