Q & A with novelist Phillip Ernest, part I

Phillip Ernest lived on Toronto’s skid row until he was twenty-eight. He learned Sanskrit from the book Teach Yourself Sanskrit, and later earned a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Sanskrit from Cambridge University. The Vetala is his first novel. 

Report from the Future I: Montreal’s Literary Avant-garde

Letters appear, quickly metamorphose into other letters, creating new words, new meanings, and new stories. A story that might have been set in Brooklyn is transformed on screen into a story about Odessa, and then into another about Berlin.

I catch a line about being “hand in hand on uncertain ground.” It all reminds me of that line of Leonard Cohen’s about a woman “who’s gone and changed her name again.”

blue as an orange

Books, in Guatemala?

by Guy Tiphane

A visit to schools supported by Child Aid, an organization that sets up school libraries and reading programs in poor areas of Guatemala.

Gender bias discussion heats up on ABC Radio National, by Linda Leith