October 6, 2026
The Paris Files, by Eva Jurczyk
There is darkness when one first enters the apartment building at 44 Rue Oberkampf in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement, which is to say that none of us—neither the characters in Eva Jurczyk’s latest, The Paris Files, nor those of us who are reading—really knows what we’re getting into here. The story, the characters, all of it just off-beat enough to keep surprising at every turn, every twist, and the image that springs to mind is the staircase in the building spiralling up-up-up, the stakes growing ever higher.
It’s the story of Genie, a Canadian woman who meets an American man while she’s travelling in Asia, and they make this plan to meet again in Paris, which sounds incredibly romantic, except that Genie’s best friend is doubtful. Because Genie has been burned before, can come on a bit too strong, wants too much, and she’s close to 40, not some young ingenue. But the American arrives, the best friend is proven wrong, apparently…but not entirely, because the entire novel is told through police interviews. With Genie herself, telephone interviews with the friend Toronto, with the building’s concierge, the neighbours, the grumpy man who sells fruit and vegetables across the street and keeps an eye on everything. Because it seems that not long after the American arrives, he and Genie spending a few love-soaked days together, he suddenly disappears.
Like the staircase, the novel is dizzying, disorienting. Genie is unreliable, characters are keeping secrets, just why the police are interviewing her in the first place isn’t clear. And while the novel’s structure could pose a limitation for lesser writers, Jurczyk’s cool and easy prose style, underlined by a darkly comic approach, brings the story and its characters to life, along with Paris itself (and the food!), and the overall effect is utterly propulsive. What I didn’t know when I was getting into this book was that I’d start reading it on Sunday, and be as close as is humanly possible to being LITERALLY unable to put it down, so that was my day gone, but I couldn’t have spent it better.
A fresh twist on the unhinged female narrator, a story about friendship, travel, duplicity, and real estate, I had high hopes for this novel, but the experience of reading it surpassed all my expectations. It’s out today and you should buy it!
October 2, 2026
Andrea Warner Was Awesome
Andrea Warner was oh so cool, and even more kind. We only met once in person, but over the past decade, I came to adore her, and was so grateful for (and quite chuffed by!) her support of my work, and also for the force of her own work, which was feminist and fabulous and truly made the world a better place. I think I learned of her first when the first iteration of her book *We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music* was published in 2016, and I loved the idea of someone taking women’s art and women’s work (and also POPULAR women’s work) so seriously, and we became online friends after that. I still often think of her 2019 CBC music piece on Avril Lavigne, which gave credit to Napanee’s hometown girl for the “great emotional dexterity and depth” of ballads like 2003’s “I’m With You.” Do yourself a favour and go read her beautiful essay on grief and Bran Van 3000’s “Drinking in LA” from 2022.
Andrea Warner took cues from nobody about what was cool and what was important, her takes and criticism unabashed and straight from the heart. She wore her heart on her sleeve, was true blue, and earnest. She co-wrote Susan Aglukark’s autobiography. She also wrote Buffy Sainte-Marie’s authorized biography, bringing all the warmth, kindness, and generosity that was entirely Andrea to the project.
In 2024, she published a wonderful book in ECW’s Pop Classics series, Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, celebrating the greatest nearly covert abortion story-line in 20th century film. We talked about it on my podcast, and you can listen here. My podcast is “short-form,” mostly because I don’t have a professional Zoom account, and get kicked off after 40 minutes. Andrea’s was the only interview I ever did where we ran out of time and I had to log on for another call, but this also seems so typically Andrea to me—exuberant, bursting with life, so full of laughter and joy to the point of overflowing. She did not have enough time, but what time she had she filled with everything she had to give—and those of us who got to receive were oh so lucky.
Andrea was a remarkable critic because she knew how to appreciate things, not just how to pick them apart. She was an example of the kind of writer who stayed curious always, asked tough questions of the art she loved, and respected such art enough to know that it was tough enough to take those questions. In our podcast conversation, she talked about how nothing in pop culture is above reproach, and how questions and critique can further our engagement with the work we love, even the “problematic” aspects. Her approach was counter to so much internet discourse which consists of maniacal stanning or trollish-pile-ons and all-out cancellation. Andrea was smarter than that. Andrea was so much better than that. Hers was the kind of critique that broadened instead of reduced, that was always inviting other people and ideas in, and making space for more.
In 2024, Andrea was diagnosed with cancer. As you’d expect, her health updates were funny, even when the news sucked. In the first one, she wrote about how “the very FIRST song we heard was Michael Bolton’s ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ which seems like it should be illegal to play in the f–king BC Cancer Agency waiting room, but was also VERY funny.” I wrote back and told her that I would have preferred Dan Hill, who is well known in waiting rooms across the globe. She told me that sh was obsessed with “Sometimes When We Touch,” And I replied that I was wishing her “Carmelia”:
Seems there’s always some tragedy
That’s tearing at our precious world
Wish sometimes we could just lighten up
Let’s take a look around us
Turn off the TV oh let’s open our eyes
Look at the stars in the sky
Carmelia, let’s dance away the night together
Let’s dance until this crazy world disappears
Girl in the morning we will still be here
Carmelia, let’s celebrate our lives together
Let’s dance until the stars tumble from the sky
I heard from Andrea’s husband Carlos this week that she died on Sunday. I am so sad for him, and so sad for her. I wish she was still here.
Update: When I heard the news about Andrea, I rushed to the internet like it was 2007 and threw all my feelings into my keyboard, just because sitting with the sadness felt awful and I wanted to talk about Andrea and celebrate her with others who knew and loved her too. I would never purport to have been a close friend of Andrea’s, which is why I never questioned, when the news arrived in my inbox, that it was public and could be shared, which was wrongheaded and clumsy of me. I’m sorry to people who were hurt by my posts, and to Andrea’s family, for not considering their privacy. I am grateful for her husband’s kindness and grace in the the face of my apology, and send love to everybody who’s missing her now.
Her family invites those of us who wish to honour her memory to make a donation in her name to the following causes:
Battered Women’s Support Services https://www.bwss.org/take-action/donate/
Urban Native Youth Association https://unya.bc.ca/ways-to-donate/
September 30, 2026
Naoyak, by Norma Dunning
With Naoyak, Norma Dunning follows up the Governor General’s Award-winning Tainna with a warm and rollicking novel about an Inuit woman whose plan for a better life for her son involves becoming inextricably bound to an inept researcher with an uncanny resemblance to Conan O’Brien, and following him all the back from the north to his home in Sherwood Park, Alberta, moving straight into the apartment in his basement. Naoyak is already behind on her plan to leave for the south by the time she’s 25, but luckily she makes up for lost time by being accompanied by the spirit of her grandmother and also Kiviuk, the giant guardian of Inuit lore who’s been watching over since birth.
It’s through their influence and also her own peculiar charm that Naoyak manages to win the researcher over (overcoming her own ambivalence to do so), and also secure a job at the university as a “community liaison” between university officials working on a study about Indigenous health and the people back home in her north community. But such a role is less straightforward than Naoyak imagines, and presumes that the academics would be approaching community members in relationship and not simply as another extension of the colonial scheme. When it turns out that this might not the case, its the southerners’ turn to get schooled.
Dunning’s fiction debut Annie Muktuk and Other Stories was such a revelation, and she keeps on giving with this latest release, with an audacious protagonist who’s just as unforgettable.
September 25, 2026
Big Little Truths, by Liane Moriarty
My first encounter with Liane Moriarty was a mass market paperback copy of Big Little Lies purchased from the drug store in 2017, a tie-in to the smash-hit HBO series that I never ended up watching, but I’ve been a big fan of Moriarty ever since then, and wish that she received more credit for her talent as a novelist from readers who might dismiss her as merely popular or as a women’s fiction writer. Craft-wise, Big Little Lies was a turning point for her, her sixth novel, and the first of the sprawling ensemble cast books that she’d be writing ever since, books that are twisty with plot but also with dizzying points of view, some of the most immediately unsympathetic characters rendered with a beautifull surprising humanity.
Big Little Truths follows Big Little Lies, and it’s Moriarty’s first sequel—a sequel to the book she wrote, not the TV show into which it was adapted, which differed from the book in several ways, most notably in being set in California. But with Big Little Truths, we’re back in Pirriwee, in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and the children who were kindergartners in the previous book are now in their teen years, which is to say that all the little problems of parenting have become positively gargantuan.
As ever with Moriarty’s work, everybody has a secret, but there are also secrets that nobody knows about yet, and what is going on with the kids and their world which none of their parents are able to properly permeate? There are also parents whose eldercare needs are more demanding than the kids are, a charismatic new history teacher who’s managed to infiltrate the mom’s group, and a severed finger that’s just been delivered to the school principal—what exactly is going on here?
Poignant, hilarious, frothy and yet not frivolous in the slightest—there are biting politics at the heart of this text—Moriarty has once again pulled off a rich and moving story about female friendship, motherhood, and middle age that is absolutely worth your time. And for those of you who haven’t read the first back (or for those who, like me, have forgotten its details), do not let that deter you, because Big Little Truths is a sequel that also stands alone.
September 21, 2026
Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson
I periodically have to remind myself that once upon a time I didn’t read mysteries, that it wasn’t until Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories that I discovered my affinity for the genre, and Jackson Brodie became my gateway to Armand Gamache, Lane Winslow, Dame Polara, Hercule Poirot, Inaya Rahman, Cat Conway, and more. And I love the way that Atkinson has in the years since then permitted herself to dip in and out of genre fiction, including crime novels and historical fiction, blurring the lines between literary and genre, and those between the genres themselves. I adore the way that Atkinson continues to build whatever kind of literary container her stories require, her own brilliant sparkle and deft prose style the common thread through all of it.
And this time she’s sparkling in mid-century England, against the backdrop of the Festival of Britain, a government funded celebration intended to rouse a nation from its post-war doldrums, which turns out to be a big ask as rationing is ongoing and Britons are still wracked by war trauma. Among them is Harry Flynn, a reporter who spent his war was a captured civilian on the Burma Railway, and who’s hired by the festival for various tasks. What he’s there for is not exactly certain, but this is also the case for a number of his colleagues, which means that everyone has something to hide when a young Frenchwoman disappears—but it’s Harry upon whom suspicion falls immediately.
There’s a lot going on in this novel, a rollicking whirlwind, and lines like, “Flynn was impressed. He didn’t usually consort with women who knew both Milton and more than one sexual position.” A veritable circus, like the Festival itself, this book is very good time.
September 21, 2026
Takes and Gifts
“And it feels so good these days to keep yourself for yourself. What a great trend,” writes my friend Shawna Lemay in her latest Transactions with Beauty post, to which I reply (to myself!), And how! Like Shawna, I’ve been asking what the point is with these sorts of spaces, who is even listening relishing the straightforward humanness of real life encounters. I think I’m still a bit burnt out from my very busy season last spring, and am having trouble finding the motivation to write my monthly Substack essays or resurrect my podcast. For the former, I am pressing on anyway, because I’m grateful to have paid subscribers, but on Substack itself and on the internet in general, I am getting very tired of screaming out into a void. On Instagram, I’m altogether tired of scrolling to find post after post of clickbait by people I don’t even follow, weird and warped content that actually bears no relationship to the world that I live in.
My blog feels different though—it was always fairly certain here that not many people were reading anyway, that relative obscurity was a feature, not a bug. What has always differentiated blog audiences from those of social media is that the former is highly specific, while the latter is terrifyingly general. I know who I’m talking to here. I’m fairly sure that those readers will understand me. And anybody who doesn’t will have the context clues of 20+ years of archives with which to make sense of the matter.
In a piece today, Emily Wilson (recent and well known translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad) complains about the one-noteness of internet discourse (which maybe is part of the reason I’m not very inspired to post on online essay about anything right now). She writes about the “poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator “takes” on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s an alternative to this way of being online.
I am so done with “takes,” and am thinking now about about what takes actually take—from their writers, their readers, from the culture at large. And I’m thinking about how the opposite of a take is a give/gift. What Shawna writes:
Artists and writers and makers very often think about the gifts they receive, and understand the give and take of it all. The more you give, the more you get back. It’s a mysterious and wonderful economy all its own.
September 16, 2026
My Year in Fairyland, by Sarah Ellis
“I didn’t want Sherry to leave. I thought her decision was premature. In my sorrow, I felt the pull at every moment to appropriate her into the greedy organism of my own self. But Sherry was not me. She was her own self, in her own body, with her own history. My task and my ethical responsibility was to see her as clearly as I could and love her. To look closely and love is a principle that I’ve tried to apply to all the life presents. Sherry’s situation strengthened my belief in this principle even as it stretched it to the breaking point and often drained me.”
Acclaimed and award-winning children’s author Sarah Ellis’s memoir/essay collection My Year in Fairyland is many things—it’s a love story, a life story, a death story, a report from a journey into grief, an exploration of the books and reading that underline the author’s life, a consideration of the ethics of MAID and our responsibilities to one another as human beings, and so much more.
When Ellis met her wife Sherry (at a ukulele circle, but Sherry wasn’t there to play), Sherry had already made up her mind that she was going to end her life when she was ready, before her MS symptoms could take that life over altogether. Of course, Ellis didn’t entirely believe her, especially after the two of them stitched their worlds together. Surely their love, their life, would be enough to change Sherry’s mind? But no, Sherry’s mind was not for changing (and this was Sherry’s standard; Ellis’s illustration of her wife as a larger than life whirlwind of a character is one of the most delightful parts of this remarkable book), and it was out of love that Ellis committed to helping Sherry do what she’d always said she’d do, eventually being accepted for a medically assisted death in Switzerland in 2019.
The couple received the date for Sherry’s death a year ahead of time, and Ellis comes to see this liminal period as they were waiting for it to happen as a kind of fairyland. The usual rules are suspended, a surreality infuses everything, they’re working toward something inevitable that feels impossible. Ellis writes about realizing that notions of a bucket list would not work for them, that steeping themselves in ordinary everydayness was what they truly desired with the time they had left together.
But there are practical matters as well—they’d maintained separate households, and needed to clean out Sherry’s house. What to do with the two coffins she used as coffee tables? What things of Sherry’s does Ellis want to hold onto?
She writes about what fairyland and notions of play had meant to her as a child, of how they’d inform her perspective of the world and a child’s eye view. She writes about how notions of play underlined the life she built with Sherry: “It was the shape of our landscape.” About her struggle to accept Sherry’s wishes, and how her finally doing so is informed by an allusion to The Secret Garden. About riddles in general and the ultimate riddle, which is life itself. About the fairy stories that had “furnished the rooms of my imagination for a lifetime.” How writing helped her through the experience, and made her think about her writing differently, that maybe it had always been more personal than she’d ever imagined. About weddings, wifedom, queerness, and “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Dancing by the light of the moon. (The moon.) And finally of what it was to come home from the experience of Sherry’s death, the same but utterly changed. The riddle of that, her own personal Odyssey.
My Year in Fairyland is a gorgeously woven tapestry, a generous offering, and a pleasure to read.
September 14, 2026
Queen Mab, by Emily McBride
Queen Mab is Madeleine, so-called by her husband. She’s a Canadian academic, adopted to an English mother and a Quebecois father, who has moved to her mother’s homeland to study the Modernists and Victorians. She’s married young and is surprised and not surprised to find herself pregnant in the middle of her graduate studies: “It was what I had wanted, but immediately I no longer wanted it. I was only twenty-three. What had I been thinking?”
I’ve read changeling stories before, among many other novels about postpartum rupture, but Emily McBride’s debut novel, Queen Mab, was a fresh take on the subject, underlined by its deep intertextuality—there are five pages of sources for the allusions woven most inconspicuously into the body of the novel. It is through reading that Madeleine understands the world, and so she does, even when her brain chemistry means that she’s misreading and supposing that her baby has been replaced by some kind of double. She recalls leaving a window open in the hospital room the night before her daughter was transferred to the NICU, something something about foxes, a street cat called Greymalkin. She’s sleep deprived and isolated, cut off from who she’d been before the baby came, and her own unknown origins only compound the confusion, her sense of being wholly untethered from the chain of things that keep the planets in alignment.
In a lesser work, the changeling story would be a metaphor, a cutesy reduction of Madeleine’s situation, but in Queen Mab, the literary allusions enhance the story, and provide a vivid sense of how she interprets her reality. The reader follows her deeper and deeper into her detachment, Madeleine’s husband and parents unable to reach her, their helplessness apparent on the story’s margins, but Madeleine’s point of view stays fixed and front and centre, the story’s shift from first to third person narration just another way in which she gets away from herself.
Luminous, literary, intelligent, and surprising, Queen Mab was captivating, and disturbing in the best possible way.
September 10, 2026
The Little Way, by Carol Bruneau
Carol Bruneau’s latest novel, much like her celebrated fictionalization of the life of Maud Lewis, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, is a celebration of the ordinary extraordinary, those pockets of wonder and colour that a lesser writer might forget to notice. Set in contemporary Halifax, it’s a very “voice-y” novel from the point of view of Isla Fownes who, at age 49, has slept in the very same bedroom all her life in the historical home with water frontage on the city’s Northwest that she shares with her elderly father and her drifting daughter who’s just announced a surprise pregnancy. Like Lewis did, Isla “brightens the corner where she is” as a local florist, but sometimes the task seems overwhelming against a backdrop of climate disaster, social inequality, and runaway real-estate speculation. Thankfully she can take comfort in her new partner, a widower who’d washed up on her shores the autumn before when his sailboat sunk.
The Little Way is the story of a season, Bruneau writing Isla and her friends and family through their days, days filled with mundanity and miracles, trials and pleasures. It’s a novel that plays tricks with language, embracing the vernacular, and doesn’t hold its readers’ hands either, demanding close attention instead of breeziness, the way that the most important things always do.
September 6, 2026
A Great Day
Yesterday, I got to see Pitbull in the company of 15,000 other fans. It was wonderful.
On March 14, 2025, we were driving home from a visit to the the Royal Botanical Gardens, and a song played on our Spotify playlist that I’d somehow never heard before, performed by an artist I knew nothing about, including his area code (unbelievably). A new release, I’d assumed, because it had come on after Charli XCX, but it turned out the song was 12 years old and everybody in my family—in the world, even?—knew it, except for me.
“Why did nobody tell me about this?” is what I kept thinking in the days to follow when I wouldn’t stop playing it over and over.
That song was “Timber.” (Full credit to Kesha, without whom….)
Now, an essential detail of this story and of my whole “Come to Pitbull” moment was that by March 14, 2025, I was six weeks into a difficult bout of anxiety, my first experience of such a thing since the major episode on 2022 that almost broke me and made me realize that I had an dysfunctional relationship with anxiety in the first place. Watching the US government wreak havoc on the post-WW2 world order had once again sent me down a road of terror and existential dread that made ordinary functioning difficult and left me sad and scared all the time in a way whose disproportions I did not comprehend. It was awful.
But “Timber” made me happy, it really did, and everybody in my family was pleased about this development because during my previous bout with anxiety, I’d listened to Phil Collins over and over, and they all determined that Pitbull was a vast improvement.
And then Leon Musk put on a cheese hat and a Democrat won the Wisconsin senate race, I realized that the forces of evil were not necessarily omnipotent, and my anxiety lifted.
But Pitbull remained.
And I’ve loved Pitbull ever since, Mr. 305, Mr. Worldwide, a product of Dade County always. Not in such a way that I’m sure you’ll love him too, if you don’t already. My love for Pitbull makes no sense, and doesn’t map neatly onto anything, weird and incongruous. But Pitbull himself is weird and incongruous, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me. After having my mind broken by its insistence on absolutes, Pitbull showed me how to relax a bit, to hold multitudes. He has taught me that some things are simpler than they seem, and that there’s power in rejecting cynicism. That I *could* consider myself too smart and worldly for a platitude like “Every day above ground is a great day,” and yet there is truth in it, so why would I?
He’s author of the line, “This biggity boy’s a diggity dog.” He does not take himself too seriously, and yet he also comically takes himself way too seriously. His lyrics are super-sexualized, his dancers practically naked, and his female fans show up at his concerts in drag, dressed like him in bald caps. He’s spoken of spending his childhood driving around with his mother listening to Tony Robbins’ cassette tapes and used his private jet to fly cancer patients from Puerto Rico to the US for treatment after Hurricane Maria. He’s a caricature, but there’s something more there that’s oddly compelling. You should read Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, which tried to skewer the Pitbull persona, but could not bring itself to do so entirely at the end.
I love him so much, and I love the world better because he’s in it.
