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TRB Podcast: John Gruesser on the Challenges of Editing Early African American Texts
On November 9 and 10, the University of Toronto hosted the Forty-Eighth Conference on Editorial Problems: Editing Early African American Literature. In the penultimate session of the conference, John Gruesser delivered his paper titled, “The Challenges of Editing Early African American Literary Texts in Serial and Book Form.” Listen and enj0y! [audio:2012.11/Gruesser.mp3] John Gruesser is…
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Ready, set, read: CBC launches Canada Reads 2013
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Starting the conversation: A review of First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People
Reviewed in this essay: First Nations 101: Tons of Stuff You Need to Know About First Nations People, by Lynda Gray (Adaawx, 2011, 275 pages). I’m a First Nations survivor of the ’60s and ’70s “Scoop”, the government-imposed movement that took hundreds of Aboriginal children away from their families, culture, traditions and heritage. I was…
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Chasing Cures: A Review of Erin Knight’s Chaser
Reviewed in this essay: Chaser by Erin Knight, House of Anansi Press, 2012. Without experiencing the discomfits of illness, we cannot benefit from the advancement of knowledge and understanding that accompanies diagnosis and healing. Erin Knight’s second book of poems, Chaser, released last spring, explores this fascinating contradiction, as well as the pathologies that affect…
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Bookishness: November 26, 2012
Mystery Dictionary.com‘s word of 2012 (image by craigdfreeman). Joan Didion on keeping a notebook “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I…
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Hunting and Gathering Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books
Dear readers, dear writers: Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books is percolating through your thoughts as I type. If you suspect you have a part of the issue in your head, waiting to spit itself out on screen, be in touch. We’re looking for essays, both shorter (800-1000 words) and longer (1500-2000 words),…
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Appadurai Muttulingam: An interview with the prolific Tamil short-story writer
Appadurai Muttulingam grew up in the Sri Lankan village of Kokkuvil and has produced hundreds of short stories in his native Tamil—a collection of which, Inauspicious Times, has been translated in English. After publishing his first collection of stories at 25, he got a degree in chartered accountancy and emigrated to work for the United Nations…
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Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre
Reviewed in this essay: “Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection,” Ryerson Image Centre inaugural exhibition. Ryerson University recently became home to the Black Star Collection, a massive archive of photojournalistic prints (over 292,000 objects) that together document the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th century. To mark this significant acquisition (the collection was…
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People We’ll Never Meet: A dance on the topic of strangers
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Bookishness: November 19, 2012
Quill and Quire visits the Bibliomat The Monkey’s Paw’s new invention. Is this even possible? “Nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality, for example, by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity. Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.”…
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TRB Podcast: Stefan Bird-Pollan on the Oedipus complex and the problem of colonial father figures
On September 18, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto invited Professor Stefan Bird-Pollan to deliver a lecture, titled “Fanon, Freud and the Intersubjective Sources of Colonial Psychopathology.” In his abstract, Bird-Pollan writes that his talk uses Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex to illuminate Fanon’s diagnosis of the widespread breakdown of intersubjective relations…
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Thoughts after watching Cloud Atlas—once
This essay discusses Cloud Atlas (2012), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell. Specific departures from Cloud Atlas, the book, render this aggressively unconventional movie adaptation more conventional, not less. It is well known that the filmmakers decomposed David Mitchell’s nesting doll structure into…