Could Be: New Fiction is the title of James (Jim) Little's latest... publication. It's difficult to stick a genre label to this 55 page book published by Mezzoforte, as it's a bit of a mishmash of Little's work.

There was a point while reading Li'l Bastard, a new collection of 'chubby sonnets' by Montreal poet David McGimpsey, that my sad English majors's brain kept flashing the age-old favourite phrase 'form informs content'. Although I've often relied on that phrase to save my ass during lacklustre moments of essay writing, I thought I'd left it behind in Concordia classrooms.

Just three shorts month ago I moved to Point St. Charles, the mysterious neighbourhood bordering Verdun and St. Henri. I say mysterious because as a non-Montreal native, I literally knew nothing about the area (other than the rent is insanely cheap, hence my decision to move there). After some Wikipedia articles and some bike rides, I discovered The Point to be a lot like it's neighbouring boroughs; very pretty, very quiet, and sometimes kind of unsafe looking.

In comes the announcement for a book launch on my RSS feed for Kathy Dobson's first novel, With a Closed Fist: Growing up in Canada's toughest neighbourhood, a book promising to details life in The Point back in it's blue collar Irish class days. Eager to learn about my new surroundings, I gave it a shot.

I had an interesting conversation with some fellow writers recently about whether or not you had to be published to be considered an author. Common consensus is that the word "aspiring" appropriately precede both the word "author" or "profession" when introducing your pastime to others. Success is rare in the world of word composition, so it's nice to celebrate it when it happens; especially since promotion is arguably a more arduous task. That's where the Québec Writers' Federation (QWF for short) lends a hand. They recently published their short-list for best English-language authors of prose, poetry and translation, and have two upcoming events to help promote the artists.

As a faithful member of the Midnight Poutine readership, you could be the lucky winner of a pair of tickets to this week's book launch and conversation with authors Daniel Clowes and Seth, who are launching their books The Death-Ray (Clowes) and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (Seth) through Drawn and Quarterly.

The Literary Death Match series kicked off its North American tour on Tuesday October 11th at our very own Sala Rosa. Paired up with local lit mag Maisonneuve Magazine and with Sean Michaels, Alexis O'Hara and Jonathan Goldstein judging readings by Katrina Best, Jason Camlot, Zoe Page and Byron Rempel, it was a pretty Montreal-centric night of high-quality performance, writing and wit.