Book Critic, Editor
With Out of Cleveland, poet and academic Lolette Kuby has produced a promising and occasionally brilliant first collection of short stories.
The book’s first tale, “Ninety East,” weaves back and forth between the minds of two drivers following each other on the highway and culminates in a cautious roadside meeting. It’s an intriguing premise, but one that is hampered by an overly self-conscious, stream-of-consciousness style. Read more…
Familiar to many Canadians as The Globe and Mail’s television critic, John Doyle has written a book that is partly a memoir of his coming of age in the Ireland of the 1960s and ’70s and partly an analysis of the effect of television on what was by all accounts a repressed, insular society almost completely under the sway of the Catholic Church. It is an intriguing premise, and a refreshing change from the usual cultural critiques that equate television with the demise of literacy and the dumbing down of society. Read more…