May 2012
1 post
WatchThis video, inspired by Poe and created by Saskia Kretzschmann is aces.
April 2012
2 posts
4 tags
WatchYay! Calling all book fetishists. The best articulation of what we concede in the move from print to digital I’ve heard to date. Also, Chip Kidd is my new favorite person.
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The ever marvelous Andrei Codrescu waxes...
March 2012
4 posts
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“My search for Olympian Spring took me into the odd, automated world of...”
– Daniel Handler with the all time best description of the wild and crazy world that is POD publishing I’ve ever read. It’s from a piece in the January 2012 issue of The Believer entitled “What the Swedes Read: A Reader Makes His Way through One Book by Each Nobel Laureate”...
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Of God and Guns and Dirty Old Men
I’ve always loved writing that takes a circuitous route to its subject. I enjoy a good meander, an incongruence even more. It is somehow especially delicious to discover that a jag about reality TV can tell us something new about Beckett. John Updike’s New Yorker pieces famously tacked midcourse to come around to the topic at hand. Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been...
4 tags
Criminally Good
I don’t put much stock in jacket flak. It’s is the land of abstract nouns and mutual ass kissing. But I only had to read Tom Franklin’s endorsement of Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana and I was fully committed: “planning a summer trip north from Mississippi, these stories caused me to reroute to avoid Southern Indiana.” Just as Winter’s Bone...
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There's a Bluebird In My Heart
Oh hai! It has been an awfully long time. Oops! I could tell you it’s because I left my old laid back print publishing gig to join the “acme ereader co” / ebook circus and it is bananas and leaves me zilch time for blogging shenanigans. Or I could spare you the excuses and give you a present. Presents are way more fun (yay presents!) so let’s do that. One of my all time...
December 2011
3 posts
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This is the Way the World Ends: Tom Perrotta's The...
There are plenty of ways to imagine the apocalypse. You can go the zombie route; very de rigueur. You can go environmental catastrophe which has a kind of Jerry Bruckheimer bent to it. Let’s see, alien invasion? Unnamed manmade catastrophe. Artificial intelligence takeover a la H.G. Wells. Social-scientific engineering run amok. Rotisseried infants shouldn’t be attempted unless your...
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Poem of the Week: "The Tollund Man"
New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.
I am very fond of Seamus Heaney. Especially his loose collection some refer to as the “bog people poems”. My honors seminar was on the human body as effigy in literature and “The Tollund Man” was a required read. It popped up again in a class on contemporary Irish...
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Behind the Danger Door: David Almond's Skellig
A lot of reviews of YA and children’s novels begin in the confessional mode. Something like “I admit it, I too indulge in the guilty pleasures of novels intending for people much younger than myself.” Scandalous! Such statements seem driven by a desire to be seen as a very serious reader (or at least a very serious critic). And I always think, well, if you really are a serious...
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Poem of the Week: "Marginalia"
New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.
This week’s poem is really my guy’s pick. It was him that put me on to Billy Collins. Like a lot of the poetry I’m attached to, it’s hard to recall where or when exactly it embedded itself in my consciousness. The guy can’t really remember either but he thinks it...
November 2011
5 posts
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Call me Skrimshander: 5 Reasons to Read Chad...
Is it possible to talk about Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding without addressing the significant advance or the panting anticipation leading up to the Fall season or the way that publishers fell all over themselves trying to sign him and then, how he went with Little Brown because they are David Foster Wallace’s publisher (reputedly for less money but who knows). Oh, and...
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The Best Book You'll Ever Read about a Country...
While I was reading Barbara Demick’s incredible book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, more than one person sauntered past my desk, had their curiosity peaked by the cover and then proclaimed “wow, that looks like heavy going reading.” When I would respond with something like “oh no, it’s riveting!” they would invariably give me the incredulous...
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Poem of the Week: "Very Simply Topping Up the...
New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.
As a literature major, I read a lot of poetry at school. Some of it I loved and a lot of it I read solely to fulfill the draconian course requirements of my undergraduate program. It was of that sort that leant heavily toward Wordsworth and Coleridge and in which the Modernists, let alone...
13 tags
Loot!: Heists, Little People and Swedes
Recently, I leant a friend a copy of Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding (which is amazing and I highly recommend by the way). He made it through 350 of its 500 odd pages and then gave it back saying “I loved it up until that point but the characters just got so pathetic so I stopped.” What the fuck is that about? This is a perfectly intelligent individual whose tastes...
October 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Adventures in Clubland: J.G. Ballard's Empire of...
I’m a big fat J.G. Ballard fan. To pilfer a Rob Gordon expression, Crash is in my all time top 5. If you don’t like that book, I don’t know, I’m not sure we can be friends. We read Empire of the Sun last month at my book club. I was like, yay!, we’re reading Ballard! People are gonna love this shit! Nope. We score books on a 10 point scale for kicks. Ballard had to...
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Fuck the Midtones: How to Make a Book with Steidl
I waited for a very long time for the paperback of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to come out. Literally years. I’m not cheap, I just think that shiny silver foil cover they went with for the hardcover is horrendous. Seriously, who approved that? If you look at it head on, it has the effect of looking into one of those shoddy rest stop mirrors. You know the ones I mean? Fine...
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Beautiful Things: Madras Press
The bibliophile’s love affair avec le livre is sadomasochistic and insatiable: the reader can not get enough, buys more than she would physically be able to read in a lifetime, fetishizes over bindings and jackets, pads her grocery budget with book purchases (wait, maybe that’s just me). That is to say, book lovers pray at the church of print, not that of DRM protected files (though...
September 2011
2 posts
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The Kids are Alright: Kevin Wilson's The Family...
I bought my copy of Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang on the day the embargo tape was peeled from the boxes. In practice this meant that I had to beg the stock chick to go and rummage in the Harper Collins shipment in the receiving room / store basement. I should really send them a thank you card now that I think about it. Not every book slinger would be willing to do that for you. Why...
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Inside the War Machine: Field Notes from the Back...
It’s great to be back after an extended hiatus. I feel like a soldier on leave from the front lines. The war in question being the annual back to school rush or, if you want to sound like a true publishing geek, BTS.
For those of you not familiar, I should probably mention that I work in academic publishing. For me, the first couple of weeks of September have long lost their sepia toned...
August 2011
1 post
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Sex! Booze! Badly Executed Crimes!: Ron Hansen's A...
Brangelina, sexting Tigers, philandering governors…tabloids and their attendant headlines are now so pervasive a part of our popular culture that they barely warrant comment. Couple that with Twitter and a 24 hour news cycle and scandals lose their steam before they even have much of a chance to capture the lusty side of the public imagination, let alone before they can find their way into...
July 2011
4 posts
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Of Wizards and Wall Street: Diana B. Henriques on...
All the talk about credit default swaps and toxic lending and the migraine inducing exercise of trying to figure out what the hell a derivative is can make it easy to forget that behind the curtain of Oz, humans were fiddling with the cogs, that the financial crises is a manifestation of human folly. This is equally true of the Madoff scandal. After you wrap your mind around the mechanics of...
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Paper Planes: Field Notes from the McLuhan100...
Is it just me or has the whole “future of the book” discussion gotten really tiresome? I know at least one publishing executive who has put a moratorium on forwarding article links related to ebooks…he just couldn’t take it anymore. And for my part, ebooks have always seemed kind of 1982. Sure I like the idea of saving myself a hernia from carrying around half my library...
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The Shorn Identity: Emily St. John Mandel's The...
In her sophomore effort The Singer’s Gun, Emily St. John Mandel delivers a sophisticated cocktail of a novel that is part literary espionage thriller, part nuanced study of 21st century identity politics. Using document forgery as an inroad to explore more weighty concerns of familial identity and how well we can really know the ones we love, Mandel has given readers a ripping yarn that...
5 tags
L. Ron Hubbard is a Psychopath And So Are You: Jon...
Are you a) glib or prone to superficial charm b) kind of slutty / prone to promiscuous behavior c) impulsive d) irresponsible e) lacking in remorse or guilt? How about callousness? Do you find it hard to empathize with people? Me too! We must be psychopaths. My boss surely is, as evidenced by f) parasitic lifestyle and g) grandiose sense of self-worth. I work in publishing; everyone has a...
June 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Rough Trade: Scott Carney's The Red Market
Scott Carney’s study of the underground (and not so underground) trade in blood and bones, corneas and kidneys, children and eggs The Red Market begins perhaps the only way it can if it is to successfully transcend mere catalogue of horrors. That is to say, with the author’s own personal recollection of an event that revealed to him first hand the swiftness with which our bodies can...
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Loot!: A NOLA Edition
When I travel to a town I’ve never been to before I begin with the literature. It might be novels, historical studies or journalism. I’ll usually try and find the local entertainment rag online as well. This is me getting my bearings and while of course it does little to dispel the shock of the new upon landing, it tends to serve me better than a Lonely Planet. Plus, I can’t...
2 tags
Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones and Butter
It is helpful on occasion to be reminded that you’re not cut out for certain professions. In the right context, this should be liberating rather than discouraging. Being a chef for example; not for everybody. Despite my Top Chef induced romanticism for the trade that, in fits of delusion, makes me think “I could totally do that”, it is helpful to get a kick in the pants every...
May 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Watch this Space: Maple Street Book Shop
In his gorgeous paean to the crescent city, Why New Orleans Matters, Tom Piazza invokes the gospel traditional “no cross, no crown” as shorthand for the complex tangle of beauty and heartbreak that makes New Orleans a city like no other. That’s it exactly: a city gorgeous despite, or perhaps a city gorgeous in part because of all its hardship. Like an arrow straight to the heart,...
8 tags
Field Notes from the 2011 Toronto Comic Arts...
The Toronto Comic Arts Fest gets better every year, rounding up a strong Canadian contingent and a growing international presence of the best of the best in comics. It’s a terrific antidote to the caped crusader insanity of the ComiCons and after last year’s debacle with FanExpo, the manageable scale and reasonably short lines (unless you’re waiting on Chester Brown’s...
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So That Happened: An Evening with Nicholas Hoare
There are few lovelier ways to spend a rainy Wednesday evening than in the company of fellow book lovers at Nicholas Hoare Books, Toronto’s temple to bibliophilia, getting the skinny on the Spring list from the store’s eponymous owner over a glass of white and some very good cheese. There are two ways to do a bookstore well to my thinking: go church or go rock and roll. The now...
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Adventures in Clubland: Terry Fallis' The Best...
Sunday’s book club huddle took a run at Canada Reads and Stephen Leacock Award winner Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans. Just to keep things interesting, we invited Terry to join us for brunch and question period. As he’s a gracious and generous soul, he was kind enough to accept. Having the author of the book you’re dishing at book club present while partaking in said...
April 2011
3 posts
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If I'm Going to Spend 200 Odd Pages with Squeegee...
Laura Miller once said of reviewing: “You have to be honest. It’s bad when an author gets a bad review he or she doesn’t deserve, but it’s bad for the overall ecology of book reviews, if a reviewer gives a book an unduly positive review.” I struggle with this issue. I tend to review books which moved me, books which I feel compelled to share my delight in. It’s not that there...
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I Never Need to Do: David...
Here’s an image that’ll be burned on your brain for all eternity: man wanders into the sweltering, humid Amazon jungle. Besieged by mosquitoes, flies and gnats in turn, his flesh becomes host to maggots. With a fervor approaching mania he tries to forcibly remove them, seizing upon their heads as they periscope out of oozing holes they’ve bored in his arms, to no avail. Relief...
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How to Spot a Red Seth: Karen Russell's...
Some characters you cleave to with Linus and blanket like ardor. For me that list would include Joe Christmas, Kureishi’s Karim, Beckett’s Murphy and, since reading Karen Russell’s short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (amazing title no?), Ava Bigtree. Unless you’re in trilogy country, you aren’t often offered the chance to revisit...
March 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Up the Eiger in Under 3 (and other Gems of the...
Performance fleece, beards and bikes took over the Bloor Cinema this weekend for the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I’d been to the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival earlier in the year and, well, after that experience I thought I was done with outdoorsy movies for life (there was one short at that festival about cliff jumpers in North Van that made me fear for the future of...
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Person Other Than Grunt: A Letter of Appreciation...
Publishing houses, especially smaller houses and especially in bureau outposts (ie Canada), tend to be relatively flat organizations. Company heads are often accessible and visible, the idea of the suit swaddled C-Suite executive a cute and exotic concept (embraced nonetheless by a few lone egotists who fancy themselves a poor man’s Warren Buffett). If you work in publishing there is, of...
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How to Tame a Tiger: Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife
An admission: I really wanted to dislike Téa Obreht’s exhaustively lauded new novel The Tiger’s Wife. After the New Yorker 20 under 40 listing and the Times love in, you want to be able to say “oh come on, it can’t possibly be that good.” Salon, predictably, took a run at finding something to take Obreht to task over. A valiant attempt but in the end it just came...
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Naked Ladies on Fire Escapes and Other Good...
Dear David: you had me at line one. Oh kindred spirit, my fellow Debbie Downer, brother from another mother, how fond I am of thee. As has been mentioned elsewhere, I am an unabashed fangirl of David Rakoff and his skewering, acerbic, romping essays. The way doughy pimply faced basement dwelling teenage boys feel about Boba Fett, that’s me and Rakoff. So, I suppose you can just stop...
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Adventures in Clubland: Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed
The great thing about book clubs is that people are likely to disagree on the variable merits of a book. That’s why I joined one. I knew though that there would come a month when the author on deck was a) a writer that I cherished and b) said cherished writer would be subject to a communal smackdown. Witness the vitriolic reaction to Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed at our last get...
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A Neon Spangled Bestiary: Trinie Dalton's Wide...
A year or so ago I went to a Dan Deacon gig that was held in a basement art gallery; a venue that was chosen, I can only assume, because it came with ample parking space for the yellow biodiesel school bus Deacon and his opening band were touring in. It certainly wasn’t chosen for its ventilation; as would become painfully apparent a couple of hours later when a mustachioed fellow fainted...
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Arrested Development: Margaux Fragoso's Tiger,...
Margaux Fragoso’s new memoir Tiger, Tiger is going to spawn furious debate. It’s a land mine of a book with an astonishing story to tell.
Between the ages of 7 and 22 Fragoso was the victim of and was ensnared in a relationship with a pedophile until, at the age of 66, he committed suicide. By providing a kind of fantastic technicolor imaginarium replete with exotic animals, secret...
February 2011
11 posts
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Loot!: Tigers of Another Stripe, Coyote Cops and...
I’ve been setting reading goals and then blowing them with procrastination, watching reruns of Generation Kill and clips from Portlandia on YouTube instead. It’s been a long week for what was actually a short week, post-long weekend. Long weekends are bittersweet anyway. I’ve never had one go by without someone saying to me “every week should be a four day week”....
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So That Happened: Field Notes from the Riverdale...
“You like books?” It was the last thing she expected him to say. It stunned her - thirty, forty seconds until she figured out what it meant. Bait. But how had he figured her out so fast?…She’d found her way to the Riverdale Library on her third day in town, but Billy wasn’t allowed in and they wouldn’t let her take anything out…”Not...
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Long Cons and Short Bets: Mat Johnson and Simon...
Setting an action packed bank heist narrative in a Katrina wracked New Orleans seems at first a bit of a cheap ploy. At the very least it’s a dangerous proposition. How do you ensure you honor both the integrity of the story and the place and people whose experience is serving as fodder for your material? When you consider the political context of the Katrina disaster though, a heist story...
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So That Happened: Notes from the Divinity Gene...
I adore launches for debut authors. There’s so much love in the room. Friends and family and early adopters that, having gotten there first, think of themselves as friends / family. When the writer is of considerable talent and the book is destined for great things, even more so. Couple that with a Gladstone Hotel booking and make it a This is Not a Reading Series event and I’m...
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Poem of the Day: Simon Armitage's "Homecoming"
Simon Armitage is a total rock star. A kind of new wavey sharp-tongued renegade. His poems are preoccupied with the gorgeousness of ordinary things: a spider, taking the cat to the vet, childhood cloakrooms. Constellations of the banal. His language cuts to the quick. It dodges and swerves and you only feel the beat down after he’s gone. He writes immensely human poems joyfully devoid of...
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Love Letter to 27L: Alain de Botton's A Week at...
Multiple choice question. Are airports a) a necessary inconvenience en route to your all inclusive pleasuredome b) an extension of your office replete with wi-fi and endless cappucinos c) an interstitial wonderland of fleeting delight and technological marvel or d) none of the above / somewhere you’ve successfully avoided thus far with the exception of that George Clooney movie? If d) I...
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The Beautiful Physics of Grieving: Darin Strauss'...
When you are 18 and especially if you are 18 in a small town, your actions tend to define you in ways that are both painful and reductive. The girl who slept with that guy, the dude who got drunk and did whatever. People despair to get out of small towns for that reason. They become desperate to grow up and be something else. The claustrophobia of never being able to be anything other than that...
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End of Days for HB Fenn
A painful and chaotic week in Canadian publishing as HB Fenn began bankruptcy proceedings. It’s still uncertain what will happen to Fenn owned Key Porter’s authors. Everyone’s talking about their backlist - Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat etc - but I feel most for their debut authors slated for a spring book release. Those writers are without a publisher at the most tender stage...