These eight stories reveal a world that’s both recognizable and strange: cities of anxiety and violence, where quiet inhabitants lead outwardly banal lives that conceal sinister interiors. The premises, both fantastic and surreal, are also eerily plausible; they often follow the logic of dreams where the real can appear in disguise. Though geographically rooted, the […]
Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs.
Uniquely imagined and vividly evoked, André Alexis’s prize-winning novel chronicles the childhood – or perhaps the loss of childhood – of Thomas MacMillan, who sets out to piece together the early years of his life. Raised in a Southern Ontario town in the ’50s and ’60s, Thomas is abandoned to the care of his eccentric […]
Award-winning novelist and critic Andre Alexis explores worlds with names such as Henry James, Maupassant, and Kawabata, trying, like any traveller, to faithfully convey what he sees and feels in those places while giving a convincing portrait of himself. At the same time, Beauty and Sadness is an autobiography. Alexis's intent is to give a sense of […]
Alexis’s long-awaited second novel follows his award-winning Childhood. Set in Ottawa during the Mulroney years, Asylum is André Alexis’s sweeping, edged-in-satire, yet deeply serious tale of intertwined lives and fortunes, of politics and vain ambition, of the building of a magnificent prison, of human fallibility, of the search for refuge, of the impossibility of love, and […]
I don’t think you can expect society to change if you’re not ready to take the first step. In the 1970s Beverly walks into an office of Black activists, wanting to join the Movement, and has to prove she’s committed enough to fight. Some forty years later, in the Hip Hop Generation, Nicole reunites with […]
Copper Woman and Other Poems is a collection of poems that announces a humanistic vision, dealing with such themes as rebirth (physical and symbolic), mythology, memory, bondage, blood, family, identities in flux, migration, politics and flights of fancy. The contents move back and forth between the past and the present, and project into the future, […]