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Oct 8, 2024 | 
thestar.com | Naomi Skwarna
At the northernmost end of Spadina Station is a soft secret, suspended in plain sight. Approximately 850 people pass daily through the station’s Kendal entrance, gained by way of a discreet Victorian house where Kendal Avenue meets Spadina Road. It is a modest number compared to the other, busier terminals, and yet for 46 years, Joyce Wieland’s large-scale quilt, Barren Ground Caribou, has met many of us in this narrow passage between coming and going.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
hazlitt.net | Shereen Lee |Jason Kirk |Naomi Skwarna
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) is the culmination of six years of dreaming for poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib. The book has followed him in draft form through a MacArthur Fellowship, the releases of three other award-winning titles, the hosting of two podcasts, creating over a hundred Spotify playlists, and through the paradigm shift that the pandemic brought to the world’s doorstep.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
hazlitt.net | Jason Kirk |Naomi Skwarna |Marta Balcewicz |Lana Hall
“Jesus is more socialist than the socialists,” wrote the theologian Karl Barth, describing the gospels’ politics as downright anarcho-socialist, a worldview too ambitious and perhaps naive for even some of the most hopeful revolutionaries. If Jesus’s politics remain that far ahead of our time, then how long will it take us to reach the rest of him?
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
hazlitt.net | Sophie Monks Kaufman |Naomi Skwarna |Gary Barwin |Andrew McMillan
Three poems found in the real-life remarks of Don Cherry, Charles Oakley, and Ronda Rousey.
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Mar 20, 2024 | 
hazlitt.net | Naomi Skwarna |Jason Kirk |Shereen Lee
The first time I read Colin Barrett, I had the sensation that my nervous system was being vigorously flossed. I still remember the inciting passage, from the 2016 story “Anhedonia, Here I Come”:He stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through, inhaled three one-euro hamburgers and a fries and a Coke, and took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle bathed in the purple-blue glow of UV lighting installed to prevent junkies from finding the veins in their arms.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
hazlitt.net | Nour Abi-Nakhoul |Naomi Skwarna |Tina Horn |Niko Stratis
In Melissa Broder’s newest novel Death Valley (Scribner), an unnamed protagonist hits the road in an attempt to escape from the stress of her hospitalized father’s imminent death. When she departs from her beloved Best Western hotel, Grab N’ Go Breakfast in hand, to take a brief walk in the desert, she’s surprised to see a giant, maybe mystical saguaro cactus.
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Oct 18, 2023 | 
hazlitt.net | Naomi Skwarna |Tina Horn |Niko Stratis |Scaachi Koul
“There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us,” writes Rachel Aviv, “and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.” In her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Anchor Canada), Aviv, an award-winning investigative journalist, turns her careful focus on mental illness: stories and storytellers, traps and reprieves.
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Oct 11, 2023 | 
hazlitt.net | Tina Horn |Naomi Skwarna |Lana Hall |Hanna Phifer
I first saw Fancy Feast perform around 2012 in Brooklyn at the body positive queer dance party Rebel Cupcake. My memories of this are admittedly a little, well, whiskey- and refined sugar-tinged, but she corroborates this would have been around the time she started her burlesque career.
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Sep 22, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Naomi Skwarna |Claudia Dey
From King Lear to Succession, the sad, mad, and pretty bad dad remains a captivating, if polarizing character in art. What makes a flawed patriarch so transfixing? The more they push us away, the closer we want to get. In Claudia Dey’s third novel, Daughter, “To be loved by your father is to be loved by God,” or so claims her protagonist Mona Dean in the first line of her play, a biographical study of Margaux Hemingway.
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Sep 6, 2023 | 
hazlitt.net | Mayukh Sen |Matthew Eng |Abhrajyoti Chakraborty |Naomi Skwarna
Welcome to the first in “Brown Hollywood,” a three-part series of essays by Mayukh Sen exploring undertold stories of South Asian performers in Hollywood’s Golden Age. William Henry Pratt wasn’t much like the other boys at school. Growing up in London during the late nineteenth century, he had a lisp, a stammer, and a bow-legged gait that made him a honeypot for bullies. He appeared graven-faced in photographs, always the odd one out.
