books

Michael Hayward
Reviews
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

Laurie Edwards
Reviews
A Discovery of Strangers

Rudy Wiebe makes the physical North present as few writers can. We see the line of light on the spring horizon, taste the lichens that feed the caribou and sometimes the humans, feel the rough granite outcroppings, stand on the edge of the great nort

Daniel Francis
Reviews
A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk

The other book is sure to become what the blurb writers call "an instant classic": A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk by Ingeborg Marshall (McGill-Queen's). The title sounds unpromising, and the book itself is a brute at 640 pages, but this is

Reviews
A June Night in the Late Cenozoic

Robert Allen's new book of stories, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan) is full of near-worlds with dimensions that intersect the three (or is it four) that we navigate by in this world. A man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip being relocated

Reviews
A Provisional Life

A Provisional Life (Oberon) by Andre Major (translated by Sheila Fischman) got me thinking about the difference between a balcony and a porch. I read a lot of translated literature so I can usually overlook the occasional odd word usage, but when the

Reviews
A Second Piece of Pi

Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Reviews
A Settlement of Memory

I've been stuck on books from Newfoundland lately, so my fingers grabbed A Settlement of Memory by Gordon Rodgers (Killick Press) when last they cruised the shelves. Inspired by William Coaker, founder of the Fisherman's Protective Union, Rodgers has

Reviews
A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma

A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma, by Catarina Edwards (NeWest), sports a truly appalling cover on the outside, and a most unfortunate typeface on the inside (can we even call it a typeface?—if this one has a name, it can only be font). These

Reviews
A Woman's Place

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Mindy Abramowitz
Reviews
Action Girl Comics

"I am by no means a connoisseur of comics, and usually confine my reading to one or two titles. Now Action Girl Comics makes it three." Review by Mindy Abramowitz.

Reviews
Adventures in Solitude

Dan Post reviews Grant Lawrence's Adventures in Solitude (Harbour).

Michael Hayward
Reviews
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Michael Hayward reviews An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Grub Street).

Reviews
Another World

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

Shannon Emmerson
Reviews
Autobiography of Red: A Romance

Speaking of the beautifully explained inexplicable things in life Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Romance (Knopf) is a gorgeous, astounding, poetic study of what things are like when you just happen to be red. The colour red.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Beautiful Mess

A review of Love & the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Behind Closed Doors

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Reviews
Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac

The recently published Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac (Viking) by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher and intellectual celebrity, provides an in-depth analysis of our pleasure-centric society and the concept of happiness

Reviews
Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada

Just in: a copy of Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada, Number One. A much needed guide to the weird and wonderful of the periodical press in Canada.

Reviews
Buffalo Gal

Patty Osborne reviews The Perimeter Dog by Julie Vandervoort.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Reviews
Budavox

Budavox (DC Books) by Todd Swift is a first collection of poems. Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what.

Mindy Abramowitz
Reviews
Bust

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

Reviews
Canada in the Fifties

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Jon Burrows
Reviews
Canada's Gigantic

Another oddly-shaped book protruding from the shelf at the library the other day was Canada's Gigantic (Summerhill), a collection of photographs by Henri Robideau, a Gianthropologist photographer who searches out Giant Things in the Canadian landscap

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Reviews
Caesarea

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Columns
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Mandelbrot
Reviews
City of Glass

Mandelbrot reviews City of Glass by Douglas Coupland (Douglas & McIntyre).

Reviews
Completely Mad

Completely Mad, a diligent history of Mad magazine (by Maria Reidelbach, Little, Brown), is more than pop culture. It's literary and political history.

Reviews
Crossings

Jennesia Pedri reviews Crossings by Betty Lambert.

Dispatches
Darwin's Bastards

Kris Rothstein reviews Darwin's Bastards (Douglas & McIntyre).

Columns
Dear Patient

A woman, hoping to find peace, seeks her birth mother. A review of By Blood by Ellen Ullman.

Reviews
Dividing Lines

Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).

Reviews
Doing the Occupation

Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.

Reviews
Don't Look Back

Stephen Osborne reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.

Reviews
Dreaming Home

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were "Personal Effects" by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his hom

Columns
Everything Arrives at the Light

If a poem is going to grab you, it has to do it right away, as Lorna Crozier's poems do. Here are a few openers from her new book, Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart): "He had a good wife, he said, / she did not complete his senten

Reviews
Fall Down Easy

Laurence Gough has another police procedural out from McClelland & Stewart: Fall Down Easy is a fast read and fun, but not much different from the American prototype.

Reviews
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

Kris Rothstein reviews Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (Lyons Press).

Peggy Thompson
Reviews
Federal Follies

Linda Svendsen eviscerates the hypocritical nature of Canadian politics in Sussex Drive.

Reviews
Finding Paradise

Mandelbrot reviews Maps of Paradise by Alessandro Scafi, a history of humanity's attempts to locate utopia.

Lily Gontard
Reviews
Finish Me

Lily Gontard reviews One Day (Hodder & Staughton), David Nicholls's novel about a decades-long friendship.

Columns
Floating Voice

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.... The secon

Essays
Frenetic, Instructive, Bossy

Patty Osborne reviews four new books from Mansfield Press.

Reviews
Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture

Marlene Nourbese Philip achieved an inadvertent kind of fame as the woman June Callwood told to fuck off at a writers' conference some time ago. Her new book Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Mercury), makes it easy to see why.

Reviews
Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner

For hard-core Blade Runner fans, or anyone interested in the filmmaking process, Paul M. Sammon's book Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner (Harper Prism) is required reading.

Columns
Fresh Hell

Stephen Osborne reviews Mary Jo Bang's translation of Dante's Inferno.

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Gettysburg

I enjoyed Killer Angels so much that I pursued my Civil War studies by renting a video of Gettysburg, the made-for-TV movie based on the book. The movie clocks in at somewhere close to four hours, and you have to put up with a lot of famous American

Reviews
Girls in Gangs

Roni Simunovic reviews Ashley Little's BC Book Prize-winning novel, Anatomy of a Girl Gang, which follows the story of five teenage girls growing up in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Reviews
Grief-in-Progress

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Reviews
Hanna's Daughters

My grandmother's picture stares down from the wall. She is very young and newly sexual. After reading Hanna’s Daughters (Orion), I thought this woman might exist in me.

Peggy Thompson
Reviews
Haunts

Peggy Thompson on Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Have You Seen...?

Michael Hayward reviews Have You Seen...? by David Thomson (Knopf.)

Reviews
Hemingway: The Toronto Years

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.

Reviews
Holding Still for as Long as Possible

Kris Rothstein reviews Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall (Anansi).

Reviews
Hotel Sarajevo

In Hotel Sarajevo (Turtle Point Press), Jack Kersh has succeeded in translating his story into the thoughts and feelings of Alma, a fourteen-year-old girl who is caught in the hell of Sarajevo under siege. Alma is part of a group of war orphans who l

Shannon Emmerson
Reviews
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media

During a heated CBC Radio discussion about one of these trends—chronic fatigue syndrome, and whether it is a "real" or psychogenic illness—both callers and panelists were emotional and argumentative, straining the usually fair, thoughtful CBC Radio s

Dispatches
Imaging The Arctic

Stephen Osborne reviews Imaging the Arctic, a collection of papers and photographs presented at a conference titled "Imaging the Arctic: The Native Photograph."

Reviews
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States

In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs en

Columns
In Season

When a friend gave me a copy of the CD In Season by Freddie Stone (Unity Records) she warned me that it was a bit odd. The main instrument on this CD is a flugelhorn—which looks to be what you would get if you heated up a trumpet, stretched it out, a

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Indians at Work

"From opposite ends of the country come two important books about Indians: one old and one new. The old is a reissue of Rolf Knight's Indians at Work." Review by Daniel Francis.

Mandelbrot
Reviews
Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Killer Angels

Daniel Francis reviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a minute-by-minute reimagining of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Reviews
Kitchen

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Reviews
Last Wedding

A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Level 26: Dark Origins

Michael Hayward reviews Level 26: Dark Origins (Dutton).

Michael Hayward
Dispatches
Levels of Loss

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Life, Repeatedly

A woman is reborn on the same cold and snowy night over and over again, living a different life of disasters, in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

Reviews
Little Betrayals

Moments of misunderstandings and other drama are highlighted in the life of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Czechoslavia.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Literary Lives

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Living by the Book

A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.

Michael Hayward
Dispatches
Magpie Memoir

Jim Christy muses on 121 items accumulated over 40 years of travel in Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

ROSEANNE HARVEY
Reviews
Marginalia: A Cultural Reader

Everyone has a guilty pop-culture pleasure. I read Entertainment Weekly regularly and I'm not afraid to admit it. Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a noted magazine writer, has compiled all of his guilty pleasu

George Fetherling
Reviews
Man of a Hundred Thousand Books

Don Stewart, proprietor of MacLeod's Books, is an antiquarian hoarder of the highest order.

Lily Gontard
Reviews
Matters of Life and Death

Lily Gontard reviews Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother by Helen Humphreys.

Daniel Francis
Reviews
Memoir Of A Time Traveller

A review of Voyage Through the Past Century by Rolf Knight.

Reviews
Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo

The photographs in Phyllis Birnbaum's Modern Girls, Shining Stars, The Skies of Tokyo compels Karen Mirsky to read it, but its dialogue on feminism kept her reading.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Dispatches
My New York Diary

My New York Diary (Drawn & Quarterly) by Julie Doucet. Like all great graphic novels, this book manages to condense a complex set of circumstances into a simple tale: Montrealer Doucet moves to New York to join her boyfriend, who turns out to be para

Reviews
Never Going Back

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

Shannon Emmerson
Reviews
Night Train

Because I am a fairly new fan of Martin Amis's novels, I picked up slim Night Train (Knopf Canada) with much interest. Amis is well known for novelistic experimentation (his Time's Arrow is written in reverse time), and he doesn't disappoint here.

Reviews
Nikolski

Becky McEachern reviews Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker (Vintage).

Daniel Francis
Dispatches
Noir

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Dylan Gyles
Reviews
Not Quite Home

Dylan Gyles reviews They Never Told Me and Other Stories by Austin Clarke.

Essays
On Earth As It Is

Steven Heighton's new book, On Earth As It Is, is bigger and much more spread out than his last one (Flight Paths of the Emperor) and more ambitious. His writing is strongest when he writes at a distance; especially fine are his excursions into the p

Reviews
One Bloody Thing After Another

Patty Osborne reviews One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau (ECW Press).

Lily Gontard
Reviews
Out Stealing Horses

Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.

Reviews
Palpasa Café

Jenny Kent reviews Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle (Publication Nepa~laya).

Columns
Paranoia in the Launderette

While doing research for a proposed TV series on heinous Victorian criminals, the hero of Paranoia in the Launderette, by Bruce Robinson (Bloomsbury), becomes convinced that there are murderers around every corner, hiding under his bed, poisoning his

Dispatches
Personhood

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

Columns
Pioneer Justice

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

JILL MANDRAKE
Reviews
Pinspotting

"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.

Michael Hayward
Dispatches
Plotto: A Plot Plotter

William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.

Michael Hayward
Reviews
Poetry of Place

Michael Hayward reviews What Poets Are Like by Gary Soto.

Reviews
Playground

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

Norbert Ruebsaat
Reviews
Private Confessions

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.

Mandelbrot
Dispatches
Private Parts

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

Reviews
Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

Reviews
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Reviews
Rookie Yearbook One

The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.

Reviews
Seeks Bee Nerd

The Bee Trading Card Series 1 includes twenty-four cards that feature facts about bee anatomy, physiology and classification.

Daniel Francis
Columns
Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Dispatches
Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin

Shades: The Whole Story of Doctor Tin (Arsenal Pulp) is the sequel to Tom Walmsley's cult masterpiece, Doctor Tin, which appeared in 1979 to rave reviews and stern warnings. Walmsley was quoted in the press at that time as having said "everything he

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