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After the Prophet: Leigh Fondakowski’s Stories from Jonestown
The paradox of utopias is that while their failure is assured, their appeal is eternal. 800 years ago, tens of thousands of ordinary people left their homes, their families, and the innumerable small ties which made up their lives to march on Jerusalem and retake it in the name of God, in the deadly mass…
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What is What is Man? On Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man
Few recent works of academic cultural criticism have received such rapturous, widespread, and indeed almost universal acclaim as Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man has over the last several months. Lorin Stein in The Paris Review calls it “exhilarating.” Adam Kirsch, in The Tablet, says that it’s “a brilliant contribution to the…
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Three Generations of Magic Between E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, and Lev Grossman
As I read E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, a tale of children’s magical adventures, a feeling of familiarity came over me. This 1906 book seemed to anticipate C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, published almost exactly half a century later (1955) but, unlike the rest of the Narnia series, set back in the…
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Being Harmless: James Grainger on Horror, Fiction, and Toronto
Toronto author James Grainger’s debut novel, Harmless, reveals the potential for horror in everyday life when a weekend in the country among old friends turns into a search for their daughters who’ve vanished in the nearby woods. TRB sat down with Grainger to situate his new book in the haunted landscape of Canadian horror. TRB:…
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Costume and Bone and Thirty Years in Literature: a Chat with Lucinda Johnston about her First Book
Writer, bookseller, anti-censorship advocate, and longtime Parkdale resident Lucinda Johnston worked at Queen Street West’s legendary Pages Books and Magazines from 1989 until its doors shut in 2009. TRB had a few questions for her as her newly published first book, Costume and Bone, inaugurates a new stage in a thirty-year career in the literary…
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Newfoundland Off the Map: Michael Crummey’s Sweetland
The demographics don’t lie. In a couple of decades, a generation at most, dozens of Newfoundland communities will have disappeared, and there seems to be no way to reverse the flow. Soon, all that will remain will be a ghostly assembly like the one that closes Michael Crummey’s Sweetland – a scene reminiscent of some…
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The Unfinished Story of the Love Canal
Reviewed in this essay: Penelope Ploughman’s Love Canal (Arcadia, 2013) “Ninety-ninth Street looks serene in these summer 1978 photographs,” writes Penelope Ploughman in Love Canal (Arcadia Publishing, 2013). “Children are walking on the sidewalk, the trees are full, lawns are mown, American flags are flying and flowers are in bloom.” It’s an ominous description of the…
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Under the Radar: An Interview with Olivier Matthon
Olivier Matthon, itinerant labourer and ethnographer, is the author of Under the Radar: Notes from the Wild Mushroom Trade. It tells the story of the seasonal migrant labourers who harvest wild mushrooms in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and is out now from Pioneers Press. Dylan Gordon caught up with Olivier between wild harvests…
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Pretenders and Holy Fools: E. L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain
Reviewed in this essay: Andrew’s Brain by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, 2014) Andrew, the cognitive scientist-narrator of E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, is endearingly clumsy—he knocks drinks into laps, drops bottles on toes, and litters the floor with books. For his ex-wife’s new husband, these slapstick misdemeanours betray a sinister connection to the tragic deaths of…
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Digital Humanities and the End of (Close) Reading: A Review of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading
Last year in a post titled “Why Teach English?” Adam Gopnik offered one reason why not to teach English studies: as a discipline it does not give students basic research skills since research in English amounts to “archival futzing.” And scrounging a library for out of print books is “not really research.” Research involves looking…
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On Wanting The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt’s Book of Cravings
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…
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We Can Never Tell the Entire Story of Slavery: In Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip
M. NourbeSe Philip is an Afrosporic Caribbean writer/poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist known for her dedication to social justice, as well as for her experiments with literary form, particularly her well known 1989 text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. In all of her work she examines themes of gender, race, colonialism, and the…