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 behind. Since it appeared last fall, efforts to find comparisons for Tartt’s...
It all begins in a bloody bathroom. A young man shaves at a mirror, his body arched over a porcelain sink. With each new stroke, a torrent of blood gushes down his cheeks, streaking across the tiles in a crimson cascade. A romantic ballad floats over the soundtrack and the young man’s gaze is as placid as the singer’s voice. He slits his throat without a sound. The Big Shave is the 1968 student...
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 tend to be backwaters...
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 in the last decade been generally seen as a model of uncontrolled violence...
A progenitor of a genre typically referred to as body horror, Toronto-born and world-renowned auteur David Cronenberg remains one of the most audacious narrative directors working in cinema. Citing literary influences as diverse and incendiary as Vladimir Nabokov and William S. Burroughs (Cronenberg adapted Burroughs’s Naked Lunch), Cronenberg’s films continually blur the line between...
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 previous books. As always, Black blends news...
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. The mood is generally light...
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, one...
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 the country he once loved. George Grant—philosopher, professor, and founder of McMaster...
Reviewed in this essay: The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy by Cherie Dimaline. Published by Theytus Books (June 2013). The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, written by celebrated Ojibway and Métis author Cherie Dimaline, weaves together a story of struggle, hope, and magic. As the main character, Ruby Bloom, experiences a series of traumatic childhood events, planets start to grow around her head. The planets...
Reviewed in this essay: The Oil Man and the Sea: Navigating the Northern Gateway by Arno Kopecky. Published by Douglas & McIntyre (September 2013). If approved, the Northern Gateway pipeline will pump bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to Kitimat, a small town in northwestern British Columbia. The bitumen will then be carried by supertankers through the web of rivers in the Great Bear...
Reviewed in this essay: L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Mark Morris Dance Group, which ran June 2013 at Canadian Stage as part of the Luminato Festival During the most recent Luminato Festival, the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) finally reconnected with Canadian audiences after an absence of nearly two decades. L’Allegro exemplifies Morris’ commitment to music, the starting point...