Critics compare her to Canada’s native short story master, Alice Munro, but Johanna Skibsrud has a charm—and a voice—all her own.

The award-winning Alexi Zentner on fiction as types of food, pen as talisman, bad music as white noise, and his fellow Canadians, who inspired him to take up the pen.

I love controversial books. Banned books, books by authors with pseudonyms and false identities, fictional books that have been passed off as non-fiction, books that take risks, and even books that play with a reader’s mind. I love these types of books because they push the envelope and help to expand our concepts of what makes something worth reading. They are experimental, and just as in the scientific world, these experiments may bring more questions than insights. Jon Paul Fiorentino’s first novel, Stripmalling, is one such book.