“Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” So begins Lorna Goodison’s astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as “uncompromising as an old testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder.”

For the last two decades, Goodison has translated and reimagined Dante’s cantos, setting the original poem into her native Jamaica and employing Jamaican expressions and sayings. In doing so, she has attempted to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century—endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power. In recreating the journey through the “unpaved and rocky road” of Dante’s Hell for a contemporary audience, Goodison has given us a dazzling and profound new narrative of spiritual yearning for our era.

There are parades and then there is Montreal’s St. Patrick’s parade, which has marched through the streets of the city and into Canadian history for 200 years. The street carnival has outlived the Patriote Rebellion of 1837, Fenian infiltration, Orange animosity, strained relationships among Roman Catholic priests who wanted it cancelled, two world wars, two Quebec independence referendums, and two centuries of howling March winds and chilling sub zero temperatures.

With One Long Line of Marvel veteran journalist Alan Hustak has dug up untold nuggets about the parade and nested them with historical certainty and an imaginative flourish in the setting of a Montreal that he knows. Although the author is not a son of Erin, he is considered an honorary Irishman and in 2006 walked the parade route as Chief Reviewing Officer. With this book he continues to honour Montreal’s Irish community by celebrating its personalities and by telling its stories. One Long Line of Marvel enlightens, entertains, amuses and perhaps above all superbly chronicles a long and worthwhile tradition in Montreal’s history.

A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.

Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black queer and trans voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together they illustrate how entire communities, despite being exploited in the name of prosperity, resist and enact their own freedom. New Stockholm, a settler colonial metropolis like any other, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the facade of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of hot young artiste Zeynab’s government-funded experimental documentary. Her lens trails into the city’s depths instead, to the polluted and overlooked district of Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this sprawling underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on activist Doudou Laguerre, as he attempts to sabotage an insidious construction project.

Preface by Mary K. MacLeod

Montreal Standard Time is drawn from Mavis Gallant’s columns in The Montreal Standard during her six-year tenure at the newspaper, beginning in 1944, when she was 22. Gallant reported on an extraordinary range of subjects: labour issues, mining, existentialism, immigration, comedy, mercy killings, feminism, and suffrage. Her journalism is peopled by a rich cast of characters: writers, painters, politicians, criminals, street kids, war brides, refugees, and unwed mothers. Eighty years after they first saw the light, the columns remain as fresh as ever.

Written with a precision, flair, and wit that would become her trademark, Montreal Standard Time is journalism of the first order. Taken together, the pieces create a remarkable portrait of Montreal in the eventful years during and after WW2, and of a young woman, fiercely independent and politically active, making her way through it. The book also corrects a long-standing gap in the Gallant oeuvre. Her celebrated reporting on the student riots in Paris in 1968 and on the Gabrielle Russier case are brilliant examples of her in-depth journalism. But that, and her insightful reviews and occasional pieces, have already been collected. Her earliest reporting from The Montreal Standard, however, has never circulated or appeared in book form.

Edited by Neil Besner, Marta Dvorak, and Bill Richardson, with a preface by Mary K. MacLeod, Montreal Standard Time is indispensable not only for the light it throws on Gallant’s time and place, but in how it reveals a major writer coming into her powers.