Sometimes being out of control can be a good thing. That’s the feeling you get reading Lynn Crosbie’s memoir. The poet, provocateur and pop culture critic has packed well over 100 flash stories, episodes and observations into a book weighted with paradox.

This is a book about depression. Well, actually it’s a book about the conflict between a person suffering from depression and the employer who fired her for a variety of causes, many of which can be read as euphemisms for malingering.

Giller winner Linden MacIntyre’s new book, the third in his Cape Breton trilogy, is less about why men lie than about the fact that they do – all the time.

Do you chuckle at those email messages from Nigeria about all the dough you can make if you transfer just the smallest sum? You won’t be laughing after you read 419.

If you’re curious about what demons plagued Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle author Kurt Vonnegut, Charles J. Shields’s bio of the mercurial and troubled writer is required reading.

There’s a lot of promise in this debut novel about a spirited girl growing up in Nigeria. Too bad the story feels like it’s been rushed to the finish line.

You’d think that Tamara Faith Berger’s preoccupation with sexually precocious teens would be getting a bit old by now. But she works it so well that you can almost forgive her for harping on her familiar themes.

He does love his stock characters, but Robert Hough also tells a great story.

As a thinker, lesbian activist Sarah Schulman runs the gamut from exhilarating to irritating. But that’s what makes her so interesting.

This short-lister for the Charles Taylor Prize is notable less for its content than for the questions it raises. Lately, memoir is leaking into fiction, and this one makes me wonder why the writer didn’t go all the way.

Kim Thuy’s novel stays true to its title, Ru, the Vietnamese word for “lullaby” and the French word for “stream.” The book flows with images – and gently, even though those images evoke painful hardship.

Nathan Englander has nerve, or “chutzpah,” the Jewish word for that quality of daring to do or say things guaranteed to provoke. Englander’s stories push the envelope in ways that will make you giddy.

Whenever a new novel causes a sensation, I’m always anxious to crack its spine. Now, having read American Dervish, I have to wonder, why this book? Why now?

In Dinaw Mengestu’s How To Read The Air, all the characters have troubled pasts that have made them emotional shells.

Even if you’re not a fan of books about the web, you’ll see the value of media guru Jeff Jarvis’s Public Parts In very clear and accessible language,  he argues that our obsession with privacy squanders opportunities to make connections in the connected world.

Chad Harbach’s debut novel has landed on many year-end best lists, including the New York Times Book Review, no less, and – be still, my heart – it has a baseball theme. So how could I resist?

Art is a valuable commodity – no surprise there. What’s astonishing is how much gets stolen and how little law enforcement agencies can do about it.

You’ve never read a story like The Free World, which is why this novel matters deeply – and, presumably, why it landed on this year’s Giller short list.