-
Soup Can Theatre’s Truncated Cabaret is Well Worth Weill
Reviewed in this essay: Love Is a Poverty You Can Sell, from Soup Can Theatre. Written by Justin Haigh, featuring the music of Kurt Weill and others. Directed by Sarah Thorpe. Musical Direction by Pratik Gandhi. Until January 15th at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto. Part of The Toronto Fringe’s NextStage Festival. 416-966-1062 or…
-
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. At Wellesley College in 1941, before he secured financial independence with Lolita (1955), Nabokov was a one-man Russian literature department. Lectures on Russian Literature collects his lessons on Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki and Dostoevsky from that period, including after he…
-
Charles Taylor Prize Finalists
Five finalists for the Charles Taylor Prize were announced this morning, the shortlist emerging from a total of 115 books read by the jury. They are Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill, The Measure of a…
-
The Party Faces Are Off at NextStage in Jules Lewis’s First Theatrical Production
Reviewed in this essay: Tomasso’s Party, from Rooftop Creations. Written by Jules Lewis. Directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, and produced by André du Toit. Until January 15th at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto. Part of The Toronto Fringe’s NextStage Festival. 416-966-1062 or www.fringetix.ca. It’s a performance that gives “pillow talk” an electrifying new meaning.…
-
The Enchantment of Video Captures the Joy of Books
-
Bookishness: Week of January 9, 2012
Rejoice! Issue 2 Our second issue has arrived! Please enjoy, and do join us at our launch party tomorrow evening (Tuesday, January 10) at Poetry Bar in Kensington (224 Augusta Ave), starting at 8 pm. *blink blink* And so we emerge, more or less bright-eyed, into 2012.While the last days of December are all about looking back (plus sleeping and…
-
TRB Issue Two: Now Live!
Today we’re thrilled to bring you the second issue of The Toronto Review of Books, complete with seven great essays, two marvelous poems and a Q&A, not to mention a spiffy new webdesign. If you’re free, join us at our launch party tomorrow, January 10th, at 8 p.m. at Poetry Jazz Cafe, 224 Augusta Ave.,…
-
Species Counterpoint: Reverberations of Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak
Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the…
-
On the Real Way to Eat like a Caveman
Hear this piece read by its author, Dylan Gordon: [audio: issuetwo/dylan.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion. Cambridge University Press, 2011. We humans have learned to eat a great number of foods, prepared in an ever more astounding variety of ways. And as Ancestral Appetites demonstrates, this range…
-
Need-to-Know: On Area 51
Hear this piece read by its author, Matthew Farish: [audio: issuetwo/matt.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Annie Jacobsen, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base Little, Brown and Co., 2011. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. New American Library, 2010. For two days…
-
Everyone and I Stopped Breathing: William Basinski at the Met
Reviewed in this essay: “Remembering September 11,” a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 11, 2011. William Basinski’s epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops emerged in 2002 with two backstories. First, Basinski, a little-known classically trained composer, was digitizing analog tape loops of twenty-year-old recordings when…
-
On Learning How to Share: A Review of the Seven Billion
Hear this piece read by its author, Mary Albino: [audio: issuetwo/mary.mp3] With baby Danica’s Halloween arrival, the planet’s population officially reached seven billion. It’s an estimate of course—the margin of error is six months in either direction—but the point is humanity has reached a milestone: there are twice as many people alive as there were…