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Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival! Win Free Tickets to a Great Film Outside
The Toronto Review of Books is thrilled to be co-sponsoring the July 19 screening of Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival, a marvellous series that presents outdoor screenings every Thursday night all summer. We’ve got a couple of tickets to Herman’s House for our readers: to enter in the draw to win ’em, send your name and your favourite bookish…
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Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger
Reviewed in this essay: Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger. Coach House Books, 2012. maidenhead, n.1 The state or condition of being a virgin, virginity (esp. of a young woman, occas. of a man). Also: the hymen (occas.: †the vagina), esp. considered as the mark of a woman’s chastity. (OED) And so, there it is. We…
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Mahmoud at the Toronto Fringe Festival
Reviewed in this essay: Mahmoud at the Toronto Fringe Festival (Tarragon Extra Space), 30 Bridgman Avenue, Toronto. Remaining show-times: July 10 at 3:30 PM, July 11 at 11:00 PM, July 13 at 12:00 PM, July 14 at 8:45 PM. Tickets available online or at the door. It takes a special kind of performer to bring…
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Bookishness: Week of July 9, 2012
Walt Whitmonster Reading Whitman into Frankenstein and Dracula. B is for Biblioclasm A-Z of Unusual Words is a collection of prints that “represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words.” (Our favourite.) Summer nights are for stargazing This Summer Constellation Map will help you to distinguish Hercules from Ophiuchus (I am completely ignoring the fact that…
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Banachek’s The Alpha Project and the One-Person Theater Show
Reviewed in this essay: Banachek’s The Alpha Project, The Fleck Dance Theatre, Luminato Festival, 8-10 June 2012 Do certain individuals have the ability to see the future, to read the thoughts of others, or to communicate with the spirit world? Whatever your answers to these questions might be, in his show The Alpha Project an…
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Bookishness: Week of July 2, 2012
“A place where the past sits intimately close to the present” A visit to Paper Books (née Of Swallows). Matisse meets Joyce For those who couldn’t shell out the cash for a copy of Ulysses illustrated by Henri Matisse, Brain Pickings did (a “year’s worth of lunch money”), and posted scans of the book’s etchings. “From taxes taxes taxes…
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A Manifesto for Averting Global Collapse
Reviewed in this essay: Humanity on a Tightrope by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. For many, humanity’s position on Earth appears to be growing more precarious by the day. The threat of global pandemics and nuclear war hangs over our heads; the population odometer continues to rise; the forward agents…
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Our Neoliberal Inheritance: Visions of Crisis in Detropia
Reviewed in this essay: Detropia, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Running Time: 94 minutes. Screened at Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival. Toronto general release in September. 91 minutes. All non-fiction seeks to use a close engagement with a specific subject as a lens to tell a story about larger, abstract issues. Filmmakers have no choice:…
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Nicole Krauss at Luminato 2012
Nicole Krauss, author of Great House, The History of Love, and Man Walks into a Room, as well as many short stories, read an unpublished story at Luminato this week, entitled “A garden is an arrangement of light.” It was a special event, introduced by the visibly excited artistic director of Luminato, Jorn Weisbrodt, and…
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Kim Thúy’s Ru
Reviewed in this essay: Ru by Kim Thúy. Random House, 2012 Ru by Kim Thúy is a deceptive book. It is a slim volume, but hardly a light read. What it lacks in pages it more than compensates for in breadth and complexity. This is a big story pared down. Thúy lays her narrative of…
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Annie Proulx at Luminato 2012
Annie Proulx spoke to New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, at the Bell Lightbox on Sunday, June 12, as part of the Luminato Festival. Talk turned to environmentalism, her characters, including the famous gay ranchers of Brokeback Mountain, and her beloved typewriter. The first hint from Annie Proulx of her Luddite leanings came early on,…
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Bookishness: Week of June 11, 2012
The 2012 Luminato Festival hosts its author series this week, and last night’s talk with Annie Proulx augers well for the rest. Our picks: author Nicole Krauss on Monday night at 7 p.m. at the Bell Lightbox Lapham’s Quarterly eponymous founding editor Lewis Lapham on Thursday the 14th at 7 p.m; Linden MacIntyre, Ayad…