Recommended Reading Lists

“Connor Kerr, he’s the best. Prairie Edge should do it. We’ve had the conversation in this country about the idea of land back, right? The idea of, what does it look like for land to be returned to Indigenous people. Well, what Connor is doing is playing this out a little bit through Edmonton. What if buffalo were back and they were going through dog parks in Edmonton?” 

“A short story writer whose book I just read is Jess Gibson’s “The Good Eye.” The work is really amusing. You sort of go into darkness without realizing this is where the car is going. It’s a great ride  — it’s loo-dee-doo and then hell! 

Canadian writing is hugely influential on my imagination because I’m an immigrant. Naturally Norman Levine’s I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well was super interesting. The Ottawa that he had lived through was vivid in his stories. It was the same with Margaret Laurence which to me was like super helpful because I felt alien. But those books made me feel less alien because they map out a terrain and you realize people have been here and they have felt these things and that, and I could work with that.” 

“The book that I think everyone should read is called The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen. This will tell you about the world that people leave behind to come to Canada and what that leaving behind means for their lives and their interactions with people.” 

“A teacher who knew my predisposition to the Victorian novel sent me Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. Here was a living Dickensian. Here was a living Victorian. From that moment on, I became a devoted Robertson Davies reader. 

There have been a couple of much younger, newer Canadian writers whom I have enthusiastically endorsed. Nazanine Hozar, who wrote that wonderful novel Aria about the Iranian Revolution, and Kevin Hardcastle’s “Debris”, the MMA novel In the Cage, and County Road Six. Kevin is a is an old-fashioned storyteller of a very familiar and narrative kind to me.” 

“A Canadian book that I would assign to every high school English class or any class, is The Valley of the Birdtail. This book is a revelation. It has hard truths and it has such hope. 

There’s a poet whom I met at a literary festival, Jess Housty. I love her book Crushed Wild Mint. I love her poetry. 

So there’s a very slim volume which I return to and I’ve returned to since I was in my 20s. I just felt like, here’s somebody who gets it, who gets what writers are trying to do. And it is The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye.”

“There was that great heyday with Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, people who were writing books that were really audacious and really entertaining. Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy. I will drone on about to anybody who lets me talk long enough.”

“The book that, like, cracked my brain open was Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. It is a retelling of a Hercules myth. It’s a queer love story. And I would kill to have been the one to write it.” 

“I think one of the very most important Canadian books in our cannon is The Handmaid’s Tale. Now, this is a book that was published in 1985 and it remains as relevant when it was published as it is today. In fact, I think more so today. It is more cautionary and more prescient. 

There is a book that I’m really so excited for Canadians to read and it is called Wild People Quiet by Tara Gereaux. This is a novel about belonging, about identity, filial belonging, and what that means as well, and I think readers are really going to respond to this book.”

“How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti remains a classic with us. It asks a good question that most of us try to answer. She thought of Flaubert’s rules when she was writing it and everything he said about having specific, detailed emotions, she was determined to break it. And yet you would think that would mean that she wrote a sort of general pat. But no, it’s, it’s very personal and quite riveting.” 

“A Complicated Kindness and All my Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, and Island: The Collected Stories by Alistair Macleod.” 

“Saeed Teebi’s writing, the short story collection Her First Palestinian and his new book You Will Not Kill Our Imagination. When the world is bleak on so many fronts, writers are uniquely positioned to imagine and articulate a better, more kind and more just world. I think Saeed’s work really does that and I would encourage everyone going to pick those up.”

“The Canadian book that probably had the most influence on me as a writer is Indian School Days by Basil Johnston. Basil was a Anishinaabe writer and so this book is about his time in residential school. And it’s the first book, maybe the only book that I’ve read that’s literally about the experience that kids had at the schools my family attended. You know, when I look through these names — Noganosh, Manitouwabing — these are family names that I know, I have an uncle, Art Solomon — there’s a Solomon in here. It’s one of those things where it connected me to my family and my community in a way that no other Canadian book did, no other book I’ve read. So this book is like a treasure to me.”