Quill & Quire

The Edible City addresses the past, present and future of food in Toronto. Like its predecessors – uTOpia, GreenTOpia and HTO – the book is a mix of political advocacy, social history and reportage.

Your basic teen-attitude story in first person, present tense is now tediously commonplace. Nevertheless, there are occasional examples in which a sharp wit, a bitingly ironic voice, sheer quirkiness and Edmonton – yes, Edmonton – carry the day. The Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1 to 19, the debut novel from Jocelyn Brown, is one of them.

Despite my abiding conviction that a moratorium should be placed on poems about Glenn Gould (whose frequent appearance in Canadian poetry has made him into something of a verse cliché), I feel bound to admit that Jeramy Dodds imbues the clutch of Gould poems in his first collection with the same idiosyncratic brilliance that the famed concert pianist injected into his own art.

What would Lolita have been like if Nabokov had imagined a child obsessively, incestuously in love with a grown man, a man as capricious and oblivious as a little girl? What is Humbert Humbert and Lolita's roles had been reversed? The result would be Stunt, playwright Claudia Dey's first novel. Prefaced by a quote from Lolita, Dey's book begins as a Nabokovian delight, and Dey sustains this high level of writing throughout. The novel has lurking beauty, with strange pathways and a population of absurd characters.

At her best, Lang's disjunctive syntax and taut, oblique episodes can be hauntingly moving. But she tends to overdo the po-mo alienation; some of the best passages in the book come when she gives her sentences and lines a bit more room to breathe. The Work of Days could be fairly classified as confessional, but there is nothing self-indulgent in the collection – unless you count its unremitting, monochromatic seriousness.

Never mix business with pleasure. That's the moral of Jessica Westhead's new office novel Pulpy and Midge, whose titular couple strives to maintain a healthy balance of work and home life. Of course, balance can be heard to come by in a story about wife-swapping with the boss.

Pulpy is a pushover worker bee in an anonymous office, while Midge is his adorable, candle-obsessed wife. Together they present a sweet and sticky ideal of marital fidelity.

In fiction, homage is a tricky undertaking. Should an author indulge readers of the original, or satisfy those as yet unfamiliar? In The Girls Who Saw Everything, a resetting of The Epic of Gilgamesh in contemporary Montreal, Sean Dixon resoundingly chooses the former.

This is underlined by Dixon's creation of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club, a crew of readers who deepen their understanding of literary works by acting them out.

Thoughtful, inspired, inclusive, careful to avoid deadly academicism as well as showoffy wackiness, and above all infused with a kind of I’ll-be-in-your-band-and-you-can-be-in-mine boho largeness of spirit, this second volume of musings on Toronto (after 2005’s uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto) focuses explicitly on the city’s arts scene and is part of the culture it celebrates.