The New Quarterly

The window in my office overlooks a red maple. The seedling was given to me by a neighbour in Ontario after the death of my first husband in 1993. My parents planted the seedling in their back yard, expecting it to grow into a shrub (Edmonton winters are not kind to maples). Instead, it’s a 30-foot tree whose leaves turns yellow and rusty orange each fall. The tree reminds me to defy expectations. I spend weekday mornings from 9-12 at my desk, unless I’m teaching or working as a mentor.

Calling It Back to Me by Laurie D. Graham is an unsettling reminder, an everywoman’s quest, to find and to understand the women of her lineage, their lost lives, their hopes, their names. Heirlooms are not enough: “a darning mushroom, / a tin of teaspoons. // Still the urge is for / story” (“Calling It Back to Me”, 3).

I’m re-reading Adania Shibli’s seminal masterpiece Minor Detail. The first time I picked it up, I wanted to read it because, at the time, I had only read stories about Palestinians living in the diaspora. As a diaspora Palestinian myself, I related to many of them, but part of me knew that my identity as a Palestinian reader and a Palestinian writer would never come close to completion without journeying through the literary world of my homeland.

A student of English literature by instinct and by trade, there is often a great deal of overlap between what I read for pleasure and what I read for my research. Because I work in contemporary British literature, I find my tastes in fiction run in that direction, too, and so when it comes time to pick something to read, I usually first look across the Atlantic. There is an enduring quality to British fiction that does not exist in any other part of the world.

The New Quarterly is based in Waterloo, Ontario, on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Neutral Peoples. We acknowledge that this land is part of the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River as part of the Haldimand Proclamation of 1784. As a literary magazine devoted to storytelling, we recognize that stories have long been a way of knowing, preserving, and sharing in Indigenous cultures.

When I was a high school creative writing teacher, my students’ work was mostly fantasy and speculative fiction with a smattering of angsty soul-searching poetry, but I don’t remember writing any of that sort of thing when I began to write in earnest. Truth be told, I always fancied myself a children’s writer because I had a vivid imagination even as a child, leading to, or stemming from, equally unsettling dreams about losing my way or not being adequate to a challenge.

Some time last fall, my officemate-turned-movie-companion-turned-dear-friend Marco and I were meeting at the Kanata Landmark for a matinee. We see a lot of movies, and so I can’t remember which it was, but I arrived early and wound up book browsing in a Value Village. I had no luck in the metal shelves of trade paperback fiction, but I found the 2008 BASS anthology incorrectly categorized in nonfiction.

In celebration of Pride Month, this reading list highlights books by queer authors published in 2025 and 2026 across fiction, poetry, memoir, graphic novels, and speculative writing. These works explore a wide range of experiences and themes, including identity, family, disability, migration, love, grief, friendship, survival, and belonging.

I’ve just finished Nobel-laureate Annie Ernaux’s memoir The Years, translated from the French by Canadian Alison L. Strayer. Reading it is something like going on a road trip with the author. You’re sitting in the car together, and she’s at the wheel.

I’m re-reading Red Calvary by Isaac Babel. This book of more than 30 loosely linked stories was rooted in Babel’s experiences serving with the First Calvary of the Soviet Red Army, as it invaded and then retreated from Poland in 1920. Written a century before Russia’s invasion and ongoing occupation of eastern Ukraine, these stories’ vivid depictions of the brutality of war don’t seem a bit dated, despite the advances in weaponry between Babel’s time and ours.