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Maritime Life at Fredericton’s Westminster Books
Westminster Books, 445 King St, Fredericton, New Brunswick Westminster Books, Fredericton’s only independent bookstore that focuses on new books, has been a community staple for over thirty years. The brother-in-law of the current owner, Janet North, opened the store in 1975. He ran it for two years before moving back to Ontario and selling the…
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Hidden in Plain Sight: The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature, edited by Almantas Samalavičius (Dedalus, 2013) If Alice Munro’s recent Nobel win demonstrates that writing about small places can illuminate the human condition internationally, then the same can be said of writers working in languages whose speakers are not numerous. The literatures of small countries…
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Tijuana’s Borderline Personality: A Review of Tijuana Dreaming
Reviewed in this essay: Tijuana Dreaming, edited by Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo (Duke, 2012). Over the last few decades, Tijuana has mutated more than any other city in Mexico. No longer the family-friendly day-trip it was in the 60s, and no longer the international art hotspot it was in the 90s, the city has…
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A Bibliotherapist’s Apothecary: The Novel Cure from A to Z
Reviewed in this essay: The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin (Canongate, 2013) As 2014 commences and with it our lists of things to do and things to do better, here is a self-help book of a different sort. Berthoud and Elderkin have compiled a medical handbook for those who prefer to ease their aches and pains with…
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Fifty Shades of Mild Canuck Humour
Reviewed in this essay: Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black, Douglas & McIntyre, 2013 Fifty Shades of Black collects the latest humour by Arthur Black, an ex-CBC broadcaster and two-time Stephen Leacock award winner. Mostly reprints from his syndicated column, these 82 essays showcase the same colloquial style and easy wisdom of his fifteen…
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Cherries and Gems in Eat It: Sex, Food and Women’s Writing
Reviewed in this essay: Eat It: Sex, Food & Women’s Writing, edited by Nicole Baute and Brianna Goldberg. Feathertale, 2013. There are some gems in this mixed-genre anthology from Feathertale, an offbeat Canadian writer’s collective. The pieces are varied in tone and style, taking the form of short fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, letters, and poetry.…
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Bad Sex in Fiction and Many Kinds of Love
Let’s take a minute to talk about bad sex. On Dec. 3, a group of literary men and women gathered at the In & Out Club in the district of St. James, central London, united with this single-minded purpose. They were gathered to announce the winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.…
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Community Strangeness: On Fredericton’s Owl’s Nest Bookstore
Owl’s Nest Bookstore, 390 Queen St., Fredericton, New Brunswick. “If nothing else, we add some strangeness to the community,” says Debbie of Owl’s Nest Books, Fredericton’s principal secondhand bookstore. And indeed, with its endless rooms and motley décor, the store glows with haphazard charm. Owls hang on the walls. Q plays on the radio. Room after…
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Podcast: A Brief History of Books in Indigenous North America, by Matt Cohen
On November 7, University of Texas at Austin Professor Matt Cohen spoke to the Toronto Centre for the Book about early printing and indigenous communities. Read Cohen’s abstract below, or listen to the full talk here: [audio: Fall2013/CohenTRBpodcast.mp3] The first Bible printed in North America was in a Native language. Many of the influential early printed…
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Drones in Theory and in Practice
Reviewed in this essay: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley J. Strawser, Oxford University Press, 2013. Academic philosophers working on topics in applied ethics, such as drone usage, insist on distinguishing between permissibility in theory and permissibility in practice. In claiming that current U.S. drone policies are impermissible in practice,…
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Nowhere Land: Writing Eastern Europe in Canada
When I was a child reading Batman comics and Hardy Boy books in the fifties and early sixties, it seemed as if Canada was a nowhere land compared to the United States. Nothing happened here, and never would. If a man had put on a Batman cape in Canada, he would have been arrested. If…
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CanLit Canon Review #18: George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism
There is a lot of great stuff jammed into the 100 pages of Lament for a Nation: it is a short history of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism; it is an analysis of Canada’s changing place in the world during the Cold War; and it’s an emotional tirade by a brilliant thinker who no longer recognizes…