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The Fifty Shades Phenomenon is Nothing New
Over two and a half centuries before British TV executive and mother of two, E.L. James, shocked the literary world with the massive success her Fifty Shades trilogy, a fifty-one year old English widower named Samuel Richardson wrote an epistolary novel called Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. Not only did Richardson’s novel become the biggest literary…
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Bookishness: Week of July 16, 2012
Delightful A book fountain in Budapest. Poems like lace Actually, lace poems. 3608 keys Speaking as a former piano student and also as someone who has moved houses four times in the past five years, I can tell you that keyboards, even those with 88 weighted keys, are not pianos. For all those who, like…
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TRB Podcast: Richard Firth Green’s “Elf Queens and Holy Friars”
Reviewed by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: On April 26, 2012, The University of Toronto hosted Richard Firth Green as the keynote speaker of the 4th annual Canada Chaucer Seminar. Green gave a brilliant speech from a forthcoming book on the topic of “Elf Queens and Holy Friars,” arguing for a medieval belief in fairies across class boundaries.…
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Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival! Win Free Tickets to a Great Film Outside
The Toronto Review of Books is thrilled to be co-sponsoring the July 19 screening of Herman’s House at Open Roof Festival, a marvellous series that presents outdoor screenings every Thursday night all summer. We’ve got a couple of tickets to Herman’s House for our readers: to enter in the draw to win ’em, send your name and your favourite bookish…
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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…
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Bookishness: Week of July 9, 2012
Walt Whitmonster Reading Whitman into Frankenstein and Dracula. B is for Biblioclasm A-Z of Unusual Words is a collection of prints that “represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words.” (Our favourite.) Summer nights are for stargazing This Summer Constellation Map will help you to distinguish Hercules from Ophiuchus (I am completely ignoring the fact that…
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TRB Podcast: Richard Stursberg’s Tower of Babble
On April 24, Richard Stursberg joined Don Ferguson of the Royal Canadian Air Farce in conversation at the Toronto launch of Stursberg’s new book, presented by This Is Not a Reading Series, D&M Publishers, the Gladstone Hotel, and the Toronto Review of Books. In The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC, Stursberg…
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Banachek’s The Alpha Project and the One-Person Theater Show
Reviewed in this essay: Banachek’s The Alpha Project, The Fleck Dance Theatre, Luminato Festival, 8-10 June 2012 Do certain individuals have the ability to see the future, to read the thoughts of others, or to communicate with the spirit world? Whatever your answers to these questions might be, in his show The Alpha Project an…
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Bookishness: Week of July 2, 2012
“A place where the past sits intimately close to the present” A visit to Paper Books (née Of Swallows). Matisse meets Joyce For those who couldn’t shell out the cash for a copy of Ulysses illustrated by Henri Matisse, Brain Pickings did (a “year’s worth of lunch money”), and posted scans of the book’s etchings. “From taxes taxes taxes…
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A Manifesto for Averting Global Collapse
Reviewed in this essay: Humanity on a Tightrope by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. For many, humanity’s position on Earth appears to be growing more precarious by the day. The threat of global pandemics and nuclear war hangs over our heads; the population odometer continues to rise; the forward agents…
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TRB Podcast: Bonnie Mak at the TRB’s e-Reading Symposium
On March 31, Bonnie Mak delivered the keynote address at the TRB’s e-Reading Symposium, presented in collaboration with U of T’s Book History and Print Culture program and the Toronto Centre for the Book. Her lecture, entitled “Reading the ‘E’ in E-Reading,” examines the impact of new technologies on reader engagement and the future of the…