HistoryTag

"The Terror That is Everywhere" Read an Excerpt from A Knife in the Sky, Marie-Célie Agnant's Story of Haiti’s Brutal Despot

Prize winning Haitian-Québécoise writer Marie-Célie Agnant is celebrated for her rich, complex, moving portraits of women living through colonial power structures. Elegant in its examinations of ...

Excerpt: Merilyn Simonds Explores the Spectacular Life of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Woman Ahead of Her Time, in a Meditative New Biography

There are some lives that are so fantastical, so packed with passion and strange turns and reinventions, that they are hard to summarize. Such is the life of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Swedish aristocrat ...

Frances Koncan on How Playwrighting Gets Her "Closest to the Truth"

Frances Koncan's play, Women of the Fur Trade (Playwrights Canada Press) is the antidote to dull historical renditions of early Canada. Set in "eighteen hundred and something something", it follows three ...

"She Saved Our Lives, But it Cost Her a Great Deal" March Writer-in-Residence Amanda West Lewis on the Story Behind Her New YA Novel

It's a daunting task to take on capturing New York City in the 60s, but Amanda West Lewis is more than up to the job in her tough, compelling, autobiographically inspired young adult novel These Are ...

K.R. Wilson on His Daring New Novel that Follows One Memorable Character from the Fall of Rome to Contemporary Toronto

Guernica Literary Prize winner K.R. Wilson's sophomore novel Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millenia (Guernica Editions) is as ambitious as it is memorable, following the titular hero through centuries ...

Robert Rotenberg on His Family's Lost Story of Heroism, A Memorable Opening Line, & Going Back to Chandler

Bestselling crime writer Robert Rotenberg, who is also a prominent criminal lawyer, knows how to craft a good story. But he got a serious surprise when two distant relatives wrote a story he'd never heard ...

"So Bizarre, It Must Be True... Nonfiction Brings the Past Alive" Nate Hendley on Nonfiction & His Wild New True Crime Story

It was a plotline that could be considered too outlandish even for a TV crime drama: a bank robbery in an iconic costume, a shootout with a military veteran, and an insanity plea that kicked off a years-long ...

"Maximum Curiosity and Maximum Respect" Susan Glickman's Collected Essays are a Hymn to Thoughtful Literary Criticism

For those who worry that thoughtful, long-form literary criticism is becoming a thing of the past, Susan Glickman's Artful Flight (forthcoming from the Porcupine's Quill; available for pre-order now) ...

Read an Excerpt from Mark Frutkin's The Artist and the Assassin, A Retelling of Revolutionary Artist Caravaggio's Life and Death

Italian artist Caravaggio revolutionized painting in the 17th century with his dramatic use of light and shadow (a technique known as chiaroscuro). During his life though, his tumultuous personal affairs ...

Read an Excerpt from Irish Author Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Haunting, Beautiful, and Genre Defying Book, A Ghost in the Throat

Part autofiction, part literary study, and part keen-eyed examination of domestic labour, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's strange, intense, and beautifully written A Ghost in the Throat (Biblioasis) is impossible ...