Before I review the contents of this book, I need to tell you a little bit about the design of this book. Monica Kidd’s second poetry collection, Handfuls of Bone, was published by Gaspereau Press, a Canadian publishing c...

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen is a wacky comedy that involves the same detective from Hiaasen's other books, Yancey, but this time he's been demoted to food inspector on the island. Things go from suspicious to weird when Yancey t...

Madcap poetry collection Eunoia by Christian Bök, a Canadian experimental poet, is a major linguistic achievement. Published in 2001, it took him seven years to write and was (eventually) a bestseller in both Canada (where it w...

In Half as Happy, his second book of short stories, Gregory Spatz plays around, as his title suggests, with ideas of halves and doubles. His characters live with a constant sense of incompleteness, as if there is always someone...

I recently encountered the useful literary term “dirty realism.” It was coined by Bill Buford, former editor of Granta magazine, to describe American literature of the 1980s, including authors like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff,...

  Where’d You Go, Bernadette  has a delightfully convoluted plot that will keep the reader second guessing the unpredictable characters and set off on a detective search for the illusive Bernadette. Set initially in ...