The raw language, powerful and harsh in its unadorned simplicity, matches the desolate landscape, both rural and urban, and the severeness of life for two working class brothers in Willy Vlautin’s novel The Motel Life. Deep loyalty, and a promise made as teenagers to their dying mother to stick together, make Frank and Jerry Lee Flannigan inseparable, as they live in…
Author: Christopher Adam
On May 4th, I took my passport, a coffee and a small piece of Ontario over to New York’s North Country, arriving in Cape Vincent to give a reading from my anthology of literary fiction, I Have Demons. What an engaged and welcoming group of local poets, writers and readers I found in this little village along the Saint Lawrence…
During a period of intense anti-Catholic persecution, a nameless priest wanders through Mexico as a fugitive, trying to evade authorities that have placed a 700 peso bounty on his head. Stemming from pride, mortification and a sense of pastoral mission, the destitute priest hears confessions, anoints the sick and celebrates Mass in the communities he visits. But is father bringing…
I stumbled upon a curious little print publication this Wednesday at lunch. I sought a Cubano sandwich at The Working Title Café in the hall of what used to be All Saints Sandy Hill Anglican Church and ended up taking home an unpretentious, yet delightful zine of analog black and white photography by Ottawa area photographers. The inaugural issue of Do…
Terse, aloof, cold, almost completely devoid of intimacy–this is how I would describe much of the dialogue in British novelist David Storey’s 1972 book Pasmore. The narrative, heavy on clipped dialogue, explores the mental unraveling of the 30 year old protagonist. Colin Pasmore is a university lecturer living and working in the London boroughs of Camden and Islington. He has…
From seedy hotel rooms, grimy pool halls, the brutality of reform school in the 1950’s, county jail and ultimately San Quentin prison, Hard Rain Falling is a coming-of-age story wrapped up in the existential crisis and dehumanization of protagonist Jack Levitt. It also explores class conflict, how class plays a role in criminal justice in the United States, it touches…
Father Ferenc Deák (or Deák atya, in Hungarian) died yesterday. He served Our Lady of Hungary Parish in Montreal from 1975 to 2007 and played a truly formative role in the lives of those of us who grew up in the eighties and nineties. He baptised me in 1981, I had my first communion with him in 1988 and then…
Encore Books and Records proved to be one of the best bookstores I have visited in a long time. Located at the corner of Sherbrooke West and Harvard in Montreal, a mere fifteen minute walk from our family home in the city’s NDG neighbourhood, I arrived with a completely random request. I was looking for Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of…
When I arrived to my mother’s house in Montreal Friday evening, where I am spending the weekend, I found this thoughtful letter from theologian and United Church of Canada minister Douglas John Hall on my recently published book I Have Demons… As my book explores the nature of the Divine’s presence in our world and in the lives of my…
We know from the revelations of the past nearly two decades that some of the men who joined the Roman Catholic priesthood were socially and emotionally maladjusted, and used their position of authority to abuse the most vulnerable in their community. There are also today a number of priests, sometimes younger ones, who not only subscribe privately to the most…