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Hell on Earth: A Review of Jim Williams’s Rock Reject
Rock Reject By Jim Williams Fernwood Press 2012 $19.95 248 pages Asbestos was once referred to as the “miracle fibre.” It’s used as a binder in cement, as insulation and in anti-fire walls. It’s also a carcinogen with a legacy of death that stretches across the globe. It causes cancerous growths on the lungs as…
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Giant: A Witty Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Giant by Aga Maksimowska. Pedlar Press, 2012. In 1988, Eastern Europe is on the brink of revolution. The citizens of Poland are weary from the stifling Communist management of their lives. Workers set in motion an unprecedented series of strikes that ripple across the country and ignite a slow but steady…
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Bookishness: November 12, 2012
Worth more than a thousand words Litographs: the entire text of classic books printed on 24×36. Here’s Around the World in 80 Days: The Smithsonian home for wayward books Inside the Smithsonian’s Book Conservation Lab, where rare books are adopted into a loving family. #love “This bit of utilitarian Web ephemera, invented with functionality…
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Issue Five Makes its Appearance
Issue Five of The Toronto Review of Books travels from the collection of tiny model ships at the Art Gallery of Ontario to Yerevan, Armenia. It gazes on not-nothingness, and waves at David Foster Wallace. Download the PDF or EPUB, or read the issue online—and celebrate this mighty issue with us tomorrow. The evening promises readings of the marvellous poems in…
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Getting Into It Through The Guns: The Thomson Collection of Ship Models at the AGO
French prisoners of war held in Britain built some of the ship models in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Cream-white as if carved in ivory but made from bones in the prisoners’ rations and other humble materials like straw and human hair, the “Prisoner of War Models” are masterfully crafted…
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Poem: My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal
You give your firstborn daughter A central-Asian name Meaning blue or water. Years later two bluebirds alight on either arm And an artist’s quick needlework Stitches birds to skin So even In your obsequies your fetlocks Wing away, appear then disappear. Of course Now you are a horse With pale blue withers…
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If Netizens United: Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked
A review of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012), by Rebecca MacKinnon Chinese journalist Shi Tao was jailed in 2005 after Yahoo provided Chinese state security agents with emails he had sent on a Yahoo China account. The emails had alerted a New York web editor of a recent…
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Instruments for the Elevation of the Soul: The Plight of the Book in Twenty-First Century Paris
Paris conjures up many images. Some visualize the Seine and arching footbridges; others see patisseries shaded by plane trees or a five a.m. street crêpe; others still, think of books. Writers and writing infuse the city’s marrow, from contemporary stars like Muriel Barbery to the 1920s icons Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, and James Joyce, and…
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Cloud Cartography: On Tubes by Andrew Blum
A review of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet (Ecco, 2012), by Andrew Blum When U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, speaking in opposition to net neutrality in June 2006, infamously described the Internet as “a series of tubes,” he was ridiculed for being out of touch with technology. The phrase was quickly absorbed into the…
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Not Himself: On Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary
A review of Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary (Yale, 2012), translated by Lillian Vallee. The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz arrived in Buenos Aires in August of 1939 on the maiden voyage of the trans-Atlantic liner Chrobry. He had been able to use his minor notoriety as an avant-garde writer in Poland to receive a free ticket on the…
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Yerevan, Armenia: World Book Capital
When Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2010, reviews in the Globe and Mail and the National Post commented at length about the beautiful book produced by Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press, where books are printed by hand, carefully bound, and often include letter-pressed dust jackets and patterned end papers. These volumes…
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Poem: Three Studies of Fruit
