Notes from a Literary Lad
Nutshell Ian McEwan Knopf Canada Readers familiar with Ian McEwan solely from his more conventional later work might be unaware of how deeply strange his fiction can be. The story collection First Love, Last Rites and early novels such as
from Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush The title “Vulnerable Adults” could reasonably refer to pretty much any of the stories in Kerry Lee Powell’s debut collection of short fiction, which has recently been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The stories
The two writers could hardly have been more different: one a sentimental magical realist whose best-known novel is a fantasy about a son connecting with his dead father through the medium of baseball; the other a scabrous existentialist whose best-known
Last week, I published a post suggesting that print books were, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, far from dead in an increasingly digital marketplace. Justin Fox of BloombergView disagrees, at least to an extent. Fox points to the same Pew
from I Am No One You Know When writers invoke 9/11 in fiction, it frequently feels like an artificial attempt to inject gravitas into a narrative (see, e.g., Claire Messud’s 2006 comedy of bourgeois manners, The Emperor’s Children). But even
Is there another writer of short fiction whose output exhibits such a staggeringly wide range of quality as F. Scott Fitzgerald? Some of the jazz age author’s shorter works – like “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” – are
There are some interesting trends in the North American bookselling sector worth keeping an eye on over the coming months. Big-box chain Indigo, which now describes itself as “Canada’s largest book, gift, and specialty toy retailer,” had a relatively rosy
The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism Kristin Dombek Farrar, Straus and Giroux We’ve all heard the story: narcissism is on the rise, reaching dangerous, even epidemic proportions, driven especially by a generation weaned online and
“While print is not yet dead,” wrote Jeff Gomez in 2007, “it is undoubtedly sickening. Newspaper readership has been in decline for years, magazines are also in trouble, and trade publishing (the selling of novels and non-fiction books to adults
from Fantastic Tales (Italo Calvino, ed.) In his introduction to “The Sandman,” arguably E.T.A. Hoffmann’s most famous tale, anthologist Italo Calvino remarks that the story “was the principal source for Offenbach’s opera and the point of departure for an essay