ARTS: BOOKS

This is not a fifth anniversary

2008/08/27

Five years ago, Pages Books proprietor Glassman, along with his then–store manager Shaun Smith, concocted This Is Not a Reading Series, a venue for publishers to launch their books with one challenging constraint: no readings.

Bush on trial

2008/08/20

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder recently cracked the Top 20 of The New York Times list with no reviews or media coverage. That basically makes author Vincent Bugliosi the Danielle Steele of polemicists. Steele is popular because she tells overwrought stories like a reliably tawdry machine. Bugliosi is popular because his idea is a potent one, even if the media has so far been incapable of understanding a non-partisan anti-Bush screed.

Rawi Hage

2008/08/13

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach is the kind of alienated-outsider book they just don’t write anymore. Credit that to the range and dark humour Hage extracts from his unnamed immigrant narrator who hails from an unnamed Arabic country and whose suicide attempt opens up the Montreal-set novel. (Reviewers, by the way, hate unnamed narrators, no matter how good a story is, because dropping “the narrator” into every other sentence makes a review sound like a precocious Grade 11 book report… but I digress).

Let’s do some crimes

2008/08/06

For all the forgotten talk of the indie film “renaissance” of the early 1990s — though expect the IFC documentary and critical reassessment of turkeys like Four Rooms or Sleep With Me anytime now — no filmmaker from that era ever had an edge on director Alex Cox.

Healthy reading

2008/08/06

New wellness-inducing books by Haruki Murakami, Anne Kent Rush and Billy Mavreas

Before the levees broke

2008/07/30

Five families — one black middle class, one white middle class, one black poor, one white poor and one upwardly mobile South Asian — all converge on one New Orleans street over a pre-Katrina year. Noting that the car-crash narrative device is now toast, what incident could bring this neighbourhood together at the beginning of Babylon Rolling (Knopf, 301 pages, $29.95), the second novel by Amanda Boyden?

Family ties

2008/07/30

Governor General’s Award–winning memoirist and poet Rachel Manley elegantly describes her late grandmother Edna as “between the lines of life.”

Drive-by psychology

2008/07/23

How’s this for a sociology assignment? Study a place where millions of people — cutting across every cultural and economic divide — are in constant flux but in the same general state, day-after-day. I know what you’re thinking — just cue the hilariously smug REM video set in a traffic jam. That’s one way of thinking about traffic. Another way is the route Tom Vanderbilt takes in his monumental study Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Knopf, 401 pages, $29.95).

Don’t fear the reaper

2008/07/16

Black Flies (Soft Skull, 185 pages, $16.50), the second novel by former New York paramedic Shannon Burke, is journal-like, telling in its narrative and laden with speeches. Despite that, it is also a balls-to-the-wall read with lucid writing that makes very little in the way of tonal missteps. Creative writing instructors and workshop pimps be damned. If you’re lucky enough to have a good story to tell, you don’t need much else.

My porno ’tis of thee

2008/07/09

The Porning of America (Beacon Press, 272 pages, $24.95), by professors Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott, sounds like it could be a Michael Medved book, but the authors’ stated goal is an even-handed assessment of porn’s porting into mainstream culture and, according to them, “how porn has shaped us, how it has affected how we see ourselves and one another.”

Scream preview: A tale of two Bills

2008/07/02

Several weeks ago, flustered Minister of Industry Jim Prentice warbled a variation on that discourse kill switch installed in every Conservative’s frontal lobe, “The market will take care of it,” before hanging up on Jesse Brown of CBC’s Search Engine.

The webmaster

2008/06/25

He co-created one of the most recognizable and lucrative characters on the planet, but today Steve Ditko lives off meagre pensions, still virtually anonymous outside the world of comics. That’s partly by design. A profoundly shy and private man, the cartoonist has forsworn photographs and interviews for 40 years, not long after abandoning his most famous creation: Spider-Man.

Summer reading

2008/06/18

For the car trip… Anyone growing up within a 400-mile radius of Niagara Falls has likely endured family trips to the “natural” wonder. In Ginger Strand’s meticulously researched history, Inventing Niagara (Simon & Shuster, 352 pages, $28.99), she details the area’s transformation from sublime nature to mediated kitsch stuck between two different countries. Strand uses the falls as a way into topics as diverse as North American relations, Love Canal, mass graves of radioactive mice and the dashed hopes of park visionary Frederick Olmsted. While it’s not covered in the book, I also heartily recommend you never do House of Frankenstein on mushrooms after eating at the Golden Griddle.

RM Vaughan

2008/06/18

When I meet poet, playwright, journalist and video artist RM Vaughan at a park in Kensington to talk about his new book, Troubled (Coach House, 80 pages, $16.95), he immediately gives me a present: a white pin with “PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT RICHARD FLORIDA” printed in microscopic type on it. “That’s the YA version,” he cracks, digging out another pin with a larger font and handing it to me. “This one’s the seniors’ version.”

Sonic Youth: Goodbye 20th Century

2008/06/11

Depending on your age, Sonic Youth either single-handedly destroyed your musical spectrum or made it. No matter your opinion, their story is the most unique band history in pop music. No one else ever went from selling 60,000 independent albums to signing a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal for albums that sold… 60,000 copies. How they maintained that arrangement right up until last year’s Rather Ripped is explored in Goodbye 20th Century (DaCapo, 421 pages, $27.95), David Browne’s exhaustive biography of the group.

Black metal dos and don’ts

2008/06/04

Black metal: it’s not just for alienated, Norwegian-welfare-collecting neo-Nazis anymore. Thanks to Vice, plum-smuggling, ironic prep-school jerks now have a coffee table collection to thumb through next time they have a panic attack and need to laugh at men dressed sillier than themselves. Oh, the regions the ecosystem of cool now has to reach for these days to maintain itself.

Reading is fundamentalist

2008/05/28

In the middle of her book against reading, The Solitary Vice (Counterpoint, 224 pages, $16.50), author and literature professor Mikita Brottman relates the most hilarious in-class misreading of Lolita ever. While numerating gifts given to Lolita by Humbert, an undergrad student of Brottman’s included DVDs on the list. “A DVD?” Brottman asked her student. “The Little Mermaid, she reminded me … she was right, Humbert does buy Lolita a copy of The Little Mermaid, but it’s not a DVD, it’s a book by Hans Christian Andersen.”

Rise up

2008/05/21

Toronto’s Shary Boyle is well known for her stream-of-consciousness drawings and for bringing far-flung mediums — overhead projectors, animation, country music — into her relentless art practice. As well, she has spent the last few years perfecting the craft of the porcelain figurine, the results of which are collected in Otherworld Uprising (Conundrum, 96 pages, $25).

Plague city blues

2008/05/14

Within the first few pages of her new novel Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books, 300 pages, $20.95) Maggie Helwig clears the air regarding novels and airborne toxic events. Just after a schoolgirl smells something rose-scented and collapses in a Toronto subway car, Alex, a medical photographer, converses with a friend on airborne toxic events. “That’s from a book, right?” Alex asks.

What is it good for?

2008/05/07

Editor Stephen Elliott’s slim political pamphlet Where to Invade Next (McSweeney’s, 96 pages, $16) begins with a quote by General Wesley Clark describing US government plans from 2001 to “take out seven countries in five years.”

Dogtown

2008/04/30

The most radical thing about Sharp Teeth (Harper Collins, 320 pages, $24.95) isn’t the story that Toby Barlow has come up with — though it is suitably gonzo — it’s that Harper Collins published a 320-page epic poem in hardcover. It happens as often as there are good books about werewolves.
As Sharp Teeth’s broken lines have it, an ancient race of lycanthropes has set up shop in contemporary Los Angeles, living on the fringes as a gang of criminals and meth cookers, until a double-cross sends the pack’s leader into hiding as a suburban pet. Also in the mix is a love-that-dare-not-bark-its-name plot between a dogcatcher who’s not cut out for the severity of his job and the werewoman he falls hard for.

Learnin’ Japanese

2008/04/23

Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere (Free Press, 336 pages, $29.99) by John Nathan, translator of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, quietly appeared during this year’s fake memoir season. Unlike fake memoirs, or most memoirs for that matter, there’s nothing particularly tragic or timely to Nathan’s story and its lack of story arc feels cleansing.

City of secrets

2008/04/23

What is “noir” as a literary, rather than a cinematic, genre? Brooklyn-based publisher Akashic’s Noir Series — each title of which brings together 16 writers from a select city, the latest one being their first Canadian foray, Toronto Noir — answers this question in a roundabout way. Crime fiction, in which cinematic noir finds its essential origins, is only a small part of Akashic’s noir vision. More important, it seems, is asking a group of respected, and largely young, writers to explore a city’s sundry underbellies with the aid of their own, distinctive voices.

McNally Robinson rising

2008/04/23

How the most controversial bookstore in Canada this year bulldozed its independent Prairie legacy into Don Mills.

Patricia Pearson: anxiety prone

2008/04/22

Writer tells all about her anxious life and starts a website for 40 million other people to say something about theirs