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On Wanting The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt’s Book of Cravings
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…
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The Razor’s Edge: The Erratic Brilliance of Martin Scorsese
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…
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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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Long Live the New Flesh: David Cronenberg’s Evolution
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 corporeality and…
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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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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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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…
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A Fantasy of Indigenous Experience: Cherie Dimaline’s The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy
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…
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The Northern Gateway Pipeline and Indigenous Knowledge: Kopecky’s The Oil Man and the Sea
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…
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Dancing a score: Mark Morris Dance Group’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato”
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…