This is the story of Toni, a girl growing up in the 1960s and ′70s and trying to navigate what it means to be gay and Jewish in Montreal. Goliger explains that she “wanted to explore how having the dual identity—marginal identity—can enrich someone. Toni is marginalized to some extent, certainly in the times she […]

Hochelaga Revisited was an art exhibition at the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), which has become an important centre for culturally diverse artistic expression in Montreal. And while we’ve lost our chance to attend this exhibition in person, we can still check out the bilingual exhibition catalogue from the Montreal Public Libraries Network. This 2009 exhibition set out […]

No Crystal Stair, set in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in the early 1940s, tells the story of Marion Willow as she tries to give her girls the confidence and refinement they’ll need to rise up in the world, even if she knows that “to be coloured is to be at the bottom of the […]

Ru, first published in French and translated into English, is an autobiographical novel by Kim Thúy. In Vietnamese ru means lullaby; in French it is a stream, often a metaphorical flow of money, tears or blood. This is the story of a girl and her family who were among the many refugees who boarded boats to […]

Serafim and Claire is a story about two people trying to escape the rigid social mores of the past to find passion in their single-minded pursuit of art. Claire flees the servitude of working for a rich Anglo family to dance on the stages of Montreal’s burlesque theatres, where she’s sure she’ll get noticed and […]

In Nikolski Montreal is a migratory hub, a city where nomads wind up, at least for a time. They carry their histories with them, mapping their routes and their roots as they go. Joyce leaves the fishing village of Tête-à-la-Baleine, Quebec, to become a pirate… Noah arrives from the Canadian prairies to study (even if […]

Cockroach unfolds during a bitter Montreal winter. Its narrator, despite his de facto membership in a community of exiles, is utterly isolated and both fearful and desirous of human ties. As a master thief, he ties himself instead to people’s effects, using them to read the people he cannot trust. He skirts the edges of […]

Montreal Reads My usual rules for pleasure reading are few. In fact, I may have only one “rule” for reading, which is that I must have variety. I like to routinely switch from one genre to another, from one setting to another, from one century to another (I have a particular soft spot for unselfconsciously […]