By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the title of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's classic hymn to love, which novelist Angela Carter once described as being "like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning.? Later, Carter wrote privately to a friend, saying that she would hate any daughter of hers to have to write such a novel, adding, "By Grand Central Station I Tore Off his Balls would be more like it, I should hope.? And now along comes Montreal novelist Martine Delvaux with The Last Bullet Is for You. This stream-of-consciousness novel takes the form a love letter, but it is the last one. One last letter filled as much with the memory of love as the desire for revenge. Love is war, wrote Ovid, and this book is a battleground. Writing is both an act of passion and the means to end it once and for all. Writing is the last bullet, shooting through the love story and into what is left of the lover: a ghost, a fiction. And maybe that's what he was from the start.

Novelist Martine Delvaux was born in Quebec City and brought up in a francophone village in Ontario. She is the author of over a dozen novels and non-fiction essays and is very popular in French-speaking media as a speaker and pundit. Her first book in English, Bitter Rose was published by LLP to critical acclaim in 2015. This was followed by The Last Bullet is For You (LLP, 2016), Nan Goldin The Warrior Medusa (LLP, 2017), and White Out (LLP, 2018). Delvaux studied in the United States, taught in England, and now lives in Montreal, where she teaches women's studies at Université du Québec à Montréal.

David Homel was born in Chicago in 1952 and left that city in 1970 for Paris, living in Europe the next few years on odd jobs and odder couches. He has published eight novels, from Electrical Storms in 1988 to The Teardown, which won the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2019. He has also written young adult fiction with Marie-Louise Gay, directed documentary films, worked in TV production, been a literary translator, journalist, and creative writing teacher. He has translated four books for Linda Leith Publishing: Bitter Roase (2015), (2016), Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa (2017) and Taximan (2018). Lunging into the Underbrush is his first book of non-fiction. He lives in Montreal.

It's already passé to ask if parity is important for today's Canada. What's needed now is to ask how we can make sure more women run for office and that they're well-represented in government. There are no easy answers to this, but it's clear that half-measures just won't do. Pascale Navarro argues that quotas are essential for women to achieve parity with men in politics. Over a hundred other nations worldwide have already established parity as a goal. What are we waiting for?

Montreal journalist and columnist Pascale Navarro is a frequent contributor to major newspapers and magazines as well as to radio and television broadcasts. Winner of the Women of Merit prize for Communications in 2007, she is the author of several feminist essays on contemporary social and political issues. Women and Power is the first of her books to appear in English.

Abdallah's encounter with the military governor on the eve of his departure for America opens this collection of stories, and Khalil al-Ibrahami's moving search for his lost fiancée in Jerusalem closes the collection. In between, Issa J. Boullata's stories show what it's like to be an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt making a new life as an immigrant in Canada or the United States. This is what it is, to be displaced. This is what it is to leave your home and start over in a new country.

Born in Jerusalem, Issa J. Boullata was a Palestinian writer, scholar, and translator who taught Arabic studies at Hartford Seminary, Connecticut, before moving to Montreal, where he taught graduate courses in Arabic literature, Modern Arab Thought, and Qur'anic Studies at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. The author of several books on Arabic literature and on the Qur'an, he was a noted translator of Arabic literature and twice won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He died in 2019 at the age of 90.