Life as an elder millennial detailed in raunchy, laugh-out-loud memoir

Believe it or not, the oldest millennials are now middle-aged.

Well, millennials can’t seem to believe it.

In this hilarious and unapologetically crass memoir, American author Jess Gutierrez reflects on her transition from a child of the 1980s to a (mostly) functioning adult of the 2020s.

Born in 1983, Gutierrez is considered an “elder millennial” as one of the oldest of those born between 1981 and 1996.

Gambling industry’s grip on sports has raked in plenty of cash — and created a new wave of addicts

Today you don’t have to go any further than your purse or pocket to lose your shirt.

Just ask the British. They’ll tell you what happens to a nation when its people can’t stop gambling.

Darragh McGee’s extraordinary book, Imitation Games, describes a country of compulsive gamblers who rely on a public-health system in crisis largely because of what they have done to it.

McGee, an Englishman himself, hopes Canada avoids the chaos his country and others are suffering having given free enterprise and technology more room than they should have in the marketing of gambling.

Hostile online platforms prove poisonous to much-needed genuine discourse, author argues

When Ray Robertson uses public transit, he realizes how different he is from the vast majority of modern human beings.

“Observe a bus full of near-comatose, infantilized commuters — heads lowered, fingers busy, eyes glazed,” Robertson writes in The Right to be Wrong.

“I don’t own a cellphone, perhaps my proudest act of social disobedience,” he declares.

Robertson has a large and varied body of written work, including nine novels, seven collections of non-fiction, a book of poetry and a book that inspired a film script. Born and raised in Chatham, he now lives in Toronto.

Joys and tribulations of beekeeping and the natural world explored in essay collection

On a small acreage on the edge of B.C.’s sprawling Lower Mainland, Susan Cormier and her husband, identified as B, live with an assortment of domestic and wild animals. It’s from this perspective — a teetering balance between rural and urban life — that Cormier has written the lyrical and engaging short essays featured in her memoir Dead Bees Still Sting.

Cormier’s essay Advice to a New Beekeeper, which opens the collection, won the CBC Nonfiction Prize, and her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She’s also a spoken-word artist and filmmaker who produces Vancouver Story Slam, Canada’s longest-running live indie storytelling competition.

The essays in Dead Bees Still Sting include practical information on the joys and tribulations of beekeeping in a changing environment — where residential subdivisions are replacing what were once agricultural fields and wooded areas housing wildflowers.

Cormier outlines the ongoing challenge of managing varroa mite infestations that can decimate healthy honeybee colonies and how amateur hobbyists, who she terms “beehavers” (as compared to beekeepers), are compounding the problem through improper management of their colonies.

Resilient Newfoundland women shine in moving, well-rendered prose

When Bobbi French introduces readers to Ruby Nolan, the heroine of her new novel The Brink of Something Beautiful, she has just been widowed. Widowhood for Ruby, however, does not follow a conventional path, and it is this non-conventionality that lies at the core of this lovely, moving and engaging work of fiction.

French is a Newfoundland writer and former psychiatrist whose debut novel, The Good Women of Safe Harbour, was named the winner of Newfoundland and Labrador Reads 2023. Like much of that first book, her latest takes place in the late 1990s, is set in St. John’s and is as much a homage to the Rock and its landscape, weather and dialect as the strong, often suffering women it portrays.

In addition to Ruby, a 50-year-old hospital medical files administrator, these women include Ruby’s mother Vera and her devoted neighbour Ida, Ruby’s former colleague Colleen and her partner Shannon, as well as a 19-year-old pregnant former foster child named Maxine who enters Ruby life’s the day of her husband Joe’s funeral.

Ruby had been unhappily married to Joe for 30 years, and her life in general, even as a child, was largely ruled by guilt and grief. Those negatives, though, never hindered the love, devotion and affection she has for her mother. Ruby visits Vera daily at St. Vincent’s, the nursing home where she lives, bringing her the fast-food hamburgers and french fries she craves, tenderly rubbing lotion into her brittle hands and sitting quietly by her side, holding those hands, even on those days that her mother doesn’t recognize her.

Mennonite revenge story shuns subtlety for depravity

Try as you might, you can’t avoid going home.

That’s the message of Sinner’s Banquet, the latest novel from Alberta writer Randy Nikkel Schroeder. Billed by the publisher as “Miriam Toews meets the Coen Brothers,” the novel tells the story of Luke Falk, a shunned member of the Mennonite Brethren, who is pulled back to the hellish and crime-infested wasteland of L.A. (That’s Lethbridge, Alberta, to the uninitiated).

His motive: revenge. Revenge for past trauma. Revenge for being shunned. Revenge for broken and conditional family bonds. Revenge for hypocrisy. Heck, revenge for being Mennonite at all.

Schroeder’s novel opens in the broken diaspora of Vancouver, where our narrator and his fellow fallen engage in all manner of drug-fuelled and funded double-crossing depravity. Luke is decisively, if not happily, getting on with his bummer of a life and trying unsuccessfully to forget where he came from. The thing about home, though, it’s that it’s always there waiting for you, and Luke never stops thinking or talking (and talking) about it.

Confronting the scourge of polio

From 1928 to 1953, polio epidemics occurred in Manitoba every three to five years. The pain for the young victims was often excruciating. The vast majority of children recovered, yet many experienced lifelong disabilities from the disease.

Literary legend waxes poetic on treasured Mexican village

If you travel a lot, there’s usually one place that resonates with you more than all the rest — a place that isn’t home, but it feels like it.

Sask. Métis village grapples with child abductions, North-West Rebellion

Major events and big personalities can overshadow the lives of ordinary people, but even the youngest and seemingly least important members of a society can help shape communities.

In Treat Them as Buffalo, Blair Palmer Yoxall has portrayed various characters in a Métis village in 1885 Saskatchewan through the life of a 12-year-old boy named Nikosis (Niko) Eriksen and his interactions with relatives and friends in the context of a community crisis and Louis Riel’s rebellion.

Yoxall is an Alberta Métis writer and poet with a master of arts in English in Indigenous literature and westerns. His fiction has won a range of prizes and landed on a number of short lists. His prose and poetry pieces have appeared in Glass Buffalo, the Fiddlehead and Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Treat Them as Buffalo is his first novel.

The novel follows Nikosis (Cree for “my son”) as he attempts to sort out the events occurring in his home community, Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Sask., in 1885. Several boys, including Niko’s cousin, have disappeared from the town, with some reappearing mutilated or dead. Niko’s mother, grandmother and aunt try to protect him, while other women in the community attempt to find their missing sons and grandsons. Meanwhile, a fierce fighting woman named Kate McCannon seeks to resolve the situation, offering to help with the search and rescue operations.

Despite success in Canada, Doug and the Slugs couldn’t break through in the U.S.

Regional musicians, often dismissed as one-hit wonders, provide some great music most people have never heard. Pittsburgh’s Iron City Houserockers and L.A.’s The Call and Warren Zevon, as examples, undeservedly fell through those cracks.

In some ways, Canada is its own region for bands relatively unknown in the United States. Some of the country’s best bands, such as the Tragically Hip and Payola$, barely registered in the lucrative market south of the border.

Another example is Vancouver’s Doug and the Slugs who, like the Hip, never had a serious hit in the U.S. They are the subject of this thoughtful and engaging history by longtime Slugs keyboardist and musical director Simon Kendall and writer Aaron Chapman.

Touring Canada and occasionally dipping into the northeastern U.S. (they sold out the iconic Bottom Line in New York many times), Doug and the Slugs produced five consecutive top-50 albums in Canada, from 1980’s Cognac and Bologna to 1988’s Tomcat Prowl. Songs such as Too Bad, Making it Work and Day By Day garnered plenty of airplay in Canada as well as a handful of Juno award nominations.

Story of real-life Scottish painters turned lovers told in joyful, moving prose

In this gorgeously written novel, Scottish writer Damian Barr begins with real-life painters Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, crafting a joyful, tragic, vital story of their love and art.

In Barr’s reimagining, which draws broad biographical outlines but fills those in with vivid novelistic colour, the two young working-class men meet in 1934, on their first day as students at the Glasgow School of Art.

“The two Roberts,” as they were often called, go on to become creative partners and lifelong lovers.

They are marked off first by their social class. In contrast to many of their art school classmates, who take for granted the cushion of inherited wealth, Bobby comes from a desperately poor family and Robert’s people are only marginally better off, his father’s promotion from the factory floor to a drafting desk at an engineering works having elevated them to “serviettes on Sunday.”

In choosing each other, same-sex couple in 19th-century Vermont defied convention

The front cover of Charity & Sylvia, the new graphic biography by acclaimed American cartoonist Tillie Walden, recreates the striking 19th-century portrait of two women, silhouetted in profile and framed by braided human hair carefully arranged in a heart-shaped detail, that inspired this volume. They are the eponymous Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, an openly lesbian couple who quietly made a life for themselves in rural 1800s Vermont.

Stitched together from an extensive archive of letters, journals and poetry, Walden’s moving, sepia-toned volume is narrated through both women during their time together as they navigate questions of identity, community and faith.

The story begins when Charity, a family friend of the Drakes, arrives from Massachusetts to rural Vermont. As the relationship between Charity and Sylvia develops, Walden infuses the book with a visual language of the mundane, drawing the reader’s eye to household sundries and everyday minutiae as she builds the story world through wordless panels of homesteading, domestic tasks, sewing patterns (both Charity and Sylvia earn their living as tailors) and impending weather as the seasons change.

She also builds out family trees for both women through backstories (including standout sections chronicling their childhoods) and daily conversations that provide context for those appearing in later scenes. Through an array of vignettes locked into a 12-panel grid, the characters move from church pews to kitchens, bedrooms, dinner tables, gardens and carriages travelling to and from neighbouring towns and states.