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On “Combative Love”: Q and A with Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, Mr. Fox, turns a critical eye on literature’s fascination with menacing heroes and imperiled women. The book takes its name from the fairytale of Mr. Fox, a variant of the Bluebeard story: Lady Mary famously discovers that Mr. Fox, her betrothed, keeps “a room filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead…
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Ask Me Anything: How Reddit Perfected the Message Board
Reviewed in this essay: reddit.com‘s AMAs (Ask Me Anything). Buried somewhere under Web 2.0’s endless “personal branding” astroturf, under the rubble of busted dot-com shell companies, and under the dense bedrock of pornography, there lies net utopianism. But all is not lost. If McLuhan were around today and needed new grounds for optimistic futurism, here’s…
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Short Forms: When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/syms.mp3] When my short story “Jenna on Twitter” was published by Joyland Magazine last year, I was pretty pleased with myself. It’s a story about a woman with a crush on a gay male singer who fantasizes while watching his YouTube videos. She uses her iPhone to…
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Old Codes for Modern Woes: The 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac
Reviewed in this essay: Robert Thomas, 2012 Old Farmer’s Almanac, Thomas Allen, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/vanmeermass.mp3] Every fall in supermarkets across North America The Old Farmer’s Almanac appears at checkout stands, sitting incongruously amid tabloids and recipe magazines. The Almanac’s antiquated woodcut cover is the first indication that this cheaply bound…
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Bookishness: Week of April 16, 2012
MZD seeking future cat lady Literature and online dating collide. The case of the missing words A blind author wrote 26 pages with a pen that was out of ink, leaving her with nothing but blank pages. Well, a little more than blank pages. The woman and her family took the sheets of paper to…
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Toronto Public Library’s Jamaica 50 Series
The Toronto of Review of Books brings you podcasts, interviews and book reviews following the Jamaica 50 series. More than 230,000 people of Jamaican heritage live in Canada; almost 160,000 in the GTA. In celebration of that community’s long history, and of Jamaica’s independence, the Toronto Public Library and the group Jamaica 50 are holding…
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CanLit Canon Review #6: Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, published in 1930, is an indispensable record of the fur trade and early European-Aboriginal relations, but it is also a brutal and exhausting test of endurance. You…
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Taking Turns: A Review of Margaret Atwood’s I’m Starved for You
Reviewed in this essay: I’m Starved for You, by Margaret Atwood. Byliner, 2012. Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopia trades The Handmaid’s Tale’s theocratic republic and Oryx and Crake’s bioengineered wasteland for more familiar locales. Set in the gated community of Consilience, a think tank-generated portmanteau of “cons” and “resilience,” the mordantly funny I’m Starved for You (an…
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Ellis Avery’s The Last Nude
Reviewed in this essay: The Last Nude by Ellis Avery. Riverhead Books, 2012. If you didn’t already have a crush on Paris, reading The Last Nude may well convert you. If you’re already a Francophile, this is your bread and honey. Or perhaps, more appropriately, your pain aux chocolate. Avery’s novel retraces a familiar period,…
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Bookishness: Week of April 9, 2012
What we like to read in bed E-books, apparently. According to a just released Pew study of e-reading, American readers now favour e-books as their preferred method of reading in bed (at 45%, with books just behind at 43%). Books to be devoured While the idea of eating a book after reading it makes me cringe,…
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Into Thin Air: J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call
Reviewed in this essay: Margin Call, written and directed by J.C. Chandor. Starring Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci. Running Time: 107 minutes. Available now on Blu-Ray and DVD. In Michael Lewis’ 1989 memoir Liar’s Poker, he described the idea of “jamming bonds”: when you knew your bank…
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In Defense of Obsolete Knowledge
On March 13, 2012, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jorge Cauz, announced that the organization, which published the first edition of the pre-eminent English-language encyclopaedia in 1768, has decided to cease production of printed editions as it shifts all major editorial energy to the maintenance of its online edition. My first thought, I confess, was…