Letter From Montreal: La Misérable

Chandler Levack September 15, 2011 “You came to Montreal for what? Your own pleasure?” asks the nurse in strangled English.

La Miserable

Illustration by Pascal Girard.

A few months ago, I moved to Montreal because Toronto was beginning to feel like a plastic bag tied tightly across my throat. My sublet is a palatial two-bedroom on Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain, just up the street from Wilensky’s, an inexplicable sandwich shop that keeps drug-front hours. Our gas stove is an antique holdover from the early 1900s; you have to light it with a match. My landlady reserves the upstairs flat solely for her eight cats, and visits sporadically to feed them and lecture me about leaving the windows open when it …

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Tenth Anniversary: Spring

ISSUE 43 Tenth Anniversary: Spring 2012

online content:

also in this issue:

  • Face the Music

    by Tim Falconer How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness.
  • The Big Job

    by Deni Y. Béchard As a teenager, Deni Y. Béchard went to Vancouver to live with his father, an ex-con with a penchant for telling tall tales. He met a man desperate to forget the past.
  • The Homesickness of Astronauts

    by Johanna Skibsrud "She felt a great sadness. She would remember next to nothing of this, even soon."
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