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Stan Rogal’s Brautiganesqe
In this special feature for Chirograph, rob mclennan presents the essay he wrote as a preface for Stan Rogal’s Love’s Not The Way To (Toronto ON: Bookland Press, spring 2013). “That’s why I forgot the bottle this morning because the Japanese squid fishermen are asleep and I was thinking about them being asleep.” -Richard Brautigan, The…
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Oil sands, Pussy Riot, and Arnaud Maggs: A guide to the 2013 Hot Docs Festival
Toronto’s twentieth annual Hot Docs film festival begins April 25th and will screen 205 films over eleven days. The complete list is here — but here are a few that caught our interest. The festival will kick-off with director Shawney Cohen’s The Manor, a film about his journey back to Guelph, his home town, to…
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Streamed Theatre, History Mapped Online, and James Reaney’s First Play: Inbox No. 1
We get lots of notices about intriguing events and projects each week. Here’s a sampling. ▶ Nathan Ng describes the Historical Maps of Toronto as follows: “If you’ve ever wondered what ‘Muddy York’ looked like 200 years ago, and then wanted to trace the city’s development over the following century, this ought to pique your…
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Revisiting ab-ex: the return of modern artist Milly Ristvedt
Art lovers of Toronto, take heed. You have only a few days left in which to witness the comeback of a storied Canadian artist. Milly Ristvedt was, in the 1960s and ’70s, a practitioner of abstract expressionism, in the vein of Mark Rothko. And while her work can be seen at the Art Gallery of…
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Earth Day, dragons, and Hot Docs picks: Bookishness for Apr. 22, 2013
Borrow, grow, return Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, why not check out the newly opened Markham Grows Seed Library at Markham Public Library’s Milliken Mills Branch (7600 Kennedy Road) where Markham residents can check out free, organic, heirloom seeds? Don’t live or work in Markham? Check out the Toronto Seed Library. Then get outside! Unfortunately… …this award…
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Hell in the Round: Soup Can Theatre’s A Hand of Bridge and No Exit
Reviewed in this essay: A Hand of Bridge & No Exit, Soup Can Theatre, which ran Mar. 27-30 at the New Tapestry Opera Studio Soup Can Theatre’s double bill of A Hand of Bridge and No Exit in theatre-in-the-round style emphasizes the blunt reality that we can never get away from other people. No Exit…
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Wild Food Spring #1: A Natural Science of Cooking
The first in a spring-time series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking by Andoni Luis Aduriz, Phaidon Press, 2012. I first ate at Mugaritz, today one of the top three restaurants in the world, in 2003. At the time there was a…
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The great Quebecois language balance: Reviewing a guide to interculturalism
Reviewed in this essay: L’Interculturalisme: Un point du vue québécois, Gérard Bouchard, Boréal, 2012. Despite the arrival of spring and the Habs’ fantastic playing, Quebec is once again at the brink of an existential crisis. Passions are stirred over Bill 14. Proposed by the PQ “separatist” government, Bill 14 attempts to enforce the supremacy of…
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Heritage Minutes, Rebel Mayor and More: Issue Six Launch Party on May 7!
We’re thrilled to announce that on May 7, to greet its sixth issue, The Toronto Review of Books is hosting the Canadian Historical Symbolism event of the season. Join us for what we suspect will be the world’s first Mystery-Science-Theatre-style screening of Heritage Minutes, along with some thoughts from Toronto political mascot @rebelmayor (a.k.a. writer Shawn Micallef),…
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China watches Jon Stewart, Robin Sloan likes libraries, and NPR tackles race: Bookishness for Apr. 15, 2013
Blog alert “Remember when folks used to talk about being ‘post-racial’? Well, we’re definitely not that. We’re a team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” NPR’s new blog, Code Switch. Strolling through human…
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Roger Ebert in Review
When Roger Ebert announced last week that he’d be taking a “leave of presence” from his writing due to his declining health, even readers who knew he’d been in rough shape since his hip fracture last December were stunned. For those of us who grew up with Siskel & Ebert as a staple of late…
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Stories within stories: A review of Tahir Shah’s ‘Scorpion Soup’
Reviewed in this essay: Scorpion Soup, by Tahir Shah. Secretum Mundi Publishing, 2013. Fast on the heels of his eerily timed epic, Timbuctoo, travel writer Tahir Shah delivers a fantastical new work of fiction drawn from the deepest wellsprings of human imagination. Scorpion Soup is a collection of stories-within-stories inspired by the Arabic masterpiece One Thousand and One Nights.…