Gaston’s American road trip offers insight into bond between father and sons

Spying on America is prolific and award award-winning writer Bill Gaston’s second memoir and 20th book — he has 15 novels as well as books of short stories, a play and a book of poems to his name.

The reward that this decades-long apprenticeship bestows is, first and last, the pure pleasure of reading Gaston’s supple, apparently effortless prose — evidence, maybe, of what Canadian poet Al Purdy referred to in a related register as “the crafte so longe to lerne.”

The book’s explicit subject is timely and engaging: as the title signals (as well as the 12-page “Epilogue: Spying on America from the Rearview” — more on this later), this is a covert operation for Gaston and his two adult sons, who embark on an 11-day drive in a rented muscle car from near Vancouver into the U.S. and back.

Their purpose and destination? To explore their ancestry: Gaston’s great-great-grandparents are none other than George B. Gaston and Maria Gaston, key American figures in the history of the underground railroad.

New essay collection explores menace of far-right movements in Canada

“Democracy is at stake and Canada is not immune to its demise,” states Miriam Edelson, editor of this timely anthology, warning that right-wing extremism, energized by memes and trolls permeating digital spaces, is heralding social and political change and affecting how current generations view the slow, often cumbersome democratic process.

Edelson’s well-researched observations are supported by 18 different contributors comprised of an array of like-minded academics, researchers and concerned activists who collectively alert readers to the extremist messaging that is altering some long-standing expectations of responsible governance.

Edelson’s social activism was honed by personal experiences while living in Toronto and working with the Canadian labour movement, spawning a literary legacy of personal essays and commentaries published by the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and Literary Review. Her earlier book, My Journey with Jake: A Memoir of Parenting and Disability (2000) remains a poignant reminder that society functions best when individuals share a common purpose of looking out for one another.

In a concise foreword to Confronting the Resurgent Right, University of Manitoba professor and award- winning Free Press columnist Niigaan Sinclair similarly reminds readers that “far right movements built on hate,” like those earlier thrust upon Indigenous people and still targeting Jews, Muslims and other identifiable groups, inexorably lead to “racism, violence, and genocide.”

Julia Elliott wins US$150k Carol Shields Prize for ‘Hellions’

TORONTO - Julia Elliott's eerie short story collection "Hellions" has won the US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

"Hellions" includes elements of horror, Southern gothic and folklore, and jurors praise it for taking "no half-measures," saying "every sentence of Hellions crackles or crawls."

The book includes stories about a teen discovering her power, a young woman who goes up against a shape-shifting older professor and a nun working on a forbidden manuscript. 

Elliott was celebrated at a gala in Toronto on Tuesday night.

‘Heated Rivalry’ wins 13 awards at the scripted television gala

"Heated Rivalry" crushed the competition, winning 13 Canadian Screen Awards at the scripted television ceremony on Saturday night. 

Those wins included two for creator Jacob Tierney, who picked up best direction and best writing for a drama.

Tierney's wins gave the Montreal-born creator a hat trick over the past two days, adding to his tally from Friday's unscripted gala, where he won best reality/competition series as an executive producer on "The Traitors Canada."

"Heated Rivalry" continues to be a worldwide hit, steaming up TV screens since its debut last year. It follows the love story between two hockey players, portrayed by Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie.

Indelible imprint: Prolific architect’s early-20th century works helped shape our city

Excerpt from John D Atchison: His Works and Times (Winnipeg Architecture Foundation) by Gail Perry. A book launch will be held June 6 at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location, beginning at 7 p.m.

New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young wins Griffin Poetry Prize

TORONTO - Kevin Young, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, has won the $130,000 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection "Night Watch."

Young took home the award at a poetry reading at Toronto's Koerner Hall on Wednesday night.

Jurors call the collection his most experimental so far and praise it as "melancholic and haunting," tackling loneliness, grief and "racial legacies that are deeply American."

Young has written 16 books of poetry and prose, and hosts the New Yorker's "Poetry Podcast."

Antisemitism’s recent rise a vast, well-funded campaign

Does a shadowy web of influence, supported by wealth and global fealty to a controlling religious group, exist? Are people and communities being influenced by a malign cabal sowing polarization and hatred?

Does a hidden hand control economies, media and political engagement of many, wide-ranging others?

Canadian author, lawyer, commentator, political consultant and punk musician Warren Kinsella believes this to be the case, detailing it in his newest book, which is sure to be controversial. But the cabal in question (spoiler!) is not the Jews, but Iran.

Kinsella has published both fiction and non-fiction about Canadian connections in politics, extremism and punk rock, including 1997’s Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network.

Winnipeg author explores a child’s grief in latest picture book

In the latest picture book from Winnipeg author Anna Lazowski, a child who has lost a loved one heads out to the backyard to build a rocket ship out of cardboard, tape and tinfoil.

That’s what you need to do, after all, when someone feels “as far away as the stars.”

I Built a Rocket Ship, out Tuesday via Kids Can Press, explores the constellation of feeling that is grief through our unnamed narrator — a kid with a shock of white hair just like the person they are missing — who is processing the loss.

Lazowski wrote the first draft of the book in 2021, during the pandemic.

Cinematic, dystopian YA romantasy series kicks off with the best kind of throwback vibes

Millennials, we are so back. From iconic fashion and celebrity comebacks to Laguna Beach cast reunions and blockbuster sequels, the early 2000s are trending.

And riding this wave of early aughts nostalgia is Booktok-famous Winnipeg author Nisha J. Tuli, who has penned the perfect homage to dystopian young adult (YA) fiction with her new romantasy, Storm Breaker.

The perfect comfort read for a generation raised on one unprecedented calamity after another, and an excellent introduction to the next generation of dystopian YA lovers, Storm Breaker follows a familiar formula: strong female heroine with a secret power, school trials, love triangles, forbidden romance and a system that is built on a lie.

What more could one ask for? Tuli has crafted a world that isn’t just reminiscent of the genre, but true to it in every way. And yet it works without feeling clichéd.

In the news today: AI strategy, B.C. killer discharged, Blue Jays sign Twins pitcher

Here is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to bring you up to speed …

PM Carney to announce federal artificial intelligence strategy in Toronto today

Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to announce the federal government's strategy on artificial intelligence today in Toronto.

The strategy comes as governments, businesses and civil society navigate the rapid development of machine learning and tools that can process information almost instantly — with varying degrees of accuracy.

Creepy apartment exudes grim vibes in dreamy ‘mommy horror’ debut

With horror becoming one of the most popular and celebrated genres in literature and film, it continues to spawn an ever-growing list of subgenres. These offshoots into specific topics or themes have always been there, but with growing popularity they’re now recognizable by readers who aren’t necessarily genre diehards.

One subgenre on the rise is “mommy horror,” stories which examine the sometimes fraught and strained relationships between mothers and their children, or the distressing and gory experience of birth itself.

It is this subgenre that Vancouver-based Liverpudlian writer and editor Emma Cleary explores in her debut novel Afterbirth.

Twenty-something Brooke is struggling to find her place. After teaching English in Japan for a couple of years and a romance that ended very badly, she is forced to move back in with her parents in England.

From her bookstore in Nashville, Ann Patchett drives the literary conversation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — When she isn't working on a novel, Ann Patchett is often thinking of what she can do for others: maybe coming up with a blurb for Douglas Stuart, or recording a video birthday message for fellow author-bookseller Emma Straub, or beginning an interview with a plug for another admired peer.

“The new Liz Strout book is the best,” she says of Elizabeth Strout's “The Things We Never Say.” “You know, every single book she publishes, you just think, ‘Oh, well, she can’t possibly do that again.’ And then she comes out with another book and it’s even better.”

At 62, Patchett is the rare and fortunate writer whose words resonate among friends and strangers alike. She owns one of the country's signature independent bookstores, Parnassus Books, with customers ranging from Nashville's book lovers to Tom Hanks. She's also a popular and prize-winning novelist whose new books are inevitably among the year's most anticipated, and whose older ones, including the acclaimed “Bel Canto,” continue to sell. In 2021, she received a National Humanities Medal for “putting into words the beauty, pain, and complexity of human nature.”

Her books have been translated into more than 20 languages, but her home is in Nashville, where she spent part of her childhood and now lives with her husband, physician Karl VanDevender. Patchett spoke at Parnassus with The Associated Press on a sunny weekday morning, shortly before opening time. She also met with staff members gathered at the center of the 4,800-square-foot store to discuss upcoming events, and indulged the occasional interruption by one of the employee-owned “shop dogs” who hurry about like bargain-seeking customers.

Fantastical, moving graphic memoir explores addictions, organ procurement and more

At the heart of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein and its many pop culture adaptations is the scene in the mad scientist’s lab where Victor Frankenstein, helped by a bolt of lightning, animates the grotesque figure made out of human and animal parts lying on his anatomy table.

As much as Shelley’s novel is a philosophical investigation into the desire of modern science to create new life, it is also a gruesome window into the clandestine European trade in graveyard and battlefield body snatching that fuelled early 19th-century anatomy research, medical training and public dissection theatres.

Whose bodies ended up on the slab to advance medical knowledge? As Montreal-based artist Arizona O’Neill explains in her captivating first graphic narrative, it was inevitably poor, racialized and criminalized bodies that were deemed appropriate for the indignities of public display and dissection in earlier periods.

But what about today? This is the central question driving the story of Opioids & Organs, O’Neill’s beautifully drawn story of coming to terms with her father’s untimely death due to a fentanyl overdose as well as the awful truth that Canada’s post-2015 opioid crisis has greatly increased the number of organs available for donation, mostly from otherwise healthy young men like her father.