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Wild Food Spring #1: A Natural Science of Cooking
The first in a spring-time series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking by Andoni Luis Aduriz, Phaidon Press, 2012. I first ate at Mugaritz, today one of the top three restaurants in the world, in 2003. At the time there was a…
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The great Quebecois language balance: Reviewing a guide to interculturalism
Reviewed in this essay: L’Interculturalisme: Un point du vue québécois, Gérard Bouchard, Boréal, 2012. Despite the arrival of spring and the Habs’ fantastic playing, Quebec is once again at the brink of an existential crisis. Passions are stirred over Bill 14. Proposed by the PQ “separatist” government, Bill 14 attempts to enforce the supremacy of…
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Heritage Minutes, Rebel Mayor and More: Issue Six Launch Party on May 7!
We’re thrilled to announce that on May 7, to greet its sixth issue, The Toronto Review of Books is hosting the Canadian Historical Symbolism event of the season. Join us for what we suspect will be the world’s first Mystery-Science-Theatre-style screening of Heritage Minutes, along with some thoughts from Toronto political mascot @rebelmayor (a.k.a. writer Shawn Micallef),…
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China watches Jon Stewart, Robin Sloan likes libraries, and NPR tackles race: Bookishness for Apr. 15, 2013
Blog alert “Remember when folks used to talk about being ‘post-racial’? Well, we’re definitely not that. We’re a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” NPR’s new blog, Code Switch. Strolling through human…
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Roger Ebert in Review
When Roger Ebert announced last week that he’d be taking a “leave of presence” from his writing due to his declining health, even readers who knew he’d been in rough shape since his hip fracture last December were stunned. For those of us who grew up with Siskel & Ebert as a staple of late…
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Stories within stories: A review of Tahir Shah’s ‘Scorpion Soup’
Reviewed in this essay: Scorpion Soup, by Tahir Shah. Secretum Mundi Publishing, 2013. Fast on the heels of his eerily timed epic, Timbuctoo, travel writer Tahir Shah delivers a fantastical new work of fiction drawn from the deepest wellsprings of human imagination. Scorpion Soup is a collection of stories-within-stories inspired by the Arabic masterpiece One Thousand and One Nights.…
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Roger Ebert, book body parts, and art speak: Bookishness for Apr. 8, 2013
A speculatively ruptured transversal Your guide to International Art English. The Toronto Public Library and the Case of the Missing Money “In classic murder mysteries, the detective looks for motive, method and opportunity. Councillors have the opportunity and the method to cut back on the library but what could possibly be their motive?” Asking “Why does…
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A guide to the Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading Festival
The Toronto Public Library is hosting events about Fahrenheit 451 all through April as part of its eighth annual Keep Toronto Reading Festival. The festival is all about celebrating the joy of reading. Whether you’d be encountering Fahrenheit 451 for the first time or rediscovering it, Ray Bradbury’s classic is still current and very much…
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Join Us for the summer! The TRB is now accepting interns
We’re looking for a few stellar folks to join The Toronto Review of Books team over the summer. TRB internships typically consist of 75 hours divided between creative work (including writing, design, or audio production) and magazine administration, completed largely on your own schedule over a period of three to five months. Interns are volunteers,…
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Creating an alt-girl utopia: Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Yearbook One
Reviewed in this essay: Rookie Yearbook One, ed. Tavi Gevinson, Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. At 16 years old, Tavi Gevinson is already an accomplished writer, editor, and pop culture icon. She quickly became a darling of the fashion industry at the age of 11, when she launched her fashion blog “Style Rookie.” In September 2011 she…
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The philosophical thriller: A review of Simon Heath’s Doppelganger
Reviewed in this essay: Doppelganger, by Simon Heath. Self-published, 2012. Doppelganger will be of special interest to Toronto readers. Although our city is never expressly mentioned named as the setting, locals will recognize several distinctive details. Unmistakeable King Street office blocks, Rosedale doctor’s offices, packed Tim Horton’s and Timothy’s coffee shops, summertime escapes to the…
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Dinosaur kids, Hemingway’s geography, and the Book Madness bracket: Bookishness for Mar. 25, 2013
A clean, well-lighted place Write like Hemingway, at least geographically. “I go to waterpolo and come back to 4 messages from a Cabinet Minister.” James Moore talks with librarians on Twitter. In other librarians vs. the man news http://youtu.be/KfwNQS_h6Qc Oxford students push for the reinstatement of “sacked” librarian after the University takes issue with the above…