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Bookishness: Week of December 19, 2011
Independent bookstore lovers unite Book and bookstore lovers spent much of last week raging at Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo’s essay on the superiority of Amazon over independent bookstores. The piece, a response to Richard Russo’s op-ed on Amazon’s recent thuggish price-check promotion, decries bookstores as user un-friendly (user!?) and “mistakenly mythologized.” Not surprisingly, bookstore…
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TRB Podcast: Polar Imprints: Book Historian Hester Blum at the University of Toronto
[audio:Hester.mp3] On November 17 as part of the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series, and in Association with the Centre for the Study of the United States, Hester Blum (Penn State University) spoke on “Polar Imprints”: Narratives of polar voyages enjoyed wide circulation in Anglo-American cultural and political spheres during the long nineteenth century.…
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Joe Culpepper’s Exits and Entrances at the New Gendai Workstation
Reviewed in this essay: Joe Culpepper, Exits and Entrances New Gendai Workstation, 25 November 2011 What disappears in a vanishing act? Is it the illusionist himself or something within us? And what might it matter when what vanishes is, ultimately, the illusion? In his performance art–magic act Exits and Entrances, performed Friday 25 November at…
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“Hatred Warms the Heart”: Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery: A Novel
Reviewed in this essay: The Prague Cemetery: A Novel by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery is a novel about hatred, and about why people love to believe conspiracy theories, which confirm their worst fears about groups they fear or resent. “In some…
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Coming Soon… TRB Issue Two!
We’re thrilled to announce that Issue Two of The Toronto Review of Books will be dashing in on the coattails of the new year. To mark the occasion, Good Readers, join us, the TRB staff and writers, on January 10 at Poetry Bar, 224 Augusta Ave., in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Along with an action- and…
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Bookishness: Week of December 12, 2011
Gold medal stories In celebration of the 2012 olympic year the BBC’s annual short story award, usually known as the BBC National Short Story Award, is going international. Says this year’s chair, Clive Anderson, “Given the popularity nowadays of the Tweet compared to the full length letter, the YouTube clip compared to the boxset and a…
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The Charles Taylor Prize announces its first ever longlist
The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction has announced the 11 finalists on its first ever longlist. Prize founder Noreen Taylor commented on the decision to release a longlist in a statement: “Last year, at our 10th anniversary, the jury informed us that there were so many additional titles so close to being named to the…
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Tattooing The Heart Of Darkness: a Review of Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist
Reviewed in this essay: Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist, by Ashley Little. Tightrope Books, 2011. Though no babe in the woods himself, when Anthony Ant Young, the redheaded protagonist in Ashley Little’s brief debut novel Prick: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist initially enters a Victoria tattoo parlour seeking an apprenticeship, his questionable virtue is unblemished…
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e-Reading – Wherefore, Why, and How: A TRB Symposium
Whether you feel naked without your mobile device, or you’re a bookworm who’s only hungry for paper, or if you couldn’t be more bored of all the standard fuss about e-reading, The Toronto Review of Books has a provocation in mind for you: I’m very pleased to announce that we’re collaborating with the University of…
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Fashion Designers At The Opera
Reviewed in this essay: Fashion Designers at the Opera, by Helena Matheopoulos. Thames & Hudson, 2011. Season after season both fashion designers and opera producers have to contend with the fact that their work will be hotly debated by the masses. Much of the scrutiny they receive comes from that greyest of all grey…
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TRB Podcast: Stephen Mitchell’s Iliad for the 21st Century
[audio:mitchell.mp3] On October 13 at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, Stephen Mitchell spoke about his new translation of The Iliad, described in promotional material as the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West, whose edition of the original Greek identifies many passages that were added after…
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A Boozy Reader’s Guide to Decadent Duos
It’s that time of year again: you step outside at 5pm and it might as well be midnight. The sky is black and starless, the air is bone-cold, and before you know it, seasonal affective disorder has you held fast in its goblin’s grip. What better way to fend off the dreary winter blahs than…