Posts tagged as:

Montreal books

BOOKS

Richard Florida’s Post-Crash Rx: Go Local and Organic

Thumbnail image for Richard Florida’s Post-Crash Rx: Go Local and Organic

The Great Reset, by Richard Florida, Random House Canada

by Joni Dufour
13.06.2010

Presumably a play on the term the Great Depression, Richard Florida’s latest title The Great Reset follows a string of books, all variations on the theme of socio-physics. Here, Florida compares the recoveries that have followed financial catastrophes of the past and takes a forensic look at the patterns that are embedded in the upswings. [...]

[...]

BOOKS

A Don Quixote for the Age

Thumbnail image for A Don Quixote for the Age

Toby: A Man, by Todd Babiak, Harper Collins

by Neil MacRae
12.06.2010

Among the clearest, most pervasive symptoms of a society’s decline is its abandonment of manners, good taste and tact. Such is Toby Ménard’s honest belief, and the restoration of these virtues has become his life’s work. But Toby’s confrontation with boorish reality is about to begin.

[...]

BOOKS

Yann Martel’s Revenge

Thumbnail image for Yann Martel’s Revenge

Beatrice & Virgil, by Yann Martel, Knopf Canada

by Mélanie Grondin
07.06.2010

A few years ago, during the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, Yann Martel read an excerpt of his work in progress: The 20th-Century Shirt. Crumpled papers in hand, he tantalized the audience with a sneak peek at the anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi, winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize. He left us with [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Deferring to the World of the Intellect

Thumbnail image for Deferring to the World of the Intellect

Therefore Choose, by Keith Oatley, Goose Lane Editions

by B. A. Markus
06.06.2010

Some writers break all the rules and yet manage to create works of literary brilliance. Their books leave the rest of us struggling writers both astounded by their unique talents and slightly resentful of their audacity. These literary non-conformists brazenly forge their own paths, ignoring the laws of writing that one hears articulated ad nauseam [...]

[...]

BOOKS

The Dignity of Deep Love

Thumbnail image for The Dignity of Deep Love

Lookout, by John Steffler, McClelland & Stewart

by Roger Sauls
31.05.2010

John Steffler is the kind of poet who likes to burrow into a landscape’s least beautiful recesses. Once inside, he’s an unusual tenant, his impulses anything but those of a mystic. When he’s in the kind of terrain that inspires his poems—the rock-strewn topography of Newfoundland, say, or the coasts of the Maritime Provinces—he inhabits [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Nothing Rhymes With Revenge

Thumbnail image for Nothing Rhymes With Revenge

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, by Adina Hoffman, Yale University Press

by Leila Marshy
30.05.2010

Let’s play word association. I say Palestinian, what do you say? Terrorist? Suicide bomber? Anti-Semite? For Adina Hoffman, an American Jew living in Jerusalem, the word that came into her head was Poet.

[...]

BOOKS

They in Their Cruel Traps, and We in Ours

Thumbnail image for They in Their Cruel Traps, and We in Ours

Penned: Zoo Poems, Stephanie Bolster, Katia Grubisic, and Simon Reader, Eds., Signal Editions

by Abby Paige
23.05.2010

Ever since we were kicked out of Eden, we’ve been trying to get back in, and sometimes the zoo seems like the next best thing. There, we can wander amid the animal kingdom from which we’ve been exiled, looking at animals and being looked at by them, seeing between cage bars the frighteningly familiar and [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Rich in Wit and Implication

Thumbnail image for Rich in Wit and Implication

Wanton, by Angela Hibbs, Insomniac Press

by Brian Campbell
22.05.2010

Angela Hibbs’ poetry is one of leaping semblances, wry cleverness, and urgent, dark confessions. Wanton, her second book, is actually two lengthy chapbooks sewn together: the first, a pastiche of dark, edgy poems mostly concerning an ill-fated love or oppressive father, the second, a long series of linked verses concerning unseemly goings-on in an imaginary [...]

[...]

BOOKS

“The Biography of a Gesture”

Thumbnail image for “The Biography of a Gesture”

Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, by Denise Chong, Random House

by Maria Schamis Turner
17.05.2010

On Tuesday, May 23, 1989, Lu Decheng, a bus mechanic from Hunan province in China and his two friends Yu Dongyue and Yu Zhijian made their way to Tiananmen Square. Throngs of student protesters had been gathering there for days. The three men positioned themselves in front of the giant portrait of Mao hanging at [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Stretching the Vampiric Envelope

Thumbnail image for Stretching the Vampiric Envelope

Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick, Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing

by Michael Mirolla
16.05.2010

Gay vampires. Blues-playing vampires. Taboo-breaking vampires. Bureaucratic vampires. Family-oriented vampires. Oedipal vampires. Sick vampires. Vampires who appear on Oprah. Friendly. Vicious. Helpful. Hurtful. Nancy Kilpatrick has gathered them all in Evolve, a collection featuring twenty-four 100% red-blooded Canadian writers determined to stretch the vampiric envelope.

[...]

BOOKS

A Perfect Balance of History and Humanity

Thumbnail image for A Perfect Balance of History and Humanity

The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon, Vintage Canada

by Mélanie Grondin
10.05.2010

Aristotle is travelling back to Pella, the capital of Macedon, where he spent most of his childhood. He intends to pay his respects to King Philip, a childhood friend, then move on to Athens where he will open up a school. (He’ll only head for Athens some 250 pages later.)

[...]

BOOKS

Call Him Ishmael

Thumbnail image for Call Him Ishmael

Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers, by Ishmael Reed, Baraka Books

by David Homel
09.05.2010

It’s rare for Montreal to receive the visit of a top-level black American intellectual, but that’s exactly what happened when Ishmael Reed dropped by in mid-April. He was in Canada to promote his book Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media. For any Canadian who doesn’t know the history of our neighbors to the south, [...]

[...]

BOOKS

Reading Between the Lines

Thumbnail image for Reading Between the Lines

R’s Boat, by Lisa Robertson, University of California Press

by Abby Paige
03.05.2010

Lisa Robertson’s latest collection, R’s Boat, may be read as a formal experiment, an autobiographical game, an argument about language and gender, or an attempt to put the unsayable on the page — but not, if you please, as a poem. Its author has described the work as neither a book of poems nor a [...]

[...]

Page 5 of 512345