NOW

Dey lights up

Zoe Whittall

Reading Stunt is like arriving at a buffet where every dish on the table is unusual, made with oddly paired ingredients, but tastes delicious. For days afterwards you can't stop thinking about it, and plain food lacks a certain thrill.

Acclaimed Canadian playwright Claudia Dey's first novel is a celebration of the bizarre and a triumph of literary invention.

All hail Helwig

Susan G. Cole

Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig (Coach House), 266 pages.

Girls of winter

Susan G. Cole

Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley (Coach House), 204 pages, $19.95 paper.

Rating: NNNN

Hockey and poetry: not exactly your typical combo, but Cara Hedley breaks the mould by giving us just that in Twenty Miles.

It’s the story of Isabel Norris, daughter of a hockey legend who died before she was born.

[Note: this review is taken directly from NOW, and includes several errors, including a few essays that have been attributed to the wrong contributors.]

THE STATE OF THE ARTS: LIVING WITH CULTURE IN TORONTO edited by Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt (Coach House), 350 pages, $24.95 paper. Rating: NNNN

The second volume in the utopia series, which asks contributors to comment on T.O.

I didn't want to like Hazel, the whimsical narrator of King, a quirky first novel by Toronto's Tanya Chapman. Trying too hard to be an outsider, she's a little too romantic about poverty, and awkwardly naive.

But the more time I spent inside Hazel's quietly inventive mind, the more my affection grew.