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On Goldstein’s Novels of Ideas: George Eliot’s Middlemarch
This piece continues a series of reviews highlighting highlighting philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s list of the best “novels of ideas”. George Eliot’s Middlemarch was the second entry on her list. Reviewed in this essay: Middlemarch, George Eliot. Penguin Classics, 2002 (Originally published: 1871-1872 (with the first single volume set appearing in 1874 and further revisions…
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A look inside the best basketball team ever: Jack McCallum’s Dream Team
Reviewed in this essay: Dream Team by Jack McCallum. Ballantine Books, 2012. The Dream Team is one of the most iconic teams in sports history. It was packed with household names like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, not to mention Michael Jeffrey Jordan: the centerpiece of the team and just maybe the most…
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All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel
Reviewed in this essay: All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel. Translated by Miranda France. Penguin, 2012. Continuing the perspectivist tradition of Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and William Faulkner’s four ways of looking at the Compsons, essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel gives readers five ways of looking at an enigmatic…
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The Wit and Wisdom of Misha Glouberman
Reviewed in this essay: The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti. Faber and Faber, 2011. You can tell the publishers weren’t quite sure what to do with Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s book The Chairs Are Where the People Go because the explanatory subtitle, “How to Live, Work, and…
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The Nightmare: On Life is About Losing Everything
Reviewed in this essay: Life is About Losing Everything by Lynn Crosbie. House of Anansi, 2012. Last year I wrote a blog post about how rotten I felt getting older. I laid bare my fear of being alone and acknowledged losing the power that youth gives women. I quoted Anne Sexton: “Live or die, but…
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John Meisel’s Life of Learning
Reviewed in this essay: John Meisel, A Life of Learning and Other Pleasures: John Meisel’s Tale. Yarker ON: Wintergreen Studios Press, 2012, 403 pp. Illus. Forward by Janice Gross Stein. Born in Vienna in 1923, Czech, Jewish, and afflicted with chronic osteomyelitis, John Meisel managed to escape the horrors of Nazi Europe because his father…
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Tradition and the Debut Talent: On David Balzer’s Contrivances
Reviewed in this essay: Contrivances, by David Balzer. Joyland/ECW Press, 2012. Towards the end of “Laura,” one of the punchiest short stories in David Balzer’s sterling first collection Contrivances, Whitney looks on the work of her artist mother and muses that “it seemed to draw on precedent just enough to be legible.” That allowance for the…
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David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: A Guide to the Vexed
Reviewed in this essay: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey. Verso Press, 2012. The scale and frequency of the urban protest movements of the last two years has overshadowed anything since the 1960’s. It was perhaps simpler then than it is now to conceive of what…
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On Goldstein’s Novels of Ideas: Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner
This piece continues a series of reviews highlighting philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s list of the best “novels of ideas”. Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner was the third entry on her list. Reviewed in this essay: The Holy Sinner, Thomas Mann. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Knopf, 1951. When The Holy Sinner was published in English in…
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Choice and Consequence in Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period
Reviewed in this essay: Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period by Stephen Marche. The Walrus Online Exclusive, November 2010. In Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period, Stephen Marche’s digital novel currently available on The Walrus website, the question of personal choice is explored in the form of an unwanted pregnancy experienced by the titular character. Lucy wants to change…
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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…