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Bookishness: Week of July 30, 2012
Book keeping “To my mother, libraries smell of a Britain waking up from rationing, and induce an extreme and horrifying existential anxiety. ‘Here is Everything You Will Never Read’ shout the dusty tomes. For me, ever the optimist, libraries represent the blissful, undestroyed promise of Everything I Am Yet To Discover.” Susanna Hislop, in an agony of…
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TRB Podcast: John Fraser and The Secret of the Crown on the Eh List
[audio:fraser.mp3] On Thursday, April 26th noted Canadian journalist, author, and Master of Massey College John Fraser talked about his new book The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty at the Barbara Frum branch of the Toronto Public Library. The talk was part of the TPL’s Eh List series of speaking events, at which…
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The History of Reading as Told by Students at the University of Toronto
This last semester I taught a course called “Readers and Readerships” to close to a hundred and fifty bright young Torontonians. A core second-year course in the Book and Media Studies program at the University of Toronto, the class surveyed the history of Western reading from the pre-history of writing to the present. We…
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Bookishness: Week of July 23, 2012
Reading at the table Dinah Fried’s Fictitious Dishes features meals from novels recreated and photographed. At right: Holden Caulfield’s drug store sandwich and malted. A flourish here and a curlicue there On a trend in book covers. Harlequin in steamy water The publisher is facing a class-action suit alleging that it has underpaid authors on digital royalties. “It’s a book about a…
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TRB Podcast: Audrey Jaffe on the Production of Realist Space
On April 28, the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario invited Audrey Jaffe to present at their 45th annual Spring Conference at York University. The TRB is pleased to present the podcast of her talk, entitled “Walk this Way: Adam Bede and the Production of Realist Space.” Listen and enjoy! [audio:april-june/jaffe.mp3] Audrey Jaffe is a faculty…
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The Fifty Shades Phenomenon is Nothing New
Over two and a half centuries before British TV executive and mother of two, E.L. James, shocked the literary world with the massive success her Fifty Shades trilogy, a fifty-one year old English widower named Samuel Richardson wrote an epistolary novel called Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. Not only did Richardson’s novel become the biggest literary…
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Bookishness: Week of July 16, 2012
Delightful A book fountain in Budapest. Poems like lace Actually, lace poems. 3608 keys Speaking as a former piano student and also as someone who has moved houses four times in the past five years, I can tell you that keyboards, even those with 88 weighted keys, are not pianos. For all those who, like…
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TRB Podcast: Richard Firth Green’s “Elf Queens and Holy Friars”
Reviewed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: On April 26, 2012, The University of Toronto hosted Richard Firth Green as the keynote speaker of the 4th annual Canada Chaucer Seminar. Green gave a brilliant speech from a forthcoming book on the topic of “Elf Queens and Holy Friars,” arguing for a medieval belief in fairies across class boundaries.…
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Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival! Win Free Tickets to a Great Film Outside
The Toronto Review of Books is thrilled to be co-sponsoring the July 19 screening of Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival, a marvellous series that presents outdoor screenings every Thursday night all summer. We’ve got a couple of tickets to Herman’s House for our readers: to enter in the draw to win ’em, send your name and your favourite bookish…
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Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger
Reviewed in this essay: Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger. Coach House Books, 2012. maidenhead, n.1 The state or condition of being a virgin, virginity (esp. of a young woman, occas. of a man). Also: the hymen (occas.: †the vagina), esp. considered as the mark of a woman’s chastity. (OED) And so, there it is. We…
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Mahmoud at the Toronto Fringe Festival
Reviewed in this essay: Mahmoud at the Toronto Fringe Festival (Tarragon Extra Space), 30 Bridgman Avenue, Toronto. Remaining show-times: July 10 at 3:30 PM, July 11 at 11:00 PM, July 13 at 12:00 PM, July 14 at 8:45 PM. Tickets available online or at the door. It takes a special kind of performer to bring…
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Bookishness: Week of July 9, 2012
Walt Whitmonster Reading Whitman into Frankenstein and Dracula. B is for Biblioclasm A-Z of Unusual Words is a collection of prints that “represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words.” (Our favourite.) Summer nights are for stargazing This Summer Constellation Map will help you to distinguish Hercules from Ophiuchus (I am completely ignoring the fact that…