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The Spirited Letters of Joseph Roth
Reviewed in this essay: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hoffman. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Some writers do their most interesting work in correspondence; only with the right private audience does their voice reach its full potential. The letters of Kingsley Amis, for instance, are more hilarious, caustic,…
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Bookishness: Week of April 2, 2012
A Slow-Books Manifesto “To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.” “The refuge of stories.” Steve Almond on grad school as an alternative to therapy. Please please Mr. Postman So much of life allows us (expects us, requires us) to be passive. The letter, though, invites a response,…
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TRB Podcast: Veronica Hollinger on “Technologies of Enchantment in Science Fiction”
Listen here:[audio:hollinger.mp3] On February 13, the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto hosted a lecture by Dr. Veronica Hollinger (Cultural Studies, Trent University). The title of Dr. Hollinger’s lecture, “Technologies of Enchantment in Science Fiction,” refers not only to the role played by technology within literary science fiction, but also posits the…
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Poetic Quanta and the Terrestrial Residue of Gil McElroy
Dull sublunary lovers’ love —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit Of absence, ’cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it. -John Donne The continuous work of Gil McElroy contains poems that are more suggestive of physical matter and processes than some other poems, in the sense they cannot really be defined by any one of…
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America, From the Margins: A Review of Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda
Reviewed in this essay: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, by Don DeLillo. Simon & Schuster, 2011. The latest from American writer Don DeLillo is a sparse but rewarding short story collection, the first of his career. While it may not offer a radical departure from the major preoccupations of such era-defining novels as White Noise…
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On Goldstein’s Novels of Ideas: Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams
In March 2010, shortly after the release of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein published her list of the five best “novels of ideas” in the Wall Street Journal. Goldstein’s list gave Michael Da Silva a starting point for a series of reviews. The fifth novel on her…
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Bookishness: Week of March 26, 2012
The enchanted e-forest Exploring twitter, where rotating skulls live alongside kittens and bunnies, with Margaret Atwood. “Application opposed” with “likelihood of confusion” Facebook attempts to claim the word book. As commenter uno2tres states: “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” and all combinations, permutations, derivatives, and modifications of “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”, including but not limited to modifications such as “ñ” , “ò”, and “ö” are trademarks of…
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TRB Issue Three Coming Soon!
The third issue of The Toronto Review of Books will launch on April 17th to all the fanfare and cheers its readers, writers, editors, and volunteers can muster at Poetry Jazz Café (224 Augusta) in Kensington Market. Join us, from 8pm ’till late—we’ll be thrilled to see you.
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e-Reading! An Interdisciplinary Toronto Review of Books Symposium on March 31 at Massey College
Join The Toronto Review of Books at Massey College next Saturday, March 31st for the interdisciplinary symposium on e-Reading we’re hosting in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s program in Book History and Print Culture and the Toronto Centre for the Book. All are welcome to attend what promises to be a fascinating afternoon. The…
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The Drummond Commission and First Nations Education
On February 15, 2012 the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services released the long awaited “Drummond Report.” Don Drummond, the former Chief Economist for TD Bank, was asked to lead the Commission and help balance Ontario’s budget by 2017-18. Drummond claims that in order to meet this target, the government must restrict the…
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Creating a New Food Paradigm: A Review of Food Sovereignty in Canada
Reviewed in this essay: Food Sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems, edited by Hannah Wittman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe. Fernwood Publishing, 2011. Food issues abound these days, from northern communities that lack access to affordable food, to foodborne illnesses initiated by poor industrial hygiene practices, to community-driven initiatives connecting rural…
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Toronto’s first “Kula”: a Review of Vanguard of the New Age: The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891-1945
Reviewed in this essay: Vanguard of the New Age: The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891-1945, by Gillian McCann. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. On 26 March 1891, some of Canada’s early avant-garde artists, labour activists, and feminists sat in the parlour of an esteemed Spadina Avenue home to discuss “The Key to Theosophy on Karma.” Spurred by…