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Bookishness: Week of August 13, 2012
!! I once decided to entirely abandon use of the exclamation mark. This lasted until I got an office job and realized that my refusal to use the offending punctuation would likely lead my colleagues thinking me humourless if not plain mean, and they would never invite me for expensive lattes in the afternoons. I…
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TRB Podcast: Robert Darnton and the Digital Public Library of America
Listen here: [audio:darnton.mp3] It’s always a pleasure when a favourite author turns out to be as charismatic and compelling in person as they are in print. That was my experience recently going to see Robert Darnton, University Librarian at Harvard, deliver the Grafstein Lecture in Communications at the University of Toronto law school. I first…
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Oh Hello SummerWorks! Win tickets to Ajax (por nobody)
Huzzah, Toronto—SummerWorks festival begins tonight! We’re looking forward in particular to Sean Dixon’s France, or the Niqab, inspired by one of the beloved Tabatha Southey’s columns, as well as TRB contributor Zack Russell’s staging of the famously “unstageable” Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan. In Tuan’s play, which promises sex games, water fights, and pomegranates, “Four people get together for…
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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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Bookishness: Week of August 6, 2012
“Wonderful things happen when your brain is empty.” Maira Kalman on the difference between thinking and feeling. A little too much imagining for non-fiction Author of the (until now) best-selling Imagination: How Creativity Works Jonah Lehrer has admitted to inventing quotes in the book. The publisher has pulled the title, and is issuing refunds. Poets in…
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TRB Podcast: A Conversation with Nahlah Ayed, the author of A Thousand Farewells
CBC foreign correspondent Nahlah Ayed on living in a refugee camp, the emotional pitfalls of covering wars in the Middle East, and why she loves her job: [audio:July-August2012/AyedAudio.mp3] “People are not quotes or clips, used to illustrate stories about war and conflict. People are the story, always.” This is what CBC Correspondent Nahlah Ayed says…
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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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Bookishness: Week of July 30, 2012
Book keeping “To my mother, libraries smell of a Britain waking up from rationing, and induce an extreme and horrifying existential anxiety. ‘Here is Everything You Will Never Read’ shout the dusty tomes. For me, ever the optimist, libraries represent the blissful, undestroyed promise of Everything I Am Yet To Discover.” Susanna Hislop, in an agony of…
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TRB Podcast: John Fraser and The Secret of the Crown on the Eh List
[audio:fraser.mp3] On Thursday, April 26th noted Canadian journalist, author, and Master of Massey College John Fraser talked about his new book The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty at the Barbara Frum branch of the Toronto Public Library. The talk was part of the TPL’s Eh List series of speaking events, at which…
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The History of Reading as Told by Students at the University of Toronto
This last semester I taught a course called “Readers and Readerships” to close to a hundred and fifty bright young Torontonians. A core second-year course in the Book and Media Studies program at the University of Toronto, the class surveyed the history of Western reading from the pre-history of writing to the present. We…
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Bookishness: Week of July 23, 2012
Reading at the table Dinah Fried’s Fictitious Dishes features meals from novels recreated and photographed. At right: Holden Caulfield’s drug store sandwich and malted. A flourish here and a curlicue there On a trend in book covers. Harlequin in steamy water The publisher is facing a class-action suit alleging that it has underpaid authors on digital royalties. “It’s a book about a…
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TRB Podcast: Audrey Jaffe on the Production of Realist Space
On April 28, the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario invited Audrey Jaffe to present at their 45th annual Spring Conference at York University. The TRB is pleased to present the podcast of her talk, entitled “Walk this Way: Adam Bede and the Production of Realist Space.” Listen and enjoy! [audio:april-june/jaffe.mp3] Audrey Jaffe is a faculty…