Family, colleagues to celebrate late playwright Ross

Winnipeg playwright Ian Ross will be remembered at a celebration of life next weekend in an event being organized by the Royal Mantioba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Manitoba Theatre for Young People and Ross’ family.

Ross, born in McCreary to a Métis father and Saulteaux mother, died suddenly on Nov. 18, 2025 at age 57. In 1997 his debut play, fareWel, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in the English-language category.

In addition to his work as a playwright, Ross became well-known for the “Joe from Winnipeg” character he developed for CBC Radio.

The celebration of life for Ross takes place Sunday, Jan. 18 at 2 p.m. at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s John Hirsch Mainstage (174 Market Ave.). Doors open at 1 p.m., with a reception to follow the event. Seating is limited, and a livestream will also be provided via the website for Ross’ obituary at wfp.to/ina.

Paperbacks: The Forger’s Requiem; Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good; The Burning Library

First things first: Bradford Morrow’s The Forger’s Requiem (Grove/Atlantic, 288 pages, $27) is the final volume in a trilogy, but you don’t need to be familiar with the first two novels (The Forgers and The Forger’s Daughter) to enjoy this one.

Field guide focuses on variety of architectural styles in Canada

Don Mikel is used to being compared to a bird watcher. The author and architectural enthusiast says he walked 40,000 steps in one day in downtown Winnipeg, his eyes peeled for our best examples of the Chicago School, Brutalism and quirkier, more regionally specific buildings.

Robertson’s new batch of musician profiles melds music criticism, biography

The problem with clichés is that their easy familiarity often comes to hide any underlying insight. Preaching to the choir may be easier than converting the unenlightened, but both require specific talents.

Canadian writer Ray Robertson, author of nearly 20 works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, returns with Dust, a work that explores and celebrates a number of influential, if not always well-known, musicians. This accessible book will appeal to both musical experts and neophytes.

Dust is a compelling blend of music criticism and biographical and historical storytelling, a thematic followup to 2016’s Lives of the Poets (With Guitars). Traversing much of the 20th century and with little concern for conformity to musical genre, Robertson shares his love of music and the often-iconoclastic performers who pushed their art into new territory. His goal along the way is not to simply share interesting anecdotes, but instead to develop a shared experience of music with readers.

Chapters aren’t tied by chronology or style. There is blues, rock, jazz and country — sometimes within the same portrait. One third of the musicians profiled died before age 30; addictions, mental health struggles and poverty abound. Yet for every Nick Drake, dead at 26, there is a Muddy Waters or the Staple Singers, who lived long, if not always unchallenging, lives.

Voices of resistance to dystopian forces coalesce in collection’s stories, essays

Speculative fiction has no shortage of oppressive dystopias, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. But how do ordinary people fight back? What does successful resistance to tyranny actually look like?

Patti’s Smith’s new memoir a wide-ranging look at life on and off the stage

Patti Smith’s career as a punk rocker blazed in the late 1970s. Her debut album, Horses, just reissued as a 50th-anniversary edition, regularly appears on lists of all-time top albums and inspired the likes of, among many others, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M.

Smith, now 79, has released multiple memoirs — 2010’s Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and 2015’s M Train — as well as numerous books of poetry and other art. Bread of Angels is more a full autobiography, often quite effectively melding her interior thoughts with important events and people.

A short preface introduces a recurring theme: rebel hump. The idea of not quite fitting in may help Smith “disguise the miniature Quasimodo trapped inside an awkward child’s body.”

Rambling chapters chronicle her Philadelphia upbringing, a sickly child determined to make her own way. “I did not want to grow up,” she says, and rejects the Bible study in her mother’s Jehovah’s Witness experience.

Apatow’s literary scrapbook a treasure trove of Hollywood ephemera

In his second book, filmmaker, comedian and self-proclaimed hoarder Judd Apatow digs through his archives to share photos, mementos and his overall love of comedy in a heavy tome covering his childhood and career.

Growing up in Long Island, N.Y. as a child of divorced parents, Apatow was obsessed with comedy and celebrity culture from an early age. In his early years, he collected actors’ and comedians’ headshots and autographs, dressed as Harpo Marx for Halloween and kept a book of joke ideas in the sixth grade.

As a teenager, he was interviewing some of the day’s biggest comedians for his high school radio station — including Jerry Seinfeld, Martin Short, Howie Mandel and Jay Leno. Pictures and autographs are all included here.

He also shares extensive photos and articles from his many projects over the years.

Disparate themes of ’60s exile story don’t quite coalesce

Veteran Winnipeg writer and Winkler native David Elias returns to fiction with a short and sometimes bizarre novel set in rural Manitoba in the 1960s.

David Elias’s most recent previous work was The Truth About the Barn, a blend of non-fiction and memoir about the history and various uses of that essential building on a farming or rural property. Mixing the history of the design and personal anecdotes about different uses, The Truth About the Barn was well-received upon its release in 2020.

Into the D/Ark is something decidedly different.

In 1963 rural Manitoba, blacksmith Clarence Martens toils incessantly on large, abstract metal sculptures. None of the townsfolk can make sense of Clarence’s creations, yet he continues to spend all his time building them and then hauling them out of his workshop onto the side of the road.

Wikipedia founder’s treatise on trust lacks spark

Wikipedia turns 25 in January, making this a fitting time for its founder, Jimmy Wales, to explain how his free internet encyclopedia went from being the butt of jokes to being hailed as a “ray of light” (the Guardian).

Feuding factions seek clues from mysterious manuscript

From Josephine Tey’s classic 1951 novel The Daughter of Time through to Peter Watson’s 1989 book Landscape of Lies to Dan Brown’s 2003 mega-hit The Da Vinci Code, mysteries featuring books and works of art hold an enduring appeal for many readers. With The Burning Library, Gilly Macmillan — a former art historian and U.K.-based author of eight previous thrillers — has added a new entry to this genre.

Her protagonist Anya Brown (surely a nod to the Da Vinci Code author) is a paleographer who, having made her reputation deciphering a mysterious manuscript, is hired by a group of women to study a collection of priceless volumes held in the Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews, Scotland. Anya is not only an expert in ancient handwriting, she also possesses an eidetic memory which (she claims) allows her to remember everything she sees in detail.

(In an odd turn, Anya is a first-person narrator surrounded by a large cast of characters whose actions are described in the third person — an authorial choice that doesn’t seem to have any justification).

Anya soon learns that her employers are part of a secret society of women calling themselves the Fellowship of the Lark, which has for centuries been engaged in a shadowy and often lethal conflict with another female-led cabal known as the Order of St. Katherine. While the “Larks” are glass-ceiling-shattering career women seeking power in corporations and governments, the “Kats” foreswear careers to care for their families and husbands — the latter of whom they secretly manipulate to their own ends.

Trump’s return to the White House chronicled in Karl’s latest doorstopper

History teachers — teachers of historical thinking and how historians think — often invite learners to analyze the causes and consequences of certain individuals, movements and moments: what happened and why and, sometimes, what didn’t happen and why. These are rich questions that help us understand the human experience.

ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl models this type of inquiry in his latest book Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America. The author of political tomes including Tired of Winning, Betrayal, and Front Row at the Trump Show makes an attempt to explain how Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election. Despite the odds and himself, Trump — a convicted felon who was caught on tape bragging about grabbing female genitals and who is linked to sexual terror Jeffrey Epstein — seemed to not only persevere, but thrive.

As Karl eerily points out following the election night, “despite it all, Trump had won — and won big. By any objective measure, his victory was stunning.” How could the man behind the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection not only win the election, but decisively secure the popular vote? And what might the impact of a more politically savvy president be who now holds a greater mandate?

Retribution is an examination of conditions that rocketed Trump back to the presidency, where we have already witnessed egregious human rights abuses, dangerous foreign policy, the destabilization of the world economy and threats of Canadian annexation. Troops in the streets have become normalized and ICE operatives with masks are commonplace.

Yousafzai chronicles her time at Oxford, finding love and more in new memoir

Remember the 15-year-old Pakistani girl who, in 2012, stood up to the Taliban in support of girls’ education and was shot in the head for her troubles?

Malala Yousafzai is back, this time as a young woman, with a memoir, Finding My Way, describing her life since she was thrust onto the public stage.

After becoming the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, Yousafzai enrolled in England’s Oxford university to study politics, philosophy and economics. She was born in Mingor, Pakistan in 1997 and graduated from Oxford University in 2020.

Finding My Way is a story of her search for friends, anxiety and first love. Yousafzai chronicles her time at Oxford, finding love and more in her new memoir that provides candid, often messy moments, such as nearly failing exams, meeting the love of her life and struggling with PTSD.

Body’s cellular makeup leads to big, existential questions

French science journalist and author Lise Barnéoud’s first book Hidden Guests is a fascinating, well-researched, atmospheric book on micro-chimerism — the presence of genetically distinct cells from one person circulating in another person.

Book club gets wild with fantastical fiction

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Hamilton author Amanda Leduc to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss her Giller Prize-longlisted novel Wild Life.

Published in March 2025 by Random House Canada, Wild Life follows the journey of two walking, talking hyenas over the course of decades, documenting their various interactions with humans all over the world.

Leduc’s story starts with the hyenas seeking out Josiah, a young man in 19th-century Scotland whose father sends him off on a religious mission; it is there Josiah meets the hyenas, who he believes are god in animal form, and they save him from a natural disaster which kills the rest of his party. Josiah then begins to develop his own religion, Church of the Wild, the crux of which is god giving the ability of speech to animals as a way to exalt the human race.

Josiah rises to an almost cult-leader status, but then mysteriously dies. The hyenas continue on their journey — though their true mission or motivation remains unclear throughout the novel. They take a train ride over an ocean, they learn how to make shortbread, they are kept in a zoo, they are given names — Barbara and Kendrith — and live in an apartment, they make friends and enemies and pique the interest of everyone in between.

New in paper

Blood Ties

By Jo Nesbo, translated by Robert Ferguson (Vintage, $27)

Two brothers and entrepreneurs in small-town Norway take to devious scheming when a new highway is slated to bypass their town — and the bodies begin to pile up.

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality