The Literature Issue – Subtlety in Stigmas and Stereotypes

Montreal Serai’s cultural critic ***** Le Siecle de Cartier-Bresson. France, 2012. Pierre Assouline. Whoever has seen photographs of Gandhi’s funeral, Nehru’s meeting with Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, the liberation of Paris or other landmarks of the 20th Century […]

Louis Dudek was one of my professors at McGill University, later he became a friend. As I’ve written elsewhere, what brought me to McGill as a graduate student in 1974 was the desire to study with Dudek. It was one […]

In november, flocks of birds fly in spectacular changing formations over the botanical garden of the downtown roman sky. Les étourneaux sur Rome Comme un nuage élastique Dirigé par une main invisible Malléable et fluide Se dessine dans l’azur Comme […]

Yes, this is a Literature issue and it was always destined to be one.  I was going to talk extensively about Literature as we have all known it to be, in the mainstream and alternative sense.  The thematic title was […]

Two excerpts from a forthcoming debut collection of short stories, Bombay Wali and other stories, by Veena Gokhale, Guernica Editions, 2013. The book will be launched in April of 2013. Printed with the kind permission of Guernica Editions. Preorder on […]

The Tao Book Club gang was  safely ensconced in the corner of the restaurant mezzanine by the time I got there. I peeled off my coat, shook the droplets of water on the dark carpet and sank into a chair. […]

In the mid-1960s Alonzo Martin and his brother Victor inherited a stony farm in the Luberon from a bachelor uncle, a house and barns in various stages of decay, the miniscule arable surface consisting of a few scraggly apricot trees. […]

Artist Statement: Mille et un papiers, les chemins de l’exil s’inspire des échanges avec plusieurs réfugiés forcés à quitter leur pays. Leurs récits habitent et hantent mon imaginaire et sont ma source d’inspiration. Dans ma peinture, j’utilise l’aquarelle, l’acrylique et très […]

…do the bouquinistes along the Seine offer a lesson for us? Sometime in 2004, I was talking with Judy Mappin at her Double Hook Book Shop on Greene Avenue in Westmount, and she expressed how very pleased she was because […]

Partial submission I thought of mailing you a paper-clip then thought again for surely you must have some in a similar small green tray or palm-sized round jar (on its lid a scene of camels, desert, sun) or in a […]

Who made us and our world? The questionhas baffled humans for centuries, and resulted in stories known as the “myths of creation.”  Based on oral tradition, many of these myths have been told and retold in different versions. They have […]

Editor’s Note: The following paper was presented at a Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth, at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, October  4-6, 2012. Paul Hawkins has previously contributed to Montreal Serai. […]

I Canada – Deformed at home, diminished abroad Activist, journalist, and researcher Yves Engler has just produced an important handbook of our national recessional – The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy (RED Publishing, Fernwood Publishing, 2012). In this small […]

TO BIG BILL BROONZY OF MISSISSIPPI it’s moving and it’s quiet in mISsissipI, MISSisSIP pi, miSSSSiSSSSi pI! and she cries out in protest of the color of her skin: if you’s white you’s alright if you’s brown you can stick […]

An Interview With Meenakshi Shedde There was a rare treat at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in the week of November 14th to November 21st 2012: a retrospective entitled Indian Expressionism. It explored the cinematic links between India and […]

[From the website of Véhicule Press]  Véhicule Press began in 1973 on the premises of Véhicule Art Inc., one of Canada’s first artist-run galleries. The large space occupied by both the gallery and the press at 61 Ste-Catherine St. West […]

Take a pinch of Conrad, a soupçon of Chekhov, shake vigorously and you get Rushdie. Not quite, but their forenames were the beards behind which Salman Rushdie hid during the nine-year fatwa against him.  1989 was a low point in […]