-
Recommended Reading: Tumescent Toronto, or a City on the Wane?
Pardon the phallic poke of the title, but it seems appropriate given our city’s most recognizable symbol, as well as the figurative casting of at least a year’s worth of spirited debate over whether Toronto is, indeed, a rising international cosmopolis swollen by its own throbbing vibrancy or is, instead, a wilting force marred by…
-
Knelman’s Hot Art: One Big Game
Stolen art—like a political sex scandal, corporate meltdown, or celebrity criminal trial—makes for a good story. Behind the thrilling headline of an $80-million Rembrandt heist, however, exists a complex network of thieves, dealers, auction houses and galleries. It is this network that Joshua Knelman traces in Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret…
-
The Night Circus: A Review
Few books this year benefited from the publicity machine as much as The Night Circus. For this novel, her first, Erin Morgenstern received a staggering seven-figure advance, the film rights were purchased months before the release of the book on September 13, and it was a bestseller in preorders. The Night Circus was a…
-
How to Make $100,000 and Infinite Units of Charm
The Victoria College Book Sale—one of the great used book sales put on annually by University of Toronto colleges—is a fine example of how to make $100,000 in a single weekend while turning out vast quantities of enchantment and love. Outside the slick infinity of Googlebooks there is a world of heavy old paper things…
-
Eccles Cake: A Review of an Unlikely Pastry
O, the Eccles Cake. Imagine noticing it for the first time, hidden off to the side of the display case at some generic local bakery (unthinkable that it could take pride of place): you might suspect it to be an unfortunate oddity conjured up by an idiosyncratic proprietor. But this dry, dense, often shriveled-looking round,…
-
Recommended Reading: On Tomas Tranströmer, Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize For Literature
None of the American literary heavyweights won it, and neither did an Arab writer, though many thought the prize committee would make a nod to the Arab Spring. Bob Dylan didn’t win it either, even though he somehow had the best odds the night before. Instead, the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Swedish…
-
A TRB Q&A with Richard Gwyn, author of Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times
In the lead-up to the announcement of the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize, The Toronto Review of Books will feature Q&As with each of the five finalists. In 2007, Richard Gwyn published John A: The Man Who Made Us, the first volume in his biography of Canada’s first prime minister, which…
-
Bookishness: Week of October 10th, 2011
-Winter Five Ways: The 2011 Massey Lectures begin this week, marking its 50th anniversary. New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik will travel across Canada to deliver this year’s lecture. His talk, entitled “Winter,” will explore five facets of the frosty season: Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter and Remembering Winter. Gopnik starts in…
-
On Iphigenia in Tauris by the Canadian Opera Company
Christoph Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris, a tragic opera about the fate of survivors, their guilt, and the question of who will pay for the crimes of the past, is a relentlessly dark and difficult challenge for viewers. The program’s awkward synopsis seems to say it all when it opens with the kind of jovial avuncular…
-
The Home Movie History Project, Oct. 15: A Desperately Fun Event
Since nothing compares to very old home movies screened in a marvellous bookshop, the TRB suggests that you might like to attend one of its favourite regular events in Toronto: b.y.o.h.m. (Bring Your Own Home Movies) for HOME MOVIE DAY Saturday October 15 Screening starts 7:00 pm (Home Movie Repair Clinic 6:30 – 8:00) at…
-
Your Ideas for the TRB
In her introduction to The Toronto Review of Books, editor Jessica Duffin Wolfe noted, “The conversation about reading is happening in the street. We’ll be there from Toronto, scattering what confetti we can in this international thoroughfare.” She meant it. Two Sundays ago some of the TRB crew set up on a street corner (Queens Park…
-
On NYC’s Gregg Pasquarelli of SHoP Architects in Toronto: The Power of (Not) Selling Out
Gregg Pasquarelli, founding principal of the New York-based SHoP Architects, debuted this year’s Bulthaup public lectures at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design last week with a rabble-rousing talk about his firm’s practice. That a lecture by a charismatic, distinguished professional with a slew of competition wins, awards and critically-acclaimed projects…