The Spring 2024 Issue of the Montreal Review of Books is out and in the world! All our reviews and interviews are individually available online, and if you want to read them alongside the gorgeous cover art by Kezna Dalz and inside illustration by Gabrielle Drolet, we also have a PDF of the issue available here for those interested! If you want to have your own print copy of the issue (because how could you not?), pick it up at your local bookstore, library, or café. If your favourite spot doesn’t carry it, let us know! We are always interested in keeping our distribution list u ..read more

Oonya Kempadoo’s recently published novel, Naniki, is a work of magic realism and Caribbean futurism. The shape-shifting co-protagonists, Amana and Skelele, elemental beings intertwined with Taíno and African ancestry, set out on an archipelagic journey with their animal avatars – their naniki – to search for the strange future seen in their dreams. When disaster strikes, they are summoned by their elders to take on a quest travelling back in time, to find the origin of the First Peoples’ knowledge. I meet with Kempadoo for lunch on a cold but sunny afternoon in Montreal’s Mile End. The resta ..read more

Padma Viswanathan’s Like Every Form of Love is hard to classify. The subtitle, “A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime,” comes close, but only scratches the surface of this complex and profound work. A novelist, translator, and teacher, Viswanathan divides her time between Montreal and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she and her husband, poet Geoffrey Brock, both work as professors at the University of Arkansas. “Like many Canadians, I never even said the word Arkansas before I ended up moving there,” she laughs. “It doesn’t have the kind of urban vibrancy that Montreal has, and I admit to having ..read more

G is a new book by Klara du Plessis and Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi that began in a fricative sound that bridges their two native languages – Afrikaans and Persian.  In both languages, “g” is a guttural sound, a throat-borne utterance that does not use the vocal cords. The closest equivalent in English is at the end of the word “loch.” The idea of a poem built around “g” seeded the ground for a poetic collaboration in which two poets met in their shared language – English – and together explored other languages and meaning. The result is a translingual playground that, though rooted i ..read more

In Sivan Slapak’s debut novel Here Is Still Here, we follow Isabel – born into a Montreal Jewish family in which the past casts overhanging shadows and the future holds the tenuous hope of fixing everything. Moving to Jerusalem first to study and then to live, Isabel navigates the contrasts and conflicts around her as she explores what identity, place, and belonging mean when here is less a place to settle than the ability to be present.  Here Is Still Here Sivan Slapak Linda Leith Publishing $22.95 paper 240pp 9781773901466 Away from Montreal and her family, Isabel attempts to build ..read more

Listening in Many Publics Jay Ritchie Invisible Publishing $23.95 104pp 9781778430442 It is a queer thing, for a poet to fear images. Most poets spend their lives in chase of them, others conceal them in metaphor. Jay Ritchie meets them in an unwilling embrace. Listening in Many Publics, Ritchie’s second published collection, admixes an anxious, capitalist surrealism with the fleeting liminality of memory, speaking back to a visual culture, where to look is to see but not feel. It is also a meditation on language, powerful in its ability to conjure images that, once spoken, entrap, first i ..read more

Who knew that a book about the taxonomy of mollusc penises, cow throats, intestinal worms, and animal deformities could be so compelling?  The Calf with Two Heads Transatlantic Natural History in the Canadas Louisa Blair Baraka Books $29.95 paper 144pp 9781771863308 Louisa Blair’s The Calf with Two Heads is a whimsical and entertaining collection of vignettes about Canada’s first naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Indigenous traditions of mapmaking and medicine, to the French Jesuits’ early contributions to botany, and the eventual rigour of organized science ..read more

Between Gentlemen Rupert Bottenberg Conundrum Press $10.00 paper 64pp 9781772620900 “Between Gentlemen,” the titular story in Conundrum Press’s reissue of four short comics by Rupert Bottenberg, contains the collection’s entire use of written language. The gentlemen are two boys identical but for their shirt collars and shorts; between them is a friendly contest, a back-and-forth of experimentation. Let’s call one boy Magic, and the other Science. Science first displays “The Crypto-vecto-jector!,” a torch with a beam of black light and esoteric design. Magic responds with an enchanted glov ..read more

    The Montreal Review of Books launches its Spring 2024 issue on Thursday, March 14th, at Hotel 10 (10 Sherbrooke Street West) in partnership with the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival! Following the festival’s 2024 programming announcement, join us in Espace Godin for refreshments and readings by Louisa Blair (The Calf With Two Heads, Baraka Books), Jay Ritchie (Listening in Many Publics, Invisible Publishing) and Oonya Kempadoo (Naniki, Dundurn Press). The Blue Metropolis press conference will begin at 4:30 p.m., followed by a wine reception at 5:15 p.m., and ..read more

Sarah Gysin is a part-time illustrator and comics artist from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her work is inspired by soft and gentle moments of human existance, and she enjoys creating worlds where pastels and coziness thrive. When she’s not working or drawing, Sarah loves to crochet, drink coffee, and hang out with her cat, Oscar. The post Illustration by Sarah Gysin appeared first on Montreal Review of Books ..read more