Recent news of Geist writers and artists, gathered from here and there. Anything else we ought to know about? Tell us at geist@geist.com.
The Globe & Mail called The Wage Slave’s Glossary by Joshua Glenn & Mark Kingwell (Biblioasis) “subversive stuff,” and according to Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times, “the book provides energized Marxists and depressed Dilberts alike a witty guide to terms like ‘air family’. . . ‘afternoon farmer’. . . ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. . . and ‘on the wallaby.’” The University of Toronto’s independent student newspaper TheNewsPaper.ca commented: “faced with unemployment, wage cuts, and the breaking of the social contract, what is your average proletarian to do? He or she ought, of course, to turn to satire.”
Of Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books), Devon Code wrote in Quill & Quire that Sina Queyras “convincingly renders the individual consciousness of each character in evocative, lyrical prose,” and Nathaniel G. Moore at the Globe and Mail called the novel a “striking comment on tragedy and its place in the human jigsaw puzzle.” A National Post reviewer concluded that it was “definitely not a feel-good novel, but one that stirs an emotional response.”
Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Anansi) is “informative, intriguing and a great read for all Canadians” said Paul Irish, a Toronto Star staff reviewer; Alex Good at Quill & Quire observed that “the big picture—which tracks the evolution of winter in the Canadian consciousness from a wild, outer force of nature to an inner, personal, cultural phenomenon—at times seems overly schematic, but there are plenty of interesting observations along the way [all] cast in Gopnik’s familiar engaging voice”; the New York Review of Books declared it a soulful, studied meditation on the season that most captures our imagination… highly recommended.”
Kate Beaton’s “witty feminist revisionism fits nicely into [her] broader shtick: depicting people and characters from the past with the mores and colloquialisms of the present, satirizing both times at once,” wrote Chris Randle in the National Post, reviewing Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn & Quarterly). Glen Weldon at NPR.org called Beaton a “master of comic strip pacing; several of Hark! A Vagrant!’s funniest strips feature panels with no dialogue at all, just a character… regarding the reader with a hilarious slow-burn glare,” and Ian Daffern noted in Quill & Quire that Beaton’s comics are “like doodles passed by your best friend in history class: familiar, friendly, funny,” and “Characters from boastful Billy Bishop to boring Lester B. Pearson, from loopy Hamlet to clueless Nancy Drew, are approached with abandon.”
