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The Literary Revolution That Gave Birth to a Social Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram. Twelve Books, 2012. Way before popular television shows like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk, there were a handful of gay American writers who introduced gay lives to mainstream America. Gay novelists, poets and playwrights of the 1940s and…
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Keys to The Gift: Yuri Leving’s Guide to Nabokov
Reviewed in this essay: Keys to The Gift: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving. Academic Studies Press, 2011. I was a student in Yuri Leving’s Survey of Russian Literature class at Dalhousie University in 2007. He got me hooked on Nabokov, so I was excited when Leving’s new book on a major…
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A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez
Reviewed in this essay: A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez. Algonquin Books, 2012. Throughout her travels into Haiti and Port-au-Prince, novelist and memoirist Julia Alvarez is haunted by the question, “Once we see a thing, what then is our obligation?” She sets out to answer the question in her new memoir, A Wedding in…
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Bookishness: Week of May 14, 2012
Where the wild things assemble A perfect combination of one of the highs and one of the lows of the last week in pop culture. On the promise of an unread book “When I read it, I will be completely absorbed by it. It will be all I think about. It will affect my daily life in…
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From Monarchist Nostalgia to Postcolonial Reality: Reading John Fraser’s The Secret of the Crown
Reviewed in this essay: John Fraser’s The Secret of the Crown (Anansi, 2012) Whatever else one can say about John Fraser’s newest book, it is certainly an invaluable opportunity to learn about a certain form of Canadian monarchism that has, it seems, gained a new lease on life. Fraser argues that with the spectacular popularity of…
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Michele Landsberg’s Writing the Revolution
Having begun life as, in her own words, “a docile little girl,” Michele Landsberg became a journalist whose descriptions in a 1981 column on female genital mutilation smacked a reader so hard that he fainted dead away while waiting for a flight to arrive at Pearson Airport. That column is included in “Writing the Revolution,”…
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A World Sans Salvation: Oren Moverman’s Rampart
Reviewed in this essay: Rampart, directed by Oren Moverman, written by Moverman and James Ellroy. Starring Woody Harrelson, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Foster, Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Steve Buschemi, and Ned Beatty. Running Time: 108 minutes. Now playing at the Carleton Cinema. There are two ways to think about director Oren Moverman’s film Rampart: it is…
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The Oscillating Universe: A Review of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s “Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang”
Reviewed in this essay: Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell. HG Publishing, 2011. For some time, scientists have been marshaling their knowledge and resources in an effort to answer some of the biggest questions about the universe. With each grandiose experiment, however, science seems to be little closer to solving…
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On Rob Benvie’s Maintenance
Reviewed in this essay: Maintenance by Rob Benvie. Coach House Books, 2011. Rob Benvie, author of The Safety of War, offers in his second novel, Maintenance, an important investigation into the relationship between place and despair. Benvie’s characters bleakly exist in suburbia — Mississauga — at the turn of the millennium and while they want…
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The Civil Side of Genocide: Powell’s Barbaric Civilization
Reviewed in this essay: Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: a Critical Sociology of Genocide, McGill-Queens University Press, 2011. What does calling someone a monster accomplish? At a recent human rights panel I attended, a scholar described a series of personal interviews he’d conducted with a group of war criminals—men who had brutally tortured and killed numerous people.…
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How Faber’s App Rescues Eliot’s Masterpiece from the Waste Land of Print
Reviewed in this essay: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land for iPad. Faber and Touch Press, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/hammond.mp3] It is difficult to describe the shock I experienced this summer on receiving an email informing me that (a) the venerable and comfortably out-of-touch publisher Faber and Faber had teamed with…
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Short Forms: When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/syms.mp3] When my short story “Jenna on Twitter” was published by Joyland Magazine last year, I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s a story about a woman with a crush on a gay male singer who fantasizes while watching his YouTube videos. She uses her iPhone to…