Emily Macrae

Miranda Schreiber

Shelf Life Books discusses our July Book of the Month: Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber. Iris and the Dead is a haunting exploration of love and desire, disability and madness, trauma and recovery. Weaving personal memory with magic realism and folklore, Iris and the Dead asks: What if you could look back and tell someone exactly how they changed the course of your life? For our narrator, that someone is Iris, the counsellor with whom she developed an unusual, almost violent bond. There are things she needs to tell Iris: some that she hid during the brief time they knew each other, and some that she has learned since. She was missing her mind the autumn they spent together and has since regained it. Iris and the Dead unfurls the hidden power dynamics of abuse, offering a beguiling inquiry into intergenerational trauma, moral ambiguity, and queer identity. Music by Arielle McCuaig.

Joni Murphy

Shelf Life Books discusses our April Book of the Month: Barbara by Joni Murphy. From the author of Double Teenage and Talking Animals comes an intimate portrait of a woman losing and finding her identity through the business and art of moviemaking. Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward. She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire's victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love. An intense, layered distillation of a zeitgeist, Murphy's latest novel whispers tales of independent cinema and grimy show business, militarism and physics, bomb making and image consumption. It is a study of the mirroring and splitting between old and new worlds, inner sensations, and outward performance. Ultimately, Barbara unspools a delicate yet propulsive tale of a woman grasping for a meaningful life amid the reflective, broken shards of the long 20th century. Music by Arielle McCuaig.

Emily Macrae

Shelf Life Books discusses our November Book of the Month: Living Disability, with book editor Emily Macrae. How can we build more accessible cities? Living Disability brings together vibrant perspectives on disability justice and urban systems. From sidewalks to the climate crisis, Living Disability brings together the vibrant perspectives of thirty-five disabled writers. They explore disability justice, analyze urban systems, and propose more equitable approaches to city building. Essays and interviews push the conversation about accessibility beyond policy papers and compliance checklists to show how disabled people are already creating more inclusive spaces in cities of all sizes. Living Disability is universal in scope but intimate and local in focus, grounded in personal struggles and celebrations. Music by Arielle McCuaig.

Kevin Stebner

Author Kevin Stebner discusses typography, his artistic practice and John Wyndham with Shelf Life Books. Typography broken down into its most basic (and beautiful) forms to reveal the inherent voice within each shape. Inherent is a collection of concrete poems that uses poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we’re used to taking for granted. Produced by physically scraping each letter onto the page using Letraset sheets—a process of tangible transference that requires irrevocable choice—this is a poetry of format that plays with aspects of form and design to demonstrate each typeface’s individual poetic stance. Sitting somewhere between Hanjorg Mayer’s Futura and Johanna Drucker’s concrete poetics, with a hint of punk DIY zine culture and a heavy study of typographic graphic design, Inherent moves with palindromic rotational symmetry, arrays of potential landscapes, and alien languages where the Roman alphabet goes supernova into brilliant new forms. Music by Arielle McCuaig.

Walter Scott

Author Walter Scott discusses the Wendy Series, art school and corporate sponsorships with Shelf Life Books. The Wendy Award: Everybody’s favorite party girl Wendy is so back. When Wendy is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art Prize alongside her friend Winona, all of her millennial dreams seem to be coming true. She lives a post-pandemic, polyamorous fine artist’s lifestyle in the big city and basks in the glory of national attention with the success of her popular comic strip, “Wanda." But not even achieving bona fide art star fame can hide the truth: a never-ending struggle with imposter syndrome. After she cracks in an online interview and gets dragged in the comments section, she heads straight to a local watering hole to drown her sorrows. Several lines of coke, too many drinks, and one all night rager with fans later, Wendy is ready to curse Gen Z and confront her addictions. All the while, she and Winona drift apart as a younger Indigenous artist wedges herself between them. Will Wendy’s commitment to change wind up short-lived? The Wendy Award incisively skewers the art world with its corporate overlords, performative activism, generational wealth, and weaponized therapy speak. A showcase of Walter Scott’s deft wit and social commentary, The Wendy Award asks the hard questions, like Do they still give awards to men? Should we be grateful for the exposure? And what exactly is Big Auntie Energy? Music by Arielle McCuaig.