Cover of Five Manifestos for a beautiful World. The cover is a midtone blue, with two off-set black half-circles on it. The title and authors are written in white text on the black shapes.

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World by Phoebe Bosewell, Saidiya Hartman,  Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, and Cristina Rivera Garza, with an introduction by Christina Sharpe

Hosted at York University, the free,  public events gather writers, artists, and thinkers from various disciplines and geographies to discuss the most pressing issues of our time. The insights shared at the live and streamed events are later transcribed and expanded in artful books published by Alchemy, a Knopf Canada publishing program, in collaboration with York University.

Picture of Fifty-Two Lines of Henry by Cary Fagan.

Fifty-Two Lines About Henry by Cary Fagan

Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).