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Atwood’s BookTweetables No. 1
The Toronto Review of Books is thrilled to present Atwood’s BookTweetables: a biweekly selection from Margaret Atwood’s matchless Twitter feed. [View the story “Atwood’s BookTweetables No. 1” on Storify]
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Hipsterizing the Louvre, drawing Mansbridge, and ruling over Legoland: Bookishness for June 17, 2013
This could mean many things. New research out of U of T shows that reading literary fiction makes us more comfortable with ambiguity. Hipsters take over the Louvre Leo Caillard reimagines classic statues as contemporary hipsters. Meet Toronto’s Legolord Legoland is his kingdom. Restaurants where you’d be better off without a date …the better to focus…
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Story Planet: A Bloor Street haven for young writers
In Bloordale Village you might come across a shop that seems to be an ordinary coffee shop, but which is actually a lounge for space travellers called the Intergalactic Travel Authority. Here you can order a black hole coffee or a Venus cappuccino. What goes on behind the spaceship portal is supernatural; it’s Story Planet’s…
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Portrait of a Record Store: She Said Boom! Roncesvalles
She Said Boom! takes its indelible name from the first song on Toronto post-punk band Fifth Column’s All-Time Queen of the World. It has two locations (393 Roncesvalles Ave and 372 College St), under separate but amicable ownership, that serve two very different communities. The College store is close to Kensington Market and the University…
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Diary: The Banff Centre’s Indigenous Writers Program
Opportunities knock at your door when you least expect them, and when they do, they can knock you right off your feet and make you ask yourself-is this really happening to me? I applied for the Aboriginal Emerging Writer Program in 2011 through the Canada Council for the Arts. When I received confirmation in the…
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Book vs movie, book nesting, and book chains: Bookishness for June 10, 2013
Why you should always read the book first Want The read nest. Homegrown National Park Meet Toronto’s latest Park Rangers charged with creating Canada’s first “homegrown national park.” The Seattle Public Library sets a new record for the longest book chain
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Wild Food Spring #3: A Feast of Weeds
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini, University of California Press, 2012. Field guidebooks often overwhelm me with their formidable erudition. First in each entry come the botanical descriptors, identifying features of leaf and root that mostly escape…
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Jazz, journalists, bpNichol, and the roaring 1920s: T.O. Events for June 6 – June 20, 2013
Coach House Books is celebrating the release of a new collection by bpNichol, entitled a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts. The night will be hosted by the book’s editor, Stephen Voyce, and features readings by Margaret Christakos (What Stirs, Multitudes) and Paul Dutton (Aurealities), plus a short-film screening by Justin Stephenson. 7PM. June 6. No One Writes to…
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Library lawns, misspelling bees, and naming your book disorder: Bookishness for June 3, 2013
Professor Old Skull Lynda Barry “strip[s] away the stiffness of adulthood and plug[s] people into their creativity.” Everyone steal this idea I’d like to visit a library lawn in every city ever, please and thank you. Every misspelled word in the 2013 Scripps spelling bee Including so many words I have never, ever heard before. BUT Was…
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Dinner Parties, Moral Porn, and Papal Book-Binding: New Books of Note: May 30-June 6, 2013
Much-anticipated, curious, or simply thrilling, here are some new and notable books out this month. The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions) by Roberto Bolaño — The Chilean poet and novelist’s five short stories and two essays, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews, contain intrigues about “a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive…
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Colonial India for a post-colonial world: A review of the ROM’s latest photography exhibition
The scores of photographs in the newest exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) are all the more revealing because we know what happened in the century after they were captured. Between Princely India & the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal records nineteenth-century colonial India but tells a story that continues long after Victoria’s imperial rule. Raja Deen…
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Wild Food Spring #2: “They Can’t Ration These”
In this series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: They Can’t Ration These by Vicomte de Mauduit, Persephone Books, 2004 [1940]. Foods foraged from the wild are this year’s hot culinary trend, and all that limelight makes it easy to forget one fact: in much of history,…