Without being about writing, two books out this spring from Random House, Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply and Joan Didion’s South and West, put its processes on display. Each chases a feature-length magazine article that feels somewhat missing-in-action in the prose: Levy’s expands a perfect essay, Didion’s, a publication of notes, imagines an essay that might have been. The viral popularity...
People who write about the future of reading often like to disavow shallow binaries, like print versus digital, for example. Yet it is the searing awareness of that very binary, that paper books are very different from screens, that gets people into the predicament of writing books about the meaning and value of books in the first place. Awkward contortions often ensue. In his lovely and personal...
I’m thrilled to announce that The Toronto Review of Books is opening a fresh call for submissions and contributors to mark the arrival of two new staff members. Novelist Damian Tarnopolsky is joining us as Managing Editor, and CanLit scholar Katherine McLeod comes on board as Poetry and Community Editor. Damian is the author of the novel Goya’s Dog, and the short fiction collection Lanzmann...
Shortly after finishing Donna Tartt’s masterpiece, I stepped into a bookstore eager to buy another book but immediately spotted The Goldfinch on a table. All sorts of novels lay around it, but I thought, petulantly—No! Only The Goldfinch! The book had made me hungry to keep reading, but I wasn’t ready to leave its story behind. Since it appeared last fall, efforts to find comparisons for Tartt’s...
Good news! The TRB’s Tasting Menu has landed at The Paper Hound, Vancouver’s most charming new indie bookshop.
TRB collaborator and Vancouver expat Katherine McLeod sent us this picture to prove it.
Vancouver readers! You know where to go and what to do.
Toronto folk: why not pick up your copy at the official Tasting Menu Launch Party next Wednesday, Nov. 27?
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][symple_background background_color=”#fff” text_color=”#000″ background_style=”parallax” center_content=”true” padding_top=”40px” padding_bottom=”40px” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” background_image=”11858″] TASTING MENU LAUNCH PARTY...
Dear Readers, I met a TV writer last week who told me she’d heard that The Toronto Review of Books had just hired a bunch of people. While she was misinformed (I’m hoping she gets her gossip from some extremely accurate fortuneteller), given everything we’ve got in the works, I’m not surprised by her intuition that things at the TRB are on the up-and-up. We’re going to be making some thrilling...
The Toronto Review of Books team is thrilled to point out that tomorrow night (Oct. 15) our senior editor Kelli Deeth launches her new collection of short fiction, The Other Side of Youth (Arsenal Pulp Press). The “Fall Fiction Feast” event at the Supermarket (268 Augusta Ave.) also features new releases from Dana Mills, Matthew Heiti and Rosemary Nixon with Coach House, Freehand, and Gaspereau...
Hearing the news about Alice Munro’s Nobel win this morning sent many Canadians to their shelves. Munro is an author to read in the morning and the evening, whose work repays frequent visits and recitations years later, and whose voice returns when you least expect it, yes, like a friend from your youth: “So one day Robert carries Flora—for the first and last time he carries her in his...
American teen superstar and public intellectual Tavi Gevinson is coming to Toronto again to launch the second yearbook of Rookie, her online magazine for girls. Writing for The Toronto Review of Books about last year’s Rookie Yearbook One (also from the Canadian press Drawn & Quarterly), Ryerson English Professor Laura Fisher said that the book synthesizes images, words, and moods into...
Yesterday we learned from David Gilmour that being in conversation with “a young woman” means one doesn’t need to take one’s words seriously—but then Gilmour also taught us that literary “seriousness” is just for straight white dudes. Education’s great, eh? I can hear Jane Austen guffawing into a carefully hemmed sleeve in the sky. A lot has already been said on author and University of Toronto...
We’ve been cooking a book all summer and we’re salivating to announce that our first print anthology, The Toronto Review of Books Tasting Menu: Choice Selections from the First Two Years, is tumbling off the press this week. This Friday, September 20, marks the TRB’s second anniversary. We’re celebrating with this feast of a book that serves up some of our favourite deliciousness from our blog...