Gruesome Twosome

2009/06/30

Derek McCormack and Tony Burgess launch the Scream Festival with dancing and rampant spirit fingers

Raising the dead

2009/06/24

A user’s guide to Scream in High Park 2009

The Scribe: Derek McCormack

2009/06/24

With his newest book, The Show That Smells, praised by New York Magazine, a fashion column in the National Post and a curatorial series at TYPE, Toronto writer Derek McCormack appears to be the po-mo Timothy Findley, with dead baby jokes to spare.

Animal

2009/06/17

One of the problems involved in reviewing short stories is that everything becomes a spoiler, especially with a punchy writer like Alexandra Leggat. Just as she’s setting up riddles, the writer quickly switches to short-circuiting expectations. I’ll tread carefully.

Ripped: How the wired generation revolutionized music

2009/06/10

Greg Kot’s happy take on the music industry’s apparent apocalypse

The Wright stuff

2009/06/04

There must be something in the initials. The American poet C.D. Wright and the Canadian poet A.F. Moritz are both $50,000 richer today, following the award ceremony of this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize, held at a lovely Mexican-themed gala dinner and dance party on June 3rd in the Distillery District. (Yes, boozed-up poets getting their groove on to a sax-heavy soul cover band is a sight to see.)

We wear short-shorts

2009/05/27

A rap session on summer short-fiction collections: John Goldbach's Selected Blackouts and Vanishing by Deborah Willis

The glories of the Griffin

2009/05/27

Scott Griffin, Canadian captain of industry and noted philanthropist, created The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry after a dinner party, attended by Michael Ondaatje and David Young, during which the guests lamented the decline of poetry’s place in public consciousness. Determined to promote the art’s profile, the Griffin Trust launched the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001, offering a large purse (the prize is now $50,000) to both a Canadian poet and an international poet. Eight years later, there are promising signs that the mission is making its mark here in Toronto.

Appalling girlhood, mad science and death

2009/05/20

A round-up of recent, small-press verse titles featuring Carolyn Smart, Mathew Tierney and Patrick Woodcock

Broken social studies

2009/05/13

Inside and outside the music with BSS friend/biographer Stuart Berman

My Winnipeg*

2009/05/07

In a new book inspired by his film My Winnipeg, Canada’s most acclaimed art-film director — Guy Maddin — investigates the not-completely-factual history of his hometown and his relationship with it, and illuminates the love-hate relationship many of us feel about the places we come from

Q&A: Guy Maddin

2009/05/06

On the launch of his book My Winnipeg, the acclaimed filmmaker talks to EYE WEEKLY about Hollywood, hockey and hometowns

A Drifting Life

2009/05/06

Enigmatic Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi comes to TCAF to discuss his extensive memoir

Columbine

2009/04/29

Denver journalist Dave Cullen’s seamless, devastating account of the Columbine school massacre is a great work.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

2009/04/22

Isn’t wanting to rewrite the Bible just a juvenile pursuit up there on any boy’s list, right in between “invent new language” and “masturbate five times a day?” Maybe, but thank god for juvenile things.

The ego book boom

2009/04/17

The end of the personal blog as the primary platform for idiosyncratic iconoclasts to get attention also means the end of the notion that the blog can be a direct line to a book deal. But publishing advances continue to be exchanged for webstunts: Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages From Home, based on the email-submission website Postcards From Yo Momma, aspires to be a seasonal impulse hit for Hyperion. Twitter Wit, a curated collection of 140-character messages, is slated for HarperCollins publication this fall.

Sheiks and geeks

2009/04/15

Richard Poplak’s The Sheikh’s Batmobile follows the path of American Pop in the Middle East

Buying Cigarettes for the Dogs

2009/04/07

This author publishes a book a year and none of them has ever sucked. That’s Stuart Ross.

Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music

2009/04/01

During my freshman year in high school, my only friend was an older kid who, a few years before, had lost half his face and a few fingers in a fiery drunk-driving accident.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963

2009/03/25

“This has been a necessity for me for the last four years: to document + structure my experiences, to understand my growth as dialectic....

Expressway

2009/03/18

There’s a built-in speed bump to any road novel or film: the setting is inherently false.

Pink Flag

2009/03/11

Is there much debate to be had on the greatest pop recording of the 20th century?

Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining our Conversation

2009/03/04

Snark is FAIL. That phrase might serve as an abbreviated thesis for David Denby’s slim, book-length essay Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, if he were conversant in the contemporary vernacular.

Overqualified

2009/02/25

A story told through job-application cover letters to an assortment of corporations is a bold, imaginative paradigm shift in today’s challenging publishing climate

Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

2009/02/18

Though Lucretius and other names of antiquity appear throughout the searching, philosophical verse of Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, Robertson’s sensibility — an exuberant, saucy approach to the materiality of language and vice versa — is much more in step with George Clinton than long-dead ascetics