Bookstorm: Recent Episodes
Shelf Life Books
Shelf Life Books discusses our July Book of the Month: Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber.Iris and the Dead is a haunting exploration of love and desire, disability and madness, trauma and recovery.Weaving personal memory with magic realism and folklore, Iris and the Dead asks: What if you could look back and tell someone exactly how they changed the course of your life?For our narrator, that someone is Iris, the counsellor with whom she developed an unusual, almost violent bond. There are things she needs to tell Iris: some that she hid during the brief time they knew each other, and some that she has learned since. She was missing her mind the autumn they spent together and has since regained it.Iris and the Dead unfurls the hidden power dynamics of abuse, offering a beguiling inquiry into intergenerational trauma, moral ambiguity, and queer identity.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Shelf Life Books discusses our April Book of the Month: Barbara by Joni Murphy.From the author of Double Teenage and Talking Animals comes an intimate portrait of a woman losing and finding her identity through the business and art of moviemaking.Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward.She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire's victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love. An intense, layered distillation of a zeitgeist, Murphy's latest novel whispers tales of independent cinema and grimy show business, militarism and physics, bomb making and image consumption. It is a study of the mirroring and splitting between old and new worlds, inner sensations, and outward performance. Ultimately, Barbara unspools a delicate yet propulsive tale of a woman grasping for a meaningful life amid the reflective, broken shards of the long 20th century.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Shelf Life Books discusses our November Book of the Month: Living Disability, with book editor Emily Macrae.How can we build more accessible cities? Living Disability brings together vibrant perspectives on disability justice and urban systems. From sidewalks to the climate crisis, Living Disability brings together the vibrant perspectives of thirty-five disabled writers. They explore disability justice, analyze urban systems, and propose more equitable approaches to city building. Essays and interviews push the conversation about accessibility beyond policy papers and compliance checklists to show how disabled people are already creating more inclusive spaces in cities of all sizes. Living Disability is universal in scope but intimate and local in focus, grounded in personal struggles and celebrations.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Kevin Stebner discusses typography, his artistic practice and John Wyndham with Shelf Life Books.Typography broken down into its most basic (and beautiful) forms to reveal the inherent voice within each shape.Inherent is a collection of concrete poems that uses poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we’re used to taking for granted. Produced by physically scraping each letter onto the page using Letraset sheets—a process of tangible transference that requires irrevocable choice—this is a poetry of format that plays with aspects of form and design to demonstrate each typeface’s individual poetic stance.Sitting somewhere between Hanjorg Mayer’s Futura and Johanna Drucker’s concrete poetics, with a hint of punk DIY zine culture and a heavy study of typographic graphic design, Inherent moves with palindromic rotational symmetry, arrays of potential landscapes, and alien languages where the Roman alphabet goes supernova into brilliant new forms.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Walter Scott discusses the Wendy Series, art school and corporate sponsorships with Shelf Life Books.The Wendy Award: Everybody’s favorite party girl Wendy is so back. When Wendy is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art Prize alongside her friend Winona, all of her millennial dreams seem to be coming true. She lives a post-pandemic, polyamorous fine artist’s lifestyle in the big city and basks in the glory of national attention with the success of her popular comic strip, “Wanda."But not even achieving bona fide art star fame can hide the truth: a never-ending struggle with imposter syndrome. After she cracks in an online interview and gets dragged in the comments section, she heads straight to a local watering hole to drown her sorrows. Several lines of coke, too many drinks, and one all night rager with fans later, Wendy is ready to curse Gen Z and confront her addictions. All the while, she and Winona drift apart as a younger Indigenous artist wedges herself between them. Will Wendy’s commitment to change wind up short-lived?The Wendy Award incisively skewers the art world with its corporate overlords, performative activism, generational wealth, and weaponized therapy speak. A showcase of Walter Scott’s deft wit and social commentary, The Wendy Award asks the hard questions, like Do they still give awards to men? Should we be grateful for the exposure? And what exactly is Big Auntie Energy?Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Chris Bergeron discusses her book Valid: Dystopian Autofiction, trans futures, Love is Blind and the multiverse with Shelf Life Books.Valid: A genre-bending speculative look at a dark future, Valid shares the story of one trans woman leading a revolution.Set in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050, Valid is a monologue delivered over the span of eight hours by Christelle, a seventy-year-old trans woman forced to live as a man in order to survive. Speaking to her captor, an ever-more powerful AI, she turns the tables and mounts her own revolution by showing her truest self. Part autofiction, part dystopic speculation on an all-too-possible future characterized by corporate power, ecological collapse, and political havoc, Valid is an ambitious work that is as much philosophical as it is confessional.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Catherine Leroux discusses her book The Future, climate anxiety and the philosophy of time with Shelf Life Books.The Future: In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Josh Cook discusses his book The Art of Libromancy, translated fiction and the politics of bookselling with Shelf Life Books.The Art of Libromancy: The essays in The Art of Libromancy explore the politics, philosophies, technologies, emotional experience, and craft of selling books in the twenty-first century.With Amazon’s growing power in both bookselling and publishing, considering where and how we get our books is more important now than ever. The simple act of putting a book in a reader’s hands—what booksellers call handselling—becomes a catalyst for an exploration of the moral, financial, and political pressures all indie bookstores face. From the relationship between bookselling and white supremacy, to censorship and the spread of misinformation, to the consolidation of the publishing industry, veteran bookseller and writer Josh Cook turns a generous yet critical eye to an industry at the heart of American culture, sharing tips and techniques for becoming a better reader and, of course, recommending great books along the way.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Kai Cheng Thom discusses her book Falling Back in Love with Being Human, self compassion rituals and the joy in marking up your books with Shelf Life Books.
Falling Back in Love with Being Human: What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?
Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred.
But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and ideals she’d built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith: she wrote. Whether prayers or spells or poems—and whether there’s a difference—she wrote to affirm the outcasts and runaways she calls her kin. She wrote to flawed but nonetheless lovable men, to people with good intentions who harm their own, to racists and transphobes seemingly beyond saving. What emerged was a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Tomas Hachard discusses his book City in Flames, the apocalypse and dad rock with Shelf Life Books.About City in Flames: At once evocative and propulsive, City in Flames is a love story about two isolated people with a deep yet fragile bond trying to find their way to each other while political disorder engulfs the world around them.Sara is a graduate student living away from home and struggling to finish her degree. When she kindles a long-distance relationship with Kevin, a disillusioned and apathetic IT worker, the two watch as the city that Kevin lives in, and Sara grew up in, slowly rises up against P., a recently elected populist leader. As protests escalate to a night of devastating fires, the impending political breakdown pushes Sara and Kevin’s relationship to the brink and leaves them torn between the turmoil of the present and a hope for the future, between their longing for connection and their terror of commitment.City in Flames offers a timely, intimate examination of our political moment, mixing the edge of Exit West and the modern romance of Normal People. It is a story that illuminates how people can grow separated from each other, the ways that these bonds can be healed and re-established, and how humans define themselves through their relationships with others.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Jessica Johns discusses her book Bad Cree, horror tropes and lovely Alberta bookstores with Shelf Life Books.About Bad Cree: A haunting debut novel where dreams, family and spirits collide. Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8. Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie's life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she's getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her. Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author River Halen discusses their book Dream Rooms, vulnerability and animal extinction with Shelf Life Books.About Dream Rooms: Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as trans, this collection concerns itself with what sits on the surface of daily life, hidden in plain view, hungry for address—what it means to take a stranger’s pet rabbit to the vet in a year of accelerating extinctions, to lose your clothes to a moth infestation then buy a duvet made of fossil fuels, to learn your bookshelf is full of work written by rapists and rape apologists, to consider a birth control device as a narrative about bodies and their possibilities, then pull the string. Deeply queer and trans not only in its content but in its thinking, Dream Rooms invites readers to that place in consciousness where fear and desire, hidden information and common knowledge brush up against each other and are mutually transformed.Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author and poet Matthew Stepanic discusses their poetry, halloween movie recommendations and lack of werewolf representation in media with Shelf Life Books.
About Queer Little Nightmares: The fiction and poetry of Queer Little Nightmares reimagines monsters old and new through a queer lens, subverting the horror gaze to celebrate ideas and identities canonically feared in monster lit. Throughout history, monsters have appeared in popular culture as stand-ins for the non-conforming, the marginalized of society. Pushed into the shadows as objects of fear, revulsion, and hostility, these characters have long conjured fascination and self-identification in the LGBTQ+ community, and over time, monsters have become queer icons.
In Queer Little Nightmares, creatures of myth and folklore seek belonging and intimate connection, cryptids challenge their outcast status, and classic movie monsters explore the experience of coming into queerness. The characters in these stories and poems - the Minotaur camouflaged in a crowd of cosplayers, a pubescent werewolf, a Hindu revenant waiting to reunite with her lover, a tender-hearted kaiju, a lagoon creature aching for the swimmers above him, a ghost of Pride past - relish their new sparkle in the spotlight. Pushing against tropes that have historically been used to demonize, the queer creators of this collection instead ask: What does it mean to be (and to love) a monster?
Contributors include Matthew Stepanic, Amber Dawn, David Demchuk, Hiromi Goto, jaye simpson, Eddy Boudel Tan, Matthew J. Trafford, and Kai Cheng Thom.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Trynne Delaney discusses their book the half-drowned, the gold standard and late-stage capitalism with Shelf Life Books.
About the half-drowned: is a vision of a future at the end of the world where what survives is the shapeshifting love of family both given and chosen. Drawing on the Afro-diasporic ancestral knowledge of water and the urgency of desire, Delaney builds a glittering, speculative world where community holds through grief, where we must choose to fend for ourselves while also caring for others. the half-drowned is a genre-bending novella that crafts a polyphony of voices to speak to and through our lives and dreams in order to reach for the unspoken and unsayable and make it heard.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author and music journalist Melody Lau discusses her new book, fandom and misogyny in the music industry with Shelf Life Books.
About Modern Heartthrobs: A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara.
Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of music’s most celebrated sister duos, from their start as Neil Young’s protégés to Canadian indie-rock purveyors and, making their riskiest transformation yet, into mainstream pop breakouts.
Coming up as grunge-loving musicians in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Tegan and Sara found themselves awkwardly pushed into categories that didn’t quite fit: a novelty twin sister folk act when they wanted to be taken seriously; pop when they wanted to be indie rock; and sellouts when they finally made their bid for mainstream success. As young, queer musicians who didn’t see anyone else like themselves growing up (in a time where Internet access hadn’t yet formed global spaces and communities for LGBTQ+ people), Tegan and Sara’s path to pop stardom was filled with familiar hurdles, but no clear instructions on how to navigate things like homophobic press, niche queer audiences that wanted to claim them, or sexism at every turn.
It’s a journey with ups and downs, but Tegan and Sara’s perseverance—alongside a music industry and journalism world that’s had to learn to confront its own biases—has helped create a musical world today that more readily accepts and embraces queer voices. Featuring continuous sonic transformations, Tegan and Sara’s story is essential to Canadian music history.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author and publisher Michael Hingston discusses his latest book, meeting royalty and bibliomania with Shelf Life Books.
About Try Not to Be Strange: tells the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves,
Michael Hingston details the friendships, feuds, and fantasies that fueled the creation of one of the oddest and most enduring micronations ever dreamt into being.
Part literary history, part travelogue, part quest narrative, this cautionary tale about what happens when bibliomania escapes the shelves and stacks is as charming as it is peculiar—and blurs the line between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that it may never be entirely restored.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author and artist Jessica Campbell discusses her new graphic novel Rave, her artist practice and Christian raves with Shelf Life Books.
About Rave: A queer coming-of-age story, complete with secret cigarettes, gross gym teachers, and a lot of church
It’s the early 2000s. Lauren is fifteen, soft-spoken, and ashamed of her body. She’s a devout member of an evangelical church, but when her Bible-thumping parents forbid Lauren to bring evolution textbooks home, she opts to study at her schoolmate Mariah’s house. Mariah has dial-up internet, an absentee mom, and a Wiccan altar—the perfect setting for a study session and sleepover to remember. That evening, Mariah gives Lauren a makeover and the two melt into each other, in what becomes Lauren’s first queer encounter. Afterward, a potent blend of Christian guilt and internalized homophobia causes Lauren to question the experience.
Author Jessica Campbell (XTC69) uses frankness and dark humor to articulate Lauren's burgeoning crisis of faith and sexuality. She captures teenage antics and banter with astute comedic style, simultaneously skewering bullies, a culture of slut-shaming, and the devastating impact of religious zealotry. Rave is an instant classic, a coming-of-age story about the secret spaces young women create and the wider social structures that fail them.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author John Elizabeth Stintzi discusses their new novel My Volcano, capitalism and the apocalypse with Shelf Life Books.
About My Volcano: The brilliant new novel from the fiercely talented author of Vanishing Monuments, shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
On the morning of June 2, 2016, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, a mass that - three weeks later - will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world.
For readers of Karen Tei Yamashita and Haruki Murakami and fans of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, My Volcano sets the mythic and absurd against the starkly realistic, attempting to portray what it feels like to live in a burning world stricken numb.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author and co-owner of Glass Bookshop Jason Purcell discusses their new poetry collection Swollening, what it's like running an independent bookstore (and so much more!)with Shelf Life Books.
About Swollening: A tender debut poetry collection that examines the queer, sick body as a reaction to an ill world and asks it how to move on toward hope.
Jason Purcell's debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings - homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex - to a body in revolt.
In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading their own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope? In Swollening, Purcell coughs up their own poetics of illness, their own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.
About Glass Bookshop: Glass Bookshop is an independent bookstore located in amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty 6, Edmonton, Alberta. They are open for browsing in The Garage space of Latitude 53 at 10242 106 Street in Edmonton, AB.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Author Stéfanie Clermont discusses The Music Game, recently translated from French to English, with Shelf Life Books.
About The Music Game: Not far away from here is a lake. You have to pay for access to its shores, but I know where there’s a hole in the fence. The water will be icy, but it will still be in a liquid state. That’s what I will do today. I will go through the hole in the fence and I’ll dive into the icy water. And then I’ll go home.
Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. From the grind of Montreal service jobs, to isolated French Ontario countryside childhoods, to the tenuous cooperation of Bay Area punk squats, the three young women navigate everyday losses and fears against the backdrop of a tumultuous twenty-first century. An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Our Halloween Special with author David Demchuk discussing his latest novel Red X and writer Frederick Blichert on Extra Salty, the new ECW pop classic on Jennifer’s Body.
About Red X: A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.
Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.
Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.
A bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.
About Extra Salty: Megan Fox, a diabolic indie rock band, toxic friendship, fluid sexuality, feminist reckoning, and a literal man-eater in the body of a high school cheerleader: Jennifer’s Body has it all.
What would be an easy sell in 2021 — women at the helm (screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Karyn Kusama), a bankable cast (Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried), and a deceptively complex skewering of gender politics — was a box office flop in 2009. In Extra Salty, Frederick Blichert flips the script on how Jennifer’s Body was labeled a failure to celebrate all that is scrumptious (as Jennifer would say) about it: supernatural horror, dark comedy, queer love, and a nuanced handling of gendered violence. The movie could have been to the aughts what Heathers was to the eighties, and it’s finally getting its due — whether in the flood of tenth-anniversary praise, the parade of Jennifer Halloween costumes, or Halsey’s nod to it (“Killing Boys”) on her platinum-selling album.
With insight into the genre’s cinematic tropes, our current cultural reckoning with misogyny, and an original interview with director Karyn Kusama, Extra Salty solidifies the status of Jennifer’s Body as a cult classic.
Music by Arielle McCuaig.
Writer Daphné B. and translator Alex Manley discuss their new work Made Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture Under Late Capitalism with Shelf Life Books.
A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.
The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter.
Intro music by Arielle McCuaig.