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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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Puzzlejuice for All: The Geniusy App-Shaped Offspring of Tetris and Scrabble
Ever since succumbing to Toronto’s latest exceptionally cough- and delirium-ridden flu a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been more than a little taken with Puzzlejuice, a new iOS app I discovered on my iPad during a long day bored out of my feverish brain in bed. Like the geniusy offspring of a steamy arcade interlude…
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CanLit Canon Review #7: Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Morley Callaghan’s fourth novel, Such Is My Beloved, was published in 1934, and it’s the first of the books in the canon that feels modern. There’s a Chinese restaurant, a completely un-CanLit lack of…
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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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Bookishness: Week of May 7, 2012
Frankenbooks Inkle’s just released Frankenstein, an interactive novel/mobile app, may have descended from the Choose Your Own Adventure stories you checked out of your school library every Thursday morning, but the resulting work is one marked by an unexpected artistry and nuance, according to early reviews. Salon’s Laura Miller says of the… novel/app/thing, it “is a…
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A Little to the Left: LeftWords Festival Celebrates Alternative Authors and Publishers
To be publicly scorned by the infamous Glenn Beck is perhaps not such a rarity in this era. Still, for famed scholar Frances Fox Piven, who was recently dubbed “an enemy of the constitution” by the radio and television personality for her vocal involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, such ire can only be…
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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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Looking At The Opera
Considering which member of an opera’s creative team tends to call the shots, Anne Midgette writes in the New York Times, “We have seen the age of the singer, the age of the conductor and, now, the age of the director.” No one, apparently, worries much about the set designer, but that doesn’t mean the…
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Bookishness: Week of April 30, 2012
A “bipolar rabbit hole of past and present” This Findings interview with Brainpicker Maria Popova about the future of reading taught me about fifteen things, as any encounter with Popova is wont to do. In other doings (she lives in hyperdrive): Popova’s book spine poetry (inspired by National Poetry Month and the delightful Sorted Books). On the intimacy of Draw Something “Draw…
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The 2012 Hot Docs festival, a Quick TRB Primer
Toronto’s annual festival of documentary and non-fiction film is upon us again, kicking off its 19th year in style tonight, April 26th, with festival opener Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a portrait of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. Dissent is indeed in the air during this year’s Hot Docs, so if you’re looking for a…