Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting The Great War, the sequel to Tim Cook’s Ottawa Book Award-winning At The Sharp End, picks up at 1917 where the latter left off.

Cook’s skill as a historian and a researcher is evident in every page of Shock Troops, and the level of detail with which he describes the battles of the war’s final two years is impressive. His ability as a writer though sometimes fails to live up to the stories he wants to tell. For the most poetic and vivid descriptions of war, Cook turns to hundreds of personal accounts from soldiers’ notebooks and letters from the front, which nicely counterbalance and serve to personalize the mind-numbing statistics on Canada’s war injuries and fatalities sprinkled throughout the book. But where Cook ventures into more poetic language himself he often misses the mark, lapsing into cliché or getting caught up in extravagant mixed metaphors.

Shock Troops is an account of war from the front lines. There are few digressions into the politics behind the conflict; instead, Cook concentrates on the planning and execution of battles in which the Canadian forces’ involvement was significant. Some, like Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele and Amiens, have passed since the war into Canadian popular vocabulary.

(Read more)

The latest of these is a short but fascinating biography of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. "I always wanted to write about Rimbaud because he was an idol of my adolescence," says White. "I think a lot of adolescents like him. He’s a favourite of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith. They’ve all written songs about him."

Boorish and hard to get along with, Rimbaud alienated almost all of his contemporaries. It didn’t help that he and an older poet named Paul Verlaine were one of the most notorious homosexual couples of their day. But by the time of his death Rimbaud had been hailed as the father of symbolism by the same people who had once shunned him.

(Read more)

Sycamore has edited several anthologies of writing on queer and gender politics, as well as published two works of gloriously disjointed autobiographical fiction. Like her first novel Pulling Taffy, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly offers up the events of Sycamore’s own life in a frantically paced stream of consciousness narrative. Her writing swings between poetic and horrifying as her ambiguously gendered central character lies awake in San Francisco’s rundown Tenderloin district, disturbed by roaches and rats and the real or imagined pigeons in the ceiling of her apartment, before taking off to service a variety of seedy men in the city’s most expensive hotels.

"For me what makes it a novel is not necessarily whether the exact events that happened in the book actually happened to me — most of them did," says Sycamore. "Memoir has become that dominant publishing industry buzz word for anything considered a little different. But, as we know, most of those memoirs are just lies. So I’d rather express my truth in fiction than present lies as if they are something that actually happened to me."

(Read more)

This month Tea appears at Toronto’s Writing Outside the Margins, a one-day festival of queer literary arts presented by Xtra, also featuring readings from the creator and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell, and Canadian MC, spoken-word performer and singer Kinnie Starr.

Tea’s books provide much-needed proof that it’s not just middle-class male intellectuals who can meander across America making love and poetry and relying upon a combination of their wits and luck to get by. But as she gets older Tea’s writing and her life are changing.

"I’m sitting against my wall completely hemmed in by boxes," says Tea on the phone from San Francisco where she has just finished moving house. "Yesterday I spent like $150 on this do-it-yourself put-it-together clothing rack, and it fell on me and I broke three parts of it. I just rigged up this crazy busted rack using a pole and a bike rack, it’s totally going to collapse on me. You have to lean on these particular skills when you’re moving and I don’t have them. I don’t have real-world skills."

(Read more)

What is the 3 Day Novel Contest, you ask? Well, it’s exactly as horrifying as it sounds. It’s Vancouver’s answer to NaNoWriMo, except instead of having to hammer out 1,000 words a day for an entire month, you get it all over with in 72 frantic, hysterical hours, during which contestants spew out an average of 100 pages each. Whether they’re any good is secondary; what matters is that you switch off your internal editor, stop making excuses, and write like a maniac.

(Read more)

Burroughs shot to fame in 2003 with his first memoir, Running with Scissors, which recounts his bizarre adolescence spent living with his mother’s psychiatrist and his eccentric family — a story so strange and unusual that Burroughs has been accused more than once of fabricating it entirely (these claims have not so far held up in court).

His second memoir, Dry, dealt (perhaps not surprisingly, given the content of the first) with his recovery from alcoholism years later in New York. Now, in A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs has returned to his childhood in Massachusetts where he explores his troubled relationship with his alcoholic and, he claims, sociopathic father.

Wolf is a chilling memoir that is markedly different in tone from his other books, which are full of black comedy even in their bleakest moments. But humour would be out of place in this latest installment in Burroughs’ richly unusual life, which is told from a young child’s uncomprehending point of view. The young Burroughs starts out craving his father’s attention, but gradually grows terrified of the shadowy and dangerous presence that stalks his house at night, starves his guinea pig and turns his docile pet dog into a ferocious beast while Burroughs and his mother are away from the house for just a few nights.

(Read more)

There’s a pleasing circularity to this exhibition at the National Library. Ian Rankin wrote much of Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus book, in the reading room here, thanks to a PhD thesis on Muriel Spark that fell by the wayside. With Rankin’s famed protagonist Inspector Rebus packed off into retirement this year, it feels right that this celebration of his 20-year journey should be housed in the place where it began.

I have a confession to make at this point: I haven’t read any of the Rebus novels, or at least I hadn’t before this weekend. So I was curious to discover whether a display of Rebus artifacts would hold much interest for me. I half expected a motley collection of titbits for the die-hard fan, but although there’s a bit of that here, there is also something for those with only a passing acquaintance with the series.

For kids, there is a murder mystery to investigate, in which the man himself is a suspect in a grisly crime inside the Library (I peeked, but I won’t give away the ending). There is also a cordoned-off ‘crime scene’, where you can peer at things through a magnifying glass or dust for fingerprints. I was tempted, but the tables were set at that slightly too-low height that quietly reminds adults that they’re supposed to be reading the informative explanations of DNA and fingerprinting behind them rather than getting sand all over the floor.

(Read more)

The Stone Gods offers up four stories about civilisations destroying themselves, and the individuals who find unconventional love among the ruins. Some of these work better than others, with Winterson ill at ease and over-explaining robots and other sci-fi staples in her dystopic future. The dialogue is often forced and unnatural, and references to current political issues are unsubtle and add little to her own largely plotless narrative.

Winterson is on more familiar ground in a story about a young sailor marooned on Easter Island, but the poetic sparkle that defined her earlier works is all but gone. The Stone Gods is grandiose and ambitious, seeking to rewrite our own history as well as providing a terrifying glimpse of the future. But with little of her trademark flair, the attempt feels stilted and flat even as the stories reach what should be their tenderly poignant conclusions.

(Original article)

This is the story of the 1960s advertising revolution that led to the shedding of jingles and rigid formulae in favour of a certain whimsy, spurred on by the visions of a handful of people who made a tidy fortune. Sam Delaney chronicles a 20-year period with gushing enthusiasm, detailing the names and excesses of everyone involved. It’s a fun read with some interesting tidbits, but ultimately fails to convince us that anything important actually took place.

He relies heavily on testimonies from retired admen, recalling long afternoons drinking, office fist fights and company Ferraris, all of which quickly becomes repetitive. The book is eventually brought down by its subject matter; reminding us that while advertising may once have been thoroughly exciting, it doesn’t alter its fate. Get Smashed is a nostalgia-fest for what has become the bane of 21st century life.

(Original article)