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| | | | Made in Canada This season’s lead Canadian titles stay close to home with stories set in locations across Canada. In Days by Moonlight (Coach House Books, Feb. 19), the fourth instalment in André Alexis’s “quincunx” of novels that includes the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Fifteen Dogs, a botanist and a professor embark on a Dantesque journey through Southwestern Ontario. Daniel Goodwin’s second novel, The Art of Being Lewis (Cormorant Books, March 23), tells the story of a Jewish boy from Montreal whose world falls apart in a series of unfortunate events after he moves to Moncton. And Ian Williams – familiar to many as the author of poetry and short stories – heads to Brampton, Ont., for his debut novel, Reproduction (McClelland & Stewart, Jan. 22), a Zadie Smithian love story.
| Megan Gail Coles can arguably already claim the prize for this year’s best title with Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club (House of Anansi Press, Feb. 12). Highly regarded as an author of stories and drama, Coles is making her debut as a novelist. Billed as “Newfoundland gothic for the 21st Century,” this perfect winter read takes place in February in St. John’s.
|  | | | Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist who splits time between Ontario’s Sudbury and Wasauksing First Nation. When he’s not working at the CBC and hosting the CBC radio show Up North, he is writing. First, there was the short-story collection Midnight Sweatlodge in 2011. He followed that up in 2014 with his first novel, Legacy. His latest is Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press), a thriller set in a snowbound northern Anishinaabe community, where a postapocalyptic reality slowly creeps its way through the band. Here are the books that have most influenced Rice throughout his life.
| What did you read as a kid?
| Growing up on the rez at a time when my family and community were really reconnecting with Anishinaabe traditions, spoken storytelling had a bigger influence on my upbringing than books did. Still, books were a big part of my childhood. My parents encouraged reading from a very early age. We didn’t have a television, so I have fond memories of both my mom and dad reading to me and improvising stories at bedtime. Some of the books on the shelf were the classics by Robert Munsch like The Paper Bag Princess, and of course, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
| | | | More stories below advertisement | | | These are dark days for technocrats.
| From Brexit Britain to Trump’s America to Ford’s Ontario, the world is in thrall to a style of politics that treats the functionary as an obstacle – an arrogant “expert” interfering with people power or, worse, an emissary of the “deep state” thwarting the executive’s whim.
| Republicans and Tories have been attacking bloated bureaucracy for generations, but this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s conservatism: In a growing segment of the modern right, the civil service is treated not only as inefficient, but illegitimate.
| | | | | To the River: Losing My Brother Random House, 272 pages, $29.95
| “When people die from suicide, one of the things they leave behind is suicide itself,” writes novelist, journalist and children’s author Don Gillmor in his most recent book, To the River: Losing My Brother.
| | | | Translated by: Howard Scott and Phyllis Aronoff
| Publisher: Simon and Schuster (trade paper), 286 pages, $22
| “I am not one of those college professors who coyly boasts of enjoying detective stories,” Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “they are too badly written for my taste.”
| Well, Nabokov is very much out of fashion and the college professors he mocked are in. There is much promotion, particularly in this country, of the idea that literary media and prizes and official reading lists are snobbish and exclusive and that genre fiction does not deserve its relegation. More and more fiction writers of the highbrow tradition are turning to murders and fantasies, either to increase their readership or as a nod to the postmodern collapsing of high/low distinctions. And occasionally even prize juries are rewarding entertaining stories over worthy ones. Furthermore, thrillers and slashers outsell meditations on identity. Why not analyze them as rigorously?
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