“Other than Apicius, there were no other cookbooks authored in Europe until the 13th century when they began to appear in local languages. The popularity of cookbook writing began in the 10th century in Baghdad and then spread all over Europe. I’ve found no clues as to what Italians ate before Apicius’ Persian-influenced cookbook De Re Coquinaria.” Edward Henderson contributes his essay, Persian influence on Italian cuisine, written initially as a Graduate Liberal Studies term paper at Simon Fraser University.
“Memories and anecdotes from the past make their way into many of the essays. He writes about family, high school, friendships, travelling, loneliness, and most significantly his relationship with Litia, his wife. Two of the essays are about the family dog. The author, who lives in Vancouver, is witty, curious, nostalgic, analytical and overly solemn. He has a way of noticing odd details and meaningful moments that pass us by when we are with those closest to us.” Bill Paul reviews Decadence, by Richard Kelly Kemick (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2026) $24.95 / 9781771967136
“What is Sveva’s achievement? In visual terms, she has left a compelling body of work that is both challenging and uplifting. In psychological terms, she goes through a ‘dark night of the soul’ and achieves what was, for her, a state of enlightenment. She uses all of her knowledge of commentators on the human condition throughout the ages as signs and guide posts throughout her journey. She also draws on her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and, on occasion, paints an homage to someone who she found particularly inspiring.” Adriana A. Davies contributes the essay Sveva Caetani: From Old to New World and Back
“This expertly curated and well-composed book intends to rectify Wakayama’s relative obscurity. He is both the subject of Enemy Alien and, to a large extent, its author.” Philip Huynh reviews Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama, by Paul Wong (ed.) (Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2025) $40 / 9781773272801
“The momentary victory didn’t seem complete, though, as my marble season was forever marred. I couldn’t play my winnings without some kid declaring that any marble with defining features was once theirs and trying to lay claim.” Marcella Kyrein explores the game of marbles battlefield during her Prince George elementary school years in her essay Marbles and the Art of War.
“…almost everything about this book is careful, measured, and studied. Handling a figure who, as the subtitle suggests, has been subject to speculation and hearsay—but also adulation and condemnation—this book is almost entirely based on careful screening of evidence and extensive documentation.” Theo Dombrowski reviews Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies, by Collette Colligan and Gregory Mackie (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025) $90 / 9781487541415
“I did however ask myself: Why have things degenerated so markedly from the zenith of lounge singing? We’ve learned to disdain crooners, haven’t we? Is it because Bill Murray’s Nick Winters (or ‘fill in the blank’) and others have tapped into crooning as a vein of satire, a motherlode of spoof? This comedic riffing can’t have been solely responsible for their demise, could it? Surely not. No, there had to be better reasons than that to explain this phenomena especially when viewed against the almost unimaginable backdrop of Bublé’s commercial success.” Graham Ware contributes the essay When the crooner was King: The rise & fall of an old musical aristocracy.
“Our daily speech also overflows with Latin prefixes and suffixes, such as circum-, con-, contra-, e- or ex-, extra-, inter-, intra-, multi-, ob-, pre-, post-, sub-, super-, trans-, and ultra-. But we don’t need to be told what each of these prefixes means: we have acquired them subconsciously, by osmosis to use a Greek term, through a host of words such as transport, pre-natal, or supermarket.” Christopher Levenson contributes a Word in Your Ear essay to The British Columbia Review: Small Latin and Less Greek
“Conrad Kain is a longer poem, much like David, but unlike the fictional David, Conrad Kain is biography turned into succinct and compact poetry. It is Birney at his alliterative and alluring best, and Kain is held high as the model and icon of the authentic Canadian mountain man.” Ron Dart takes a look back at the poem Conrad Kain, by Earle Birney.
“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’
“Food is never merely sustenance; it is narrative layered with memory and meaning. In October 2025, I travelled to Rome and Oxford as part of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, culminating in a project that combined two themes: Italy in the ancient and modern imagination (with a focus on food history) and life writing (an exploration of how lives are represented across time, genre, and media). I deepened my understanding of the links between food writing, memory, and culture by studying the works of three contemporary authors. Ada Boni (1881-1973), codified Italian home cooking and idealized domesticity during Mussolini’s era; Elizabeth David (1913-1992), a wry aristocrat who sought to liberate postwar Britain from culinary blandness by introducing Mediterranean sensuality; and Patience Gray (1917-2005), an eccentric British artist who followed a vein of marble through Italy with her sculptor partner, documenting rural foodways for posterity. Melanie Monk presents her essay Minestrone and Women’s Lives: A Culinary Palimpsest of Lives Written, Tasted, Remembered.
In “Poets’ Pastime Paradise,” an “essay in play format about poetry” that’s set in a cemetery at midnight, author Sarah Freel corrals modernist poets, an American rapper, and a poetess named Reiko to versify while they debate over literary politics.
“Not one single gravestone stands to mark my family. It is as though they didn’t exist.” —In “The Blood in the Stone” Deborah Lane excavates family history and imagines life as it might have been.
Probing account of representational ethics “is elucidating without ever being didactic and genuinely enjoyable to read,” yet prompts “more hope than outrage.”—Jessica Poon reviews Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism, by Christopher Cheung (Vancouver: UBC Press/Purich Books, 2024) $24.95 / 9780774881111
An “honourable and compassionate compendium of heartfelt statements from people who were willing to go to jail for their beliefs.” Sadly, it’s “over-long and at times tediously repetitive” too. —Ron Verzuh reviews Standing on High Ground: Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain, edited by Rosemary Cornell, Adrienne Drobnies, and Tim Bray (Toronto: Between the Lines Books, 2024) $29.95 / 9781771136631
Essay collection relates the “great pleasure of strolling in great cities” and offers an appealing and illuminating “window into a wider world.” —Bill Paul reviews The Coincidence Problem: Selected Dispatches 1999-2022, by Stephen Osborne (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024) $24.95 / 9781551529653
Terrific essay collection covers agri-business, beans on toast, a century-old family recipe for trifle, gender politics, potatoes, and a whole lot more.
—Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence, by Andrea Bennett (Toronto: ECW Press, 2024) $24.95 / 9781770411
Warland is convinced that as writers, “we must learn to live with profound vulnerability.” In doing this, we are filling in the lack of stories that others have been too afraid to tell. We become more resilient in ourselves as we learn from ourselves—our fears and identities—and we can start to tell authentic narratives that our world, culturally and socially, so desperately needs.” —Natalie Virginia Lang reviews Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing, by Betsy Warland (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2023) $24.95 / 9781770867031
By turns funny and incisive, a debut essayist is a connoisseur of everyday absurdities. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Laser Quit Smoking Massage: Essays, by Cole Nowicki (Edmonton: Newest Press, 2024) $21.95 / 9781774390917
