Book Review: Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
In Irma Voth, Miriam Toews returns to her compelling (and successful) topic of following the inner world of a young teenage girl in a Mennonite community. A Complicated Kindness, which Irma Voth echoes, won Toews the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
Book Review: Bumble-Ardy by Maurice Sendak
Bumble Ardy is the somewhat confusing tale of a pig who turns nine and incurs the wrath of his guardian aunt by inviting circus performers to his first ever birthday party. Never mind that, in pig years, nine is well past maturity, and that the character’s name appears to have been chosen simply so the author has something to rhyme with the word party. The story itself simply doesn’t make much sense. Sendak is minimalistic at the best of times, but there’s a difference between sparse and lacking – the reader is never quite sure what is going on.
Greeting the Light at UFV: Campus welcomes new professors and research at free event
In one week, on October 20, UFV will present its first South Asian Literary Colloquium, an event that hopes to shine a light on the research and activities happening at UFV by staff and students in the field of South Asian studies. The event, which will have the full name, “Greeting the Light: UFV South Asian Literary Colloquium,” is sponsored by the Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies, the English department, the college of arts and the UFV research office. Greeting the Light will be an hour long lunch time event, running from noon to 1 p.m. and will feature readings followed by a Q&A and light refreshments.
Book Review: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
To read an author whose talent and imagination leads them through an array of genres is an interesting change from modern authors who stick to the familiar. Patchett is one such example, moving through the tangled Amazon in State of Wonder, to a home for unwed mothers in the 1960s in Patron Saint of Liars; from a father trying to protect his children in Run to a magician’s widow delving into the secrets of her deceased husband in The Magician’s Assistant. And now Bel Canto, a quiet reflection of twisted, lovely, complex, human relationships
Book Review: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
In The Paris Wife, Paula McLain rewrites A Moveable Feast from Hadley’s point of view, and captures the hopefulness and heartbreak experienced by the first Mrs. Hemingway.
Book Review: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
The idea for the literary non-fiction story was conceived when Hemingway received word from the Paris Ritz Hotel that he had two trunks left in the basement from long ago in his days when he lived there. Hemingway had forgotten all about these trunks, and went to inspect them. What he found was his old clothes from his years as a young American Expatriate, and old writings documenting the time he lived in Paris. This sparked the idea in his mind that he would write about Paris in the 1920s, from his own perspective, using these lost writings as the basis.
Book Review: This is a Book by Demetri Martin
The subtlety with which he delivers his material at first makes you wonder if he’s reached his punch line at all, but if you’re an intelligent audience member hoping to do more than just sit next to the drunk guy who laughs at anything anyway, then Demetri Martin is the one for you, especially now that his brilliance is so easily accessible in the form of his first book, This is a Book.
Book Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera is a singularly inventive and interesting author, and his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is an exemplary illustration of his deftness and wit.
Book Review: The Lotus Singers, ed. Trevor Carolan
In a modern age that has forgotten past memories all too often for the quick thrill and temporary buzz of iPads and meat-clad singers, let me, if you will, reintroduce an image you might remember – from a childhood story at least. It is of the travelling merchant, a peddler of goods, from nowhere in particular, yet, he certainly goes somewhere; everywhere even. And in this memory – mine and yours – he is an important man because he is the bringer of goods and the connector of places; he is a keeper of stories.
Pottermore for evermore
What did all the hype amount to? E-books, which are being sold directly from the publisher and will come with extras: images, small details about characters that have never been releases, and so on.
Book Review: Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. Rolfe Humphries
The power of this translation lies in how approachable the language is. This book doesn’t read like a dusty scholarly work; Humphries uses plain but vibrant English, and the ease of reading allows you to focus on the stories.
A summer bum’s guide to beach reads
It’s going to be a long, hot summer and the beach read is something that you can skim on a day by the water; a paperback that can have grains of sand between each page, grease smudges from the chips, and sun block smeared on the cover without you feeling guilty.
Book Review: Declare by Tim Powers
Such is one of the quotes with which Tim Powers opens Declare, a genre-twisting, hopelessly enigmatic, jewel of a story, which combines espionage, political intrigue, communists, and the supernatural into five hundred pages of esoteric brilliance. Pitched as a Cold War spy thriller, Declare has a level of detail that will make any history buff drool, yet it is melded with as engaging a story as has ever been written. You want to learn about deep-cover communist spy networks in Germany in 1941? Read Declare. You want to learn the sordid history of Kim Philby, British traitor, fox-owner, and member of the Cambridge Five? Read Declare. You want to learn the truth about the fall of communism, Catholicism, immortality, and how the three are related? Uh…what?
Book Review: The Warhol Gang by Peter Darbyshire
From The Raw Shark Texts to Atlas Shrugged and every Chuck Palahniuk novel in between, it’s not too hard these days to find a book (or film) that plays devious tricks on your mind. Rarer is the breed that takes you for that mental rollercoaster ride and then leaves you thinking about the underlying message for days to come. Enter Peter Darbyshire, with his follow up to the critically-acclaimed Please.
Book Review: Bossypants by Tina Fey
You may already know who Tina Fey is. It’s hard not to if you’ve owned a television at any point in the last 12 years or if you like comedy even a little bit. Long-running Saturday Night Live writer and Weekend Update co-anchor, outspoken liberal feminist, and creator of the critically successful comedy 30 Rock, Tina Fey has a history of making us laugh on screens both small and big. But can she make us laugh in the old fashioned chunk-of-paper book format? Yes, it turns out she can.
Book Review: Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett is a British author who has been writing for the past thirty-some-odd years. He has wrote with the likes of Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline and Stardust), but his real work as a writer has been in the Discworld series. Now into its 37th book, the series is an excellent mess of books to become immersed in over the summer break.
Book Review: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields, is the life story of a woman who never fully understands herself. The protagonist’s uncertainty is disquieting and creates a haunting story about irresolution and lack of fulfillment. Shields is a Canadian novelist and poet renowned for her writing of ordinary lives with perceptive depth and sympathy. Here she presents a tale that never fully defines the protagonist, instead impressing upon the reader the restrictions of the biographical novel.
Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon’s The Curi-ous Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – as his protagonist, Christopher would say about any novel – is a collection of “lies about things which didn’t happen.” This interpretation highlights the kind of ironic humor afforded by the protagonist’s unique perspective as a 15-year-old boy who is severe-ly autistic, remarkably intelligent, and entirely logical.
Book Review: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
It is rare to find a character in a book that so infiltrates the public mind that the name itself becomes an adjective. Only a few examples come to mind: Faust, Romeo, Satan (and I’m reaching with that last one). Yet in the pages of Don Quixote dwells a being so unabashedly strange that his name has become synonymous with delusional behaviour.
Book Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
In one of her latest novels, Margaret Atwood retells the tale of The Odyssey, this time from the point of view of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. After all, how would you feel if your husband left for ten years to go fight for your beautiful cousin and then vanished for another ten? In this work, Atwood gives a voice to the untold story of Penelope, as told by her from the underworld of Hades.
Book Review: Wally Lamb – She’s Come Undone
It takes an author with an exceedingly delicate touch to craft a heartwarming story of resilience and transformation peppered with such brutal and depressing topics as rape, childhood alienation, abusive relationships, and mental illness – yet this is exactly what Wally Lamb achieves with his debut work.
Book Review: The Sentamentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
Johanna Skibsrud has lived every aspiring Canadian author’s dream: come up with a novel idea to honour your dead relative, get a Canada Arts Council grant to write it, include a wealth of references to poetry and literature of your choice, get the novel printed through a small publisher you love, then, magically, find yourself the winner of the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, with your book suddenly in such high demand that the uber-publisher Douglas & McIntyre picks it up. Skibsrud has birthed a unicorn of modern publishing: a book that stays true to an author’s heart while attaining popular approval and financial success.
Book Review: The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen
Everyone of post-secondary age is probably familiar with that infamous claim of mysterious scientific origin: men think about sex every few seconds. Chad Kultgen’s book, The Average American Male, takes that claim a step further. Not only are straight American men aimless video game addicts, but they are quite literally willing to sleep with 98 percent of the female population, given the right conditions. In fact, Kultgen’s protagonist is unable to identify a single woman who he could honestly place in the remaining 2 percent, regardless of age, sanity, and (presumably) cleanliness.
Book Review: Fool Me Once by Rick Lax
The city of Las Vegas is one that is world renown for sucking in the most hardened skeptic, sending them packing after a few days of vacation broke, alone, and with no memory of the previous several days. What is it about Vegas that attracts individuals who have made it their life goal to hustle and scam people out of the money they have worked so hard to earn? How does a person avoid falling victim to one of the many tourist traps that plague a place like Sin City?
