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SPRING: A Poem
Listen to the author read this poem: [audio: issue3/surani.mp3] (i) You visit each day in a different dress, a clear umbrella for the rain. Coffees. And one day this week, with a daisy whose stem you sawed with a kitchen knife (ii) Only the magnolias have squandered their colour. Their shells convalesce over the…
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Disappearing Bookstores: a Letter from Sweden, Toronto, and Iran
I returned to Toronto in May 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. When I find Sweden (where I am resident) uninhabitable, and Iran (where I was born) too dangerous, I take refuge in Toronto, undoubtedly, the most ethnically diverse city in the world. I rented a suite on the southern fringe…
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The World’s Greatest Art Museum is in Hobart, Tasmania
Reviewed in this essay: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/smiley.mp3] Visit the permanent collection of any national art museum and you will likely find an Impressionist room, with a Cezanne, a Monet, a Manet, and maybe a Pissarro. There will be an Abstract Expressionist…
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Trombone Shorty and the Three Jazzes
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/nolan.mp3] In December 2011, Downbeat magazine awarded Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew “Historical Jazz Album of the Year.” What kind of tradition creates an award “of this year” for something from its distant past? Contemporary jazz. In its most commonly known modern iteration, jazz is mostly good, but not…
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On “Combative Love”: Q and A with Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, Mr. Fox, turns a critical eye on literature’s fascination with menacing heroes and imperiled women. The book takes its name from the fairytale of Mr. Fox, a variant of the Bluebeard story: Lady Mary famously discovers that Mr. Fox, her betrothed, keeps “a room filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead…
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Ask Me Anything: How Reddit Perfected the Message Board
Reviewed in this essay: reddit.com‘s AMAs (Ask Me Anything). Buried somewhere under Web 2.0’s endless “personal branding” astroturf, under the rubble of busted dot-com shell companies, and under the dense bedrock of pornography, there lies net utopianism. But all is not lost. If McLuhan were around today and needed new grounds for optimistic futurism, here’s…
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Short Forms: When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/syms.mp3] When my short story “Jenna on Twitter” was published by Joyland Magazine last year, I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s a story about a woman with a crush on a gay male singer who fantasizes while watching his YouTube videos. She uses her iPhone to…
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Old Codes for Modern Woes: The 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac
Reviewed in this essay: Robert Thomas, 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac, Thomas Allen, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/vanmeermass.mp3] Every fall in supermarkets across North America The Old Farmer’s Almanac appears at checkout stands, sitting incongruously amid tabloids and recipe magazines. The Almanac’s antiquated woodcut cover is the first indication that this cheaply bound…
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Bookishness: Week of April 16, 2012
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Toronto Public Library’s Jamaica 50 Series
The Toronto of Review of Books brings you podcasts, interviews and book reviews following the Jamaica 50 series. More than 230,000 people of Jamaican heritage live in Canada; almost 160,000 in the GTA. In celebration of that community’s long history, and of Jamaica’s independence, the Toronto Public Library and the group Jamaica 50 are holding…
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CanLit Canon Review #6: Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, published in 1930, is an indispensable record of the fur trade and early European-Aboriginal relations, but it is also a brutal and exhausting test of endurance. You…
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Taking Turns: A Review of Margaret Atwood’s I’m Starved for You
Reviewed in this essay: I’m Starved for You, by Margaret Atwood. Byliner, 2012. Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopia trades The Handmaid’s Tale’s theocratic republic and Oryx and Crake’s bioengineered wasteland for more familiar locales. Set in the gated community of Consilience, a think tank-generated portmanteau of “cons” and “resilience,” the mordantly funny I’m Starved for You (an…