The view from here

New sci-fi/fantasy bookstore a welcome addition

A new chapter has begun in Winnipeg’s literary landscape with the opening of science fiction and fantasy bookstore Other Places Books.

Located at 436 Graham Ave., the queer-owned and operated shop is the latest in a host of genre bookstores to have opened in the city over the last few years. In addition to longtime mainstay Whodunit? Mystery Bookstore (163 Lilac St.), the local scene now also features a horror bookstore (Raven’s End Books, which opened at 1859 Portage Ave. in 2024) and a shop focused on romance (Bound to Please, which opened at 995 McPhillips St. earlier this year).

The 900 titles currently in stock at Other Places, which opened Tuesday, span a range of sci-fi and fantasy sub-genres, with a particular focus on queer writers and storylines. The bookstore is the brainchild of Didi Chanoch, who moved to Winnipeg from Israel in 2025 after the Canadian federal government began offering work permits to those in Israel and Palestine looking to leave the area due to the conflict.

Winnipeg ended up on Chanoch’s radar in large part due to a more reasonable cost of living than other Canadian cities.

Survival guide offers a frightening perspective on life in U.S. prisons

Canadian criminal sentencing guidelines identify “three traditional utilitarian goals — deterrence … incapacitation and rehabilitation.”

In spite of lofty intentions, fiction and film have identified North American incarceration in general as largely negative, incapacitating most inmates only while they are actually behind bars. Prison often leads to more crime, teaching criminal behaviour.

Tom Nelson spent more than 17 years in medium and maximum security facilities in the U.S. for such pasttimes as auto theft, armed robbery and drug dealing. Then he turned that life of crime around and became a successful physical trainer and gym owner in Los Angeles.

Nelson met and formed a friendship with Taylor Sheridan, creator and writer of such series as Yellowstone, Landman and the prequels 1883 and 1923. When COVID devastated the gym business and Nelson’s health was failing, Sheridan suggested turning Nelson’s attempt at a screenplay about prison life into a book.

Asian supermarket T&T to open at Polo Park

Live seafood, more than 150 varieties of baked bread and rows of Asian produce are being promised for CF Polo Park — in two years time.

Champion curler Meleschuk never lost his passion for the game

At the height of his curling career, Orest Meleschuk balanced ferocity and finesse like almost no one else.

The Winnipeg product was a fierce competitor skilful enough to thread a rock through a window and find the button.

Known as “The Big O,” he curled competitively for over six decades, finding success at the local, provincial, national and global level, and his longevity on the pebble was notable before lengthy careers became the norm.

Meleschuk is still tied with his good friend John Usackis for the most appearances in the Manitoba men’s provincial playdowns, at 30.

The view from here: Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

Staycation: The Art of Being Here feautres more than 100 Manitoba-related artworks from the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq collection, spanning the past 50 years. These pieces reveal how the places around us are layered with memory, story and lived experience. Over the coming weeks, the Free Press will spotlight works from this eclectic exhibition, each one offering a new way of seeing home. Experience it in person and enjoy some staycation time at the gallery, on view until December.

Phyllis Green. Boob Tree, 1975

(Yarn, wood. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Acquired with funds from the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Naylor, funds administered by The Winnipeg Foundation, 2014-128. Photo: Ernest Mayer.)

The year 1975 was designated International Women’s Year by the United Nations, and in celebration, the WAG staged the show Images of Women, which explored how women had historically been depicted, an impressive selection but by mostly male artists. Amid pushback from the community, Sharron Zenith Corne and Marian Yeo organized a second exhibition, Woman as Viewer, which challenged those portrayals by only featuring works by women. It was called the first Canadian exhibition of feminist art. American artist Phyllis Green’s Boob Tree, a four-foot-tall crochet sculpture of a cluster of breasts, adorned the exhibit posters, which were so popular they were snatched by passersby! The sculpture is playful and unsettling, re-appropriating the objectification of women’s bodies.

New lab a win for Winnipeg’s long game

It would be easy to overlook the announcement this week that the federal government was green-lighting a quarter-billion-dollar expansion of the National Microbiology Laboratory’s Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health on Arlington Street.

Easy to overlook, in part, because it will take a decade to build the new 140,000-square-foot laboratory specializing in medical countermeasures.

But make no mistake, this latest investment from Ottawa galvanizes Winnipeg’s reputation as a global leader in the research of the world’s most infectious diseases. It also confirms that a wager made by Manitoba political leaders nearly 40 years ago is paying off in spades.

The existing NML was, to be frank, hastily conceived compensation for one of the most egregious examples of political pork-barrelling ever seen in Canada.