As disparate and fractured as Canada and the enterprise of Canadian literature has always been, one commonality bridges all of our divisions be they political, historical, racial, aesthetic, or geographic. Simply put, this characteristic is complacency. We care about literature; we express enthusiasm for Canadian books, writers, and publishers; but we do so little to [...]
Features
The Digital Apocalypse
Alex GoodNear the beginning of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake the character of Snowman – survivor of a plague that has carried off most of the human race, leaving behind only a genetically engineered species of primitive beings he has dubbed the Crakers – thinks of keeping a Crusoe-like journal. It is an idea he [...]
Sort of Giving Up A Little Bit on Reading
AJ SomersetWe live in dark times. Bookstores are closing, the few surviving newspaper book reviews have atrophied like the legs of a man with a spinal injury, and Toronto, which once claimed to be the cultural capital of our fair nation, is governed by asshole philistines who appear to have engineered a budget crisis with the [...]
Be Proud to Linger (A CNQ Web Exclusive)
Brian PalmuFederico Fellini was as brilliant in his prose musings as he was in crafting his cinematic wonders. He bemoaned and lambasted the transfer of movies from the communal house to TV and VCR. The newer technologies profoundly altered the viewer’s experience of those movies. No longer a “prisoner” on a cinema pew, the lucky moviegoer [...]
Genrealities: Five Honest-to-Goodness True Stories of Everyday Humiliations
Michael Libling1 A naïf in Vermont
He seemed like a nice enough guy, but so did Ted Bundy from all accounts. And it wasn’t like Bread Loaf was short on desperadoes. It was a writers’ conference, after all. Charlie Manson could have hidden in plain sight. Still, here I was, following this guy across campus in the middle [...]
The CNQ Interviews: Ray Smith
John MetcalfRay was interviewed by mail by John Metcalf. The questions have been omitted to make for smoother reading.
Apart from a year in Summerside where my father was taking Coastal Command training as a pilot in the RCAF, I spent most of my first five years in my mother’s family home in the lovely village of [...]
An Interview with William Gibson
August C BourréWilliam Gibson is a visionary author who revitalized science fiction with the hard-boiled cyberpunk novel Neuromancer in 1984, and who has continued to push its boundaries ever since. Gibson has written six near-future science fiction novels (the Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy), as well as The Difference Engine, with Bruce Sterling, a steampunk alternate-history [...]
The Gutter Years
Marko SijanEight years ago, on December 31, 2002, I signed a contract for the publication of my novel. It was the happiest moment of my life. I was going to be an author and, ipso facto, a “professional writer.” This was my dream. For years I blamed its death on one man: publisher, agent and literary [...]
Other Worlds; Other Words
Margaret AtwoodExcerpt from the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination to be published in Fall 2011 by McClelland and Stewart (Canada), Virago (U.K.), and Nan Talese (Doubleday), Random House (U.S.A.).
. . . To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx [...]