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Hunting and Gathering Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books
Dear readers, dear writers: Issue Six of The Toronto Review of Books is percolating through your thoughts as I type. If you suspect you have a part of the issue in your head, waiting to spit itself out on screen, be in touch. We’re looking for essays, both shorter (800-1000 words) and longer (1500-2000 words),…
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Appadurai Muttulingam: An interview with the prolific Tamil short-story writer
Appadurai Muttulingam grew up in the Sri Lankan village of Kokkuvil and has produced hundreds of short stories in his native Tamil—a collection of which, Inauspicious Times, has been translated in English. After publishing his first collection of stories at 25, he got a degree in chartered accountancy and emigrated to work for the United Nations…
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Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre
Reviewed in this essay: “Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection,” Ryerson Image Centre inaugural exhibition. Ryerson University recently became home to the Black Star Collection, a massive archive of photojournalistic prints (over 292,000 objects) that together document the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th century. To mark this significant acquisition (the collection was…
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People We’ll Never Meet: A dance on the topic of strangers
Eiden: Eidos See: Know Hail, Mary, Jean-Luc Godard’s film about the immaculate conception was banned by the Vatican because it imagined what it might have been like to be Mary. I saw a woman lay her head over the streetcar tracks. We spy on strangers. Bodies leaping from…
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Bookishness: November 19, 2012
Quill and Quire visits the Bibliomat The Monkey’s Paw’s new invention. Is this even possible? “Nostalgia cycles have become so short that we even try to inject the present moment with sentimentality, for example, by using certain digital filters to “pre-wash” photos with an aura of historicity. Nostalgia needs time. One cannot accelerate meaningful remembrance.”…
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TRB Podcast: Stefan Bird-Pollan on the Oedipus complex and the problem of colonial father figures
On September 18, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto invited Professor Stefan Bird-Pollan to deliver a lecture, titled “Fanon, Freud and the Intersubjective Sources of Colonial Psychopathology.” In his abstract, Bird-Pollan writes that his talk uses Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex to illuminate Fanon’s diagnosis of the widespread breakdown of intersubjective relations…
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Thoughts after watching Cloud Atlas—once
This essay discusses Cloud Atlas (2012), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell. Specific departures from Cloud Atlas, the book, render this aggressively unconventional movie adaptation more conventional, not less. It is well known that the filmmakers decomposed David Mitchell’s nesting doll structure into…
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Hell on Earth: A Review of Jim Williams’s Rock Reject
Rock Reject By Jim Williams Fernwood Press 2012 $19.95 248 pages Asbestos was once referred to as the “miracle fibre.” It’s used as a binder in cement, as insulation and in anti-fire walls. It’s also a carcinogen with a legacy of death that stretches across the globe. It causes cancerous growths on the lungs as…
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Giant: A Witty Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Giant by Aga Maksimowska. Pedlar Press, 2012. In 1988, Eastern Europe is on the brink of revolution. The citizens of Poland are weary from the stifling Communist management of their lives. Workers set in motion an unprecedented series of strikes that ripple across the country and ignite a slow but steady…
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Bookishness: November 12, 2012
Worth more than a thousand words Litographs: the entire text of classic books printed on 24×36. Here’s Around the World in 80 Days: The Smithsonian home for wayward books Inside the Smithsonian’s Book Conservation Lab, where rare books are adopted into a loving family. #love “This bit of utilitarian Web ephemera, invented with functionality…
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Issue Five Makes its Appearance
Issue Five of The Toronto Review of Books travels from the collection of tiny model ships at the Art Gallery of Ontario to Yerevan, Armenia. It gazes on not-nothingness, and waves at David Foster Wallace. Download the PDF or EPUB, or read the issue online—and celebrate this mighty issue with us tomorrow. The evening promises readings of the marvellous poems in…
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Getting Into It Through The Guns: The Thomson Collection of Ship Models at the AGO
French prisoners of war held in Britain built some of the ship models in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Cream-white as if carved in ivory but made from bones in the prisoners’ rations and other humble materials like straw and human hair, the “Prisoner of War Models” are masterfully crafted…