In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me. more »
Jan 24, 2011 by Stephen Henighan in Columns
mgm publicists tried to persuade the Army to recruit Clark Gable as a captain, to match the role he played on screen, but General Arnold insisted that Gable earn his rank through Officer Candidate School. more »
May 13, 2009 in Essays
It is morning. The woman on the radio said Hurricane Rita passed through in the middle of the night, but it probably does not feel that way to Boogie Augustine, who is drinking Bud Light in his white pickup truck near a gas station off the Interstat more »
Jul 21, 2008 by Mary Vallis in Prose
When Julia Kwan’s grandmother died, her parents said the grandmother had been reincarnated as a goldfish. The report from Sunday school was quite different: Grandma had gone to hell. Eve and the Fire Horse is Kwan’s story of a young Chinese-Canadian girl who attempts to reconcile these competing cosmologies. more »
Jul 24, 2007 by Kris Rothstein in Reviews
At the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival I watched The Harp, a short film that is written and produced by John Bolton, who used to share a music stand with my daughter in the local youth orchestra. John gave up playing the viola years ago, but his love of classical music grew into this film which features the Borealis String Quartet playing a movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet in E-flat major Op. more »
Jul 24, 2007 by Patty Osborne in Reviews
Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses’ Company) is a first book of poems by Chris Hutchinson, who isn’t so tempered in his questions but plunges into them head-first and thirsty. These poems are afflicted by rain and sometimes flooded. more »
Jul 24, 2007 by Jill Boettger in Reviews
Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine (Oxford University Press), is another study in the evocation of place: a collection of twenty-two stories by French and other Francophone writers inspired by specific Parisian locales. Many of the expected names appear: Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Colette, Balzac, Gérard de Nerval are all represented by some of their lesser-known pieces (Maupassant’s “Nightmare,” for example, vividly evokes the deserted streets of a Paris still illuminated by gaslight; Zola’s “Squares” brings back a time when those sacrosanct oases of grass, trees and flowers were still a novelty). more »
Jul 24, 2007 by Michael Hayward in Reviews
