Principally, what makes this lecture series good, is Spurgin’s strong and thoughtful suggestion that reading fiction is an art in something like the way that writing fiction is an art. He introduces what he calls a set of tools that can be used by the reader to think about a piece of fiction during reading.
NSCAD graduate and Burning Rock member Lisa Moore is the reigning queen of CanLit. Few writers can match her evocative, elegant way with words, and for that she is a multi-award-winning author, twice nominated for the country’s most esteemed literary award: the Giller Prize.
February is her latest novel, said to be her masterpiece, and Salty Ink certainly thinks so.
I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.
A love story on a grand scale, Therefore Choose is set in a world where a single choice can affect the direction of a life, a country, or even a continent. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, George, Anna, and Werner must choose and live with the irrevocable consequences.
I would like to be home in Toronto for the publication of my book but, due to a cloud of volcanic ash, I am involuntarily confined to Europe at least until the weekend.
In The Amazing Absorbing Boy, Maharaj takes a look at immigration from the POV of a young man, forced into moving to Canada after the death of his mother. His father had moved to Canada years previously, and now Samuel finds himself in a small Regent Park apartment in Toronto with a stranger who could charitably be described as ‘cold.’ Samuel is the prototypical stranger in a strange land, fish out of water hero; alone, frightened, resourceful, and very confused as to what a typical Canadian might be.
Canadians already read Margaret Atwood. Was there any person actually interested in Canada Reads who hadn’t read The Handmaid’s Tale? Ditto Life of Pi, ditto The Stone Angel, ditto A Fine Balance, ditto A Complicated Kindness. Again, I do not mean to disparage these novels; I unreservedly love Handmaid and Life of Pi, I dig Complicated, I’ve never even read Balance, and my views on Stone Angel are likely distorted by the overall unhappiness of my high school years and cannot be trusted.
Global warming and environmental issues are receiving growing public attention, and book lovers are not indifferent. Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, 100 bloggers will take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 100 “green” books.
From MacLeans:
John Polidori may have kicked off the bloodsucker craze when he wrote Vampyre in 1816, but it was Bram Stoker who gave it its enduring imagery, rules of engagement and iconic figure with Dracula in 1897. Now Stoker’s descendent Dacre Stoker, along with co-author Ian Holt, a Dracula-obsessed screenwriter, has picked up the tale in Dracula: the Un-Dead.
AbeBooks users pick:
Bleak Books - the Top 10 Most Depressing Books
Earlier this year AbeBooks asked you to identify your most depressing reads and you came up with some desperately bleak books. There was nuclear fallout, the Holocaust, government oppression, poverty, mental illness and the savage nature of humanity itself, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Epigramaphobia, or: Where the Hell Did the Satire Go? (Part 1)
“I’m not so sure that Americans in general see ‘the poet’ as off-limits to satire. Poetry is, after all, of little concern to the great bulk of the American population—not exactly an issue many people worry about: probably a good thing, in the long view, for them and for poetry both.” -Kent Johnson
