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CanLit Canon Review #2: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. From its very first sentence, which is 148 words long and covers, in part, the evolution of a local stream, Anne of Green Gables is a charming novel, but in an excruciatingly bland…
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Much Ado in Theatre Brouhaha’s Titillating Commentary LoveSexMoney
Reviewed in this essay: LoveSexMoney, from Theatre Brouhaha. Written and directed by Kat Sandler. Until January 15th at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto. Part of The Toronto Fringe’s NextStage Festival. 416-966-1062 or www.fringetix.ca. If hotel rooms could talk, what stories would they tell? And would you really want to know what they have to…
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Bookishness: Week of January 16, 2012
027.471 meets 641.874 The Toronto Public Library Foundation aims to recruit a younger set of donors with the New Collection, a membership program for Torontonians under 40. The $300 solo membership ($500 duo) provides members with invitations to special events throughout the year (or, as the National Post puts it, “parties and booze”), after-hours tours of library…
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TRB Podcast: Mike Carey at the 2nd Annual Toronto SpecFic Colloquium
As part of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium on October 15, 2011, and sponsored by The Beguiling, comic-writer Mike Carey presented a talk entitled “Speak of the Dazzling Wings”: Myth, Language, and Modern Fantasy.” Listen, and enjoy. [audio:carey.mp3] From the SpecFic site: MIKE CAREY was born in 1959 in Liverpool, England, where both his parents worked…
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Soup Can Theatre’s Truncated Cabaret is Well Worth Weill
Reviewed in this essay: Love Is a Poverty You Can Sell, from Soup Can Theatre. Written by Justin Haigh, featuring the music of Kurt Weill and others. Directed by Sarah Thorpe. Musical Direction by Pratik Gandhi. Until January 15th at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto. Part of The Toronto Fringe’s NextStage Festival. 416-966-1062 or…
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature
Reviewed in this essay: Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. At Wellesley College in 1941, before he secured financial independence with Lolita (1955), Nabokov was a one-man Russian literature department. Lectures on Russian Literature collects his lessons on Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorki and Dostoevsky from that period, including after he…
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Charles Taylor Prize Finalists
Five finalists for the Charles Taylor Prize were announced this morning, the shortlist emerging from a total of 115 books read by the jury. They are Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill, The Measure of a…
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The Party Faces Are Off at NextStage in Jules Lewis’s First Theatrical Production
Reviewed in this essay: Tomasso’s Party, from Rooftop Creations. Written by Jules Lewis. Directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, and produced by André du Toit. Until January 15th at Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst Street, Toronto. Part of The Toronto Fringe’s NextStage Festival. 416-966-1062 or www.fringetix.ca. It’s a performance that gives “pillow talk” an electrifying new meaning.…
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The Enchantment of Video Captures the Joy of Books
We’re feeling quite charmed by this video, The Joy of Books, made for Type Books in Toronto by the Lowe Roche Agency: Clearly this is how books dance every night, but we suspect that not since the height of Victorian spirit photography have they been captured in such glorious motion.
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Bookishness: Week of January 9, 2012
Rejoice! Issue 2 Our second issue has arrived! Please enjoy, and do join us at our launch party tomorrow evening (Tuesday, January 10) at Poetry Bar in Kensington (224 Augusta Ave), starting at 8 pm. *blink blink* And so we emerge, more or less bright-eyed, into 2012.While the last days of December are all about looking back (plus sleeping and…
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TRB Issue Two: Now Live!
Today we’re thrilled to bring you the second issue of The Toronto Review of Books, complete with seven great essays, two marvelous poems and a Q&A, not to mention a spiffy new webdesign. If you’re free, join us at our launch party tomorrow, January 10th, at 8 p.m. at Poetry Jazz Cafe, 224 Augusta Ave.,…
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Species Counterpoint: Reverberations of Jenny Sampirisi’s Croak
Reviewed in this Sight-Reading: Croak, by Jenny Sampirisi. Coach House Press, 2011. Why did I introduce into the text all those extraordinary frogs and legs and things, all that fermenting matter, isolating them on the page only by the style, the cold and disciplined tone, and demonstrating to the reader how completely I dominated the…