River Street Writing

06/06/2026

ICYMI: Fully-Booked reviewer Shirin E. wrote an excellent review of Alison Gadsby’s electrifying and titillatingly unsettling short stories, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026).

Shirin, you had us at “twisted version of Chicken Soup For The Soul.”

Read the full review:

https://fully-booked.ca/reviews/breathing-is-how-some-people-stay-alive-review/

Thank you to Shirin and Fully-Booked for uplifting amazing Canadian published literature!

“Alison Gadsby’s short story anthology Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive takes readers on a wild, twisty, harrowing, and agonizing trip into the minds of some of the loneliest characters I have ever read.

The deep-dive into their trauma-filled psyches was not one I was prepared for, and I was left wondering where the fine line between horror and reality lies in the world around us. This anthology is comprehensive of almost every genre, exploring the most difficult underbelly of what it means to be human, but it feels more like a twisted version of Chicken Soup For The Soul.”
—Shirin E.

📖: .jay.gee

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06/05/2026

Shout out to the marvellous Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, pictured here at a recent event in Winnipeg, where she read from her beautifully distilled book, Wound Archive, which was just released with The Porcupine’s Quill.

You can grab a copy of Wound Archive from wherever books are bought or borrowed.

Learn more: https://ghp-pql.com/products/wound-archive

“So much about infirmity is waiting: like the spaces between atoms, oceans between landmasses, interregna between phenomena, or the punctuations of ‘the body’s grammar.’ The lyrics of Anna Veprinska’s Wound Archive are all the more consequential for having cracked the disciplines of waiting, and the code of white space. The visual-sensory language of these poems rejects the urge to fill all of the silence, allowing the spare text to breathe as the speaker, and reader, find a new rhythm beyond rupture.”

— Tolu Oloruntoba, author of The Junta of Happenstance

📸: Ariel Gordon

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06/05/2026

Delighted to see Not All Dragons by David Ly on this excellent list of Pride Month reads! Thank you, All Lit Up!

with: Wolsak & Wynn Publishing Ltd

We collected 8 new and newish books by LGBTQ+ authors for Pride Month. From poetry to literary fiction to memoir to drama to fantasy, there is something here for everyone.

https://alllitup.ca/8-fabulous-books-for-pride-month-2026/

06/05/2026

It was a lovely evening at Flying Books in Toronto hearing Elina Penner talk with Sherri Klassen about the new translation of her acclaimed novel, Nightberries, published by Canadian Mennonite University and translated from German by Bradley Schmidt.

You can grab a copy of Nightberries [Nachtbeeren] wherever books are bought or borrowed.🫐

https://www.cmu.ca/cmu-press

More about Nightberries:

Where is your husband?

Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. Or are memories like nightberries? Nightberries taste good, with sugar, when ripe. But sometimes nightberries are dangerous, and you need to understand when that transformation happens. A tense situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.
Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and moved to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the US, she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful personal essayist and blogger. Nachtbeeren was her debut novel, in 2022. In 2025, her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen, will be published in Germany.

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Photos courtesy of River Street’s amazing Selena Mercuri!

06/04/2026

Beloved author John Degen joins us to talk about setting in his acclaimed mystery novel, Seldom Seen Road—just released with Northern Ontario’s Latitude 46 Publishing. This book is the first in Degen’s Burnt River series of murder mysteries featuring the Roth family detective trio.

You can pick up this read wherever books are bought or borrowed!

More about Seldom Seen Road:

When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggest it was murder. Mark Roth is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the case. He has the least solid claim on the art of solving murders, but he is driven by the insistent busybody nature of the recently retired. Profoundly hard-of-hearing after a career in musical performance, and equally disappointed with finding himself alone in his world after the death of his beloved wife, Mark stubbornly and clumsily puts himself in harm’s way to draw out the truth. Constable Jeremy Roth, Mark’s long-lost cousin, is the muscle of the group, patrolling the northern highways for the local police detachment and investigating on the ground. Mark’s beloved daughter, Stephanie, building her name as a criminologist at the university in Thunder Bay, gets to the details of the matter using her academic credentials and her innate puzzle-solving instincts.

Who dumped Robichaud into the frigid spring run-off? Is there a connection between his death and both the largest uranium refinery in the world and the local small-time pot trade? How do Robichaud’s wife, Kim Keranen, daughter Algoma, local real estate developer Gillian Larch, and her pot-head son Bobby fit into the puzzle? And who is The Albanian? Mark ignores all official advice and his own precarious health as he digs deep into the secrets of his new town. But the town is looking back at him—observing, plotting—and it may prove more than a match for Mark’s loved ones, and deadly to him.

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