In this comprehensive and often lively study of Superman’s love-interest, Lois Lane, Halifax-based comic historian Tim Hanley describes his subject as “Superman without the superpowers… [Lois] is just as committed to truth and justice through her tireless reporting, and just as willing to put herself in harm’s way to help someone.” Read more…
Toronto Star
THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL
by Yann Martel
Though set decades apart —“Homeless,” “Homeward,” and “Home” — the three interlinked panels of The High Mountains of Portugal, Yann Martel’s triptych of a novel about grief and origins, have a series of elements in common: a bereaved man, a chimpanzee, people who walk backwards, and the titular mountains. Read more…
THE HOTELS OF NORTH AMERICA
by Rick Moody
Rick Moody is primarily famous for two things at opposite ends of the desirability spectrum: his popular 1994 novel the Ice Storm, which became a successful film, and for having been labelled “the worst writer of his generation” by the ostentatiously venal critic Dale Peck in 2002. Read more…
MOUNTAIN CITY GIRLS:
The McGarrigle Family Album
by Jane and Anna McGarrigle
A 2012 Massey Hall tribute to Kate McGarrigle, who had died two years previously of cancer, was the impetus behind this lively, evocative memoir by the musician’s surviving sisters, Jane and Anna—the latter the other half of the Canadian folk-duo who rose to fame starting in the mid-seventies (the authors are also aunts to Kate’s famous children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright). Read more…
THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO
by Anthony Marra
With its complexly interlinked characters (among them a ballerina exiled to Siberia and a Chechen war-veteran-turned-drug-dealer); recurring objects passed, like a series of batons, from tale to tale (an unplayable mixtape, a painting of a Chechen landscape); and near-century-long narrative arc (from the Stalin-era Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia) splayed against a backdrop of systemic corruption and personal futility, Anthony Marra’s new book presents as if it were the love child of David Mitchell and George Orwell. Read more…
UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK
by Elvis Costello
Don’t start me talking, I could talk all night, go the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s 1979 song “Oliver’s Army.” It was clearly the case while writing his hefty but illuminating new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.
Costello’s appealingly nonlinear narrative style often feels like a jammy windshield wiper: chapters repeatedly return to certain chronological spots—the lead-up to his late-seventies’ breakout with his band The Attractions, for instance—yet delay mention of salient details like the adoption of his stage name (he had no particular fondness for his namesake, who died shortly before his first US tour), or his defiant television debut on Saturday Night Live, which famously got him banned from the show. Read more…
UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR
by Patrick deWitt
Patrick DeWitt’s struggling-author anonymity vanished with the publication of his mock-Western second novel, The Sisters Brothers, which won two major prizes (the Rogers Writers’ Trust and the Governor General’s awards for fiction) and was shortlisted for two others (the Man Booker and the Giller). After he bought film rights, the actor John C. Reilly promised to play the languid assassin Eli Sisters, a bit of typecasting so perfect it makes my hands flap uncontrollably. Read more…
ACT NORMAL
by Greg Hollingshead
When at one point, the narrator of “Sense of an Ending,” a story smack in the middle of Greg Hollingshead’s crackerjack new collection, Act Normal, announces “It’s in a reader’s interest to close down on the meaning as soon as she can. She needs to be able to move on as soon as possible to the next story,” it’s hard not to take it personally. That’s because in these twelve non-sequiturish tales of miscommunication, uncanniness and altered states, Hollingshead (currently director of the Banff Centre Writing Studio and a G-G Award for Fiction-winner for his 1995 collection The Roaring Girl) makes a sport of denying exactly this to his readers, as if “meaning” were a piece of fantasy real estate and he were Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross urging us, minus the verbal abuse, to “always be closing.” Read more…
THIS IS HAPPY
by Camilla Gibb
Judged by its title alone, you might take Camilla Gibb’s memoir to be a Pollyannaish portrait of a successful author in mid-career. And with four well-received novels (including The Beauty of Humanity Movement and Sweetness in the Belly), a professorship at U of T, and a young daughter, Gibb would seem, outwardly at least, to have much to be happy about. Yet undermining the title’s seeming declarativeness is a conspicuous use of lower-case type and lack of punctuation on the cover—it is not This is Happy? or, This! Is! Happy!—which, combined, suggest that Gibb’s happiness, while nominally achieved, is mitigated by something. Read more…
THE BLACK SNOW
by Paul Lynch
Paul Lynch’s The Black Snow is, like its predecessor, Red Sky in Morning, a fierce and stunning novel written in chiaroscuro; its darkness always threatening to absorb its light. The Irish author’s gnarled, lustrous prose style is peppered with local vernacular; his literary sensibility an ornate version of the American Gothic of McCarthy and Faulkner. Throw in an elastic attitude to grammar and all of this has a thrillingly defamiliarizing effect: though he’s writing in English, Lynch makes you feel like you’ve magically acquired the ability to understand a foreign language. Read more…
THEATRE OF THE UNIMPRESSED
by Jordan Tannahill
In the second chapter of his lively and passionate jeremiad against mundanity in contemporary English-language theatre, Theatre of the Unimpressed, Jordan Tannahill compares the experience of a bad play to a failed orgy he once organized. “A lackluster orgy suffers from all the same problems as boring theatre,” he reasons. “People go through the motions, they do what’s expected, they make the sounds they’re supposed to make, but it’s really not as surprising or exhilarating as you hope or imagine it will be.” Read more…
ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES
by Graham Swift
It’s been a recent trend in filmmaking to withhold the picture’s title until the very end, as if the audience had been entirely in the dark about what it was watching until the credits rolled. The title story of England and Other Stories, Graham Swift’s first book of short stories in 30 years (all of them previously unpublished), functions similarly—but less coyly. It is the collection’s caboose, but also its coxswain. Read more…
UNDONE
by John Colapinto
John Colapinto’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-nominated first novel, About the Author, was a metafictional tale about a blocked writer named Cal who discovers that his roommate has secretly written a great novel based on his (Cal’s) life. When the roommate suddenly dies, Cal pilfers the manuscript and becomes a bestselling author; his time in the limelight coming to an end when he fails to produce a follow-up and when a former flame, aware of his secret, tries to blackmail him. Read more…
POETRY NOTEBOOK: REFLECTIONS ON THE INTENSITY OF LANGUAGE
by Clive James
It’s not often you hear of a poem going viral, but that’s essentially what happened with “Japanese Maple,” the poem Clive James, who suffers from a variety of terminal ailments, wrote about his impending death last year in the New Yorker. When his powers of prophecy failed (the poem suggested he would die after the titular maple’s leaves fell in autumn) James admitted to an Australian interviewer that he found the fact of his continued existence “embarrassing.” Read more…
THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K
by Rachel Kushner
When we’re in love, we want to learn every little thing about the object of our love: childhood dreams, adolescent heartbreaks, chips versus chocolate. Since the publication of her two remarkable novels, 2008’s Telex from Cuba and 2013’s The Flamethrowers, the American writer Rachel Kushner (who is the only author to have a first and second novel nominated for the National Book Award) has earned legions of fiercely adoring fans. It’s no surprise then that the three stories collected in this slim, sub-hundred-page volume, The Strange Case of Rachel K, all of which appeared previously in various literary journals, have suddenly been made available to a love-struck readership hungry for origin stories. Read more…
OUTLINE
by Rachel Cusk
It’s become a book review cliché to describe plain but effective prose as “deceptively spare,” the implication being that some form of legerdemain has been used to conjure deep thoughts from simple words. The bromide could be applied to Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Outline, about a UK writer who comes to Athens to teach a summer writing course; Cusk’s placid, measured writing certainly seems at odds with the sense of exhilaration we get reading it. Read more…
THE UNSPEAKABLE AND OTHER SUBJECTS OF DISCUSSION
by Meghan Daum
“Authenticity has long been a major interest of mine,” declares L.A. Times columnist and author Meghan Daum in her trenchant and deeply funny book of essays, The Unspeakable. It’s an interest that many of us likely share, though in practice it can be a slippery thing. Unlike Fabergé eggs and Royal Doulton shepherdesses, most people and experiences don’t come with certificates of authenticity. So for the most part we rely on instinct: authenticity is something we think we know when we see (though as so many fallen celebrities and high-profile art forgeries demonstrate, we often don’t). Read more…
YOUR FACE IN MINE
by Jess Row
America often gets accused of being “race obsessed” and for the most part its literary canon—from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison—bears this out. Recently though, some of the most insightful novels about race in America have been written by outsiders, notably young British-African women like Helen Oyeyemi and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Read more…
10:04
by Ben Lerner
It’s one of the harsher rules of the literary game that a single highly acclaimed novel will always trump an entire shelf of award-laden poetry, which is why, after writing three highly acclaimed, award-winning volumes of poetry (one a finalist for the National Book Award), Ben Lerner only came to public prominence after his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, made a number of key Best of the Year lists in 2011. Read more…
THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN
by Jill Lepore
Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. She’s also, along with Superman and Batman, one of the most enduring. Like all superheroes, she has an origin story: descended from a tribe of Greek Amazons, Princess Diana lives in the all-female utopia of Paradise Island until Steve Trevor, a U.S. army officer, crashes his plane there during the Second World War. Diana gives up eternal life to return him to America where he—and now she under the alias of Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman —can continue fighting the Nazi threat. Read more…