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A Long Strange Trip: Travels Through The North Coast with Denis Johnson
“This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California.” -Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic On a bright, sultry afternoon at the tail end of last August, my wife Jill and I sat at a picnic table in the spacious courtyard of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville, California. The town…
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Wild Food Spring #1: A Natural Science of Cooking
The first in a spring-time series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking by Andoni Luis Aduriz, Phaidon Press, 2012. I first ate at Mugaritz, today one of the top three restaurants in the world, in 2003. At the time there was a…
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The great Quebecois language balance: Reviewing a guide to interculturalism
Reviewed in this essay: L’Interculturalisme: Un point du vue québécois, Gérard Bouchard, Boréal, 2012. Despite the arrival of spring and the Habs’ fantastic playing, Quebec is once again at the brink of an existential crisis. Passions are stirred over Bill 14. Proposed by the PQ “separatist” government, Bill 14 attempts to enforce the supremacy of…
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Stories within stories: A review of Tahir Shah’s ‘Scorpion Soup’
Reviewed in this essay: Scorpion Soup, by Tahir Shah. Secretum Mundi Publishing, 2013. Fast on the heels of his eerily timed epic, Timbuctoo, travel writer Tahir Shah delivers a fantastical new work of fiction drawn from the deepest wellsprings of human imagination. Scorpion Soup is a collection of stories-within-stories inspired by the Arabic masterpiece One Thousand and One Nights.…
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Roger Ebert, book body parts, and art speak: Bookishness for Apr. 8, 2013
A speculatively ruptured transversal Your guide to International Art English. The Toronto Public Library and the Case of the Missing Money “In classic murder mysteries, the detective looks for motive, method and opportunity. Councillors have the opportunity and the method to cut back on the library but what could possibly be their motive?” Asking “Why does…
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Creating an alt-girl utopia: Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Yearbook One
Reviewed in this essay: Rookie Yearbook One, ed. Tavi Gevinson, Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. At 16 years old, Tavi Gevinson is already an accomplished writer, editor, and pop culture icon. She quickly became a darling of the fashion industry at the age of 11, when she launched her fashion blog “Style Rookie.” In September 2011 she…
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The philosophical thriller: A review of Simon Heath’s Doppelganger
Reviewed in this essay: Doppelganger, by Simon Heath. Self-published, 2012. Doppelganger will be of special interest to Toronto readers. Although our city is never expressly mentioned named as the setting, locals will recognize several distinctive details. Unmistakeable King Street office blocks, Rosedale doctor’s offices, packed Tim Horton’s and Timothy’s coffee shops, summertime escapes to the…
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Jerzy’s many masks: A review of “Oral Pleasure:Kosinski as Storyteller”
Reviewed in this essay: Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller. Edited by Kiki Kosinski. Grove Press, 2012. Years ago, when my reading tastes were largely defined by whatever contained the most explicit sex, I devoured the novels of Jerzy Kosinski. I had other sources—Henry Miller, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis—but there was something especially creepy and seductive…
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Violence in our bedrooms and kitchens: A review of Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch
Reviewed in this essay: Monkey Ranch by Julie Bruck, Brick Books, 2012 Julie Bruck’s poems have the transparency of fingerprints on glass. The achievement of Monkey Ranch, her Governor General Award-winning collection, is not obvious. Her third book, it contains poems about rituals and family life–a son at a window, a lover sleeping through the noise of…
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CanLit Canon Review #13: Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. People of the Deer, Farley Mowat’s first book, was published in 1952. At the time, the story was already old, but the way in which Mowat told it was new. It’s the story of white…
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Vendors in the hot sun: Selling books in Nairobi’s shadow economy
The lookout point in Nairobi’s smart Upperhill district provides an admirable city vista where glistening new buildings pop against faded infrastructure—all evidence of Kenya’s stuttering but undeniable emergence from poverty. But from the bustling boulevard where Joe carefully lays out his books every morning, the view is much different. As a second-hand book seller, he is a…
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Sheet music, Sriracha, and the Harry Potter Alliance: Bookishness for Feb. 25, 2013
Pencils, penises, pigeons, goblins, Hitler, and tea cosies What will be the oddest book title of the year? An army of fans, activists, nerdfighters, teenagers, wizards and muggles: fighting with love “Did you ever wish Harry Potter was real? Well it kind of is.” Join the Harry Potter Alliance and fight for social justice. Soooooo…