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Archives for the ‘Editor's Picks’ Category

Ken Finkleman sticks the knife in

By the Branta Webcrawler • Sep 2nd, 2010 • Category: Book Reviews, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, Writing Routines

“I thought to myself, ‘If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.’ ”
John Barber/Globe and Mail



Visions of Fast Food

By the Branta Webcrawler • Sep 2nd, 2010 • Category: Advice, Editor's Picks, Recommended Artistic Consumption



Brew North

By the Branta Webcrawler • Sep 2nd, 2010 • Category: Book Reviews, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, In Brief

Our history with…[beer]… is long and colourful. Author Ian Coutts has documented it with his new book Brew North: How Canadians Made Beer and Beer Made Canada.
Jesse Skinner/Toro Magazine



How Google Unwittingly Helped Propegate the Misleading “Ground Zero Mosque” Label

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 28th, 2010 • Category: Brave New World, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, In Brief

When a handy label like “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges, it’s immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it’s short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you’ve written.
Andrew Price/Good Magazine Blog



Book Trailer: YOU comma Idiot

By Eric Hill • Aug 27th, 2010 • Category: Brave New World, Editor's Picks, Goose Lane Authors, Video



Flying Under the Radar: 10 Underrated Canadian Authors

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 25th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, Lists

With one exception, the authors on this list don’t have the same recognition factor as those on the previous list (and the one exception is notorious for all the wrong reasons). However, while they are heterogeneous in style, subject, and approach, they share in common a vivacity and willingness to push the boundaries of language and form. And they make reading a joy, not a chore, which is something sorely lacking from much of our fiction these days.
Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie/The National Post



Terra Infirma

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 24th, 2010 • Category: Brave New World, Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, Travel

The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. Thirty years ago, quicksand might have sprung up at recess, in pools of discolored asphalt or the dusty corners of the sandbox—step in the wrong place, and you’d die. But not anymore, a boy named Zayd tells me. “I think people used to be afraid of it,” he says. His classmates nod. “It was before we were born,” explains Owen. “Maybe it will come back one day.”
Daniel Engber/Slate



All the Sad Young Literary Women

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 24th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, Essays, From the Interweb, Reading Horror(s)

I was going on about some novel I was reading and loving and she cut me off and asked, when was the last time you read fiction by a woman? And I honestly couldn’t come up with anything for a few minutes. It was a pretty shameful moment, in part, because I started wondering about early onset memory loss…
Chris Jackson/The Atlantic



Creative Writing and Psychology

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 16th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, Essays, From the Interweb, Writing Routines

The first psychologist-novelist we have asked to write for us is Elaine Hatfield, a noted social psychologist whose best known work is on love and its social implications. Her first novel was Rosie, about a young psychologist, Rosie St Giles, who has a temporary teaching job at the University of Hawaii.



Who are your favourite underrated writers?

By the Branta Webcrawler • Aug 12th, 2010 • Category: Editor's Picks, From the Interweb, Lists, Travel

Milan Kundera, meanwhile, is one of the few writers to win the dubious accolade of being called both overrated (”The Unbearable Shiteness Of Being,” says theswagman) and underrated (”why Kundera hasn’t won the Nobel prize is beyond me,” says @m0ses).
Alison Flood/The Guardian