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…
Non-fiction
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…
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…
A LIFE WITH WORDS
by Richard B. Wright
As a boy growing up in Midland, Ontario, Richard Wright watched his work-bound father struggle against the deep snow brought by endless winter storms off Georgian Bay. To show his appreciation for his father’s sacrifice, Wright decided he would get up early and shovel a path so his father wouldn’t have to arrive at work in wet clothes. In his quest to make the path as wide and perfect as possible, however, Wright failed to finish it before his father left. After this happened several times, his dad suggested gently that, in future, Wright might consider shovelling a rough but serviceable path then widen it later on. 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…
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…
THE RIGHT TO BE COLD
by Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Growing up in the Arctic town of Kuujjuaq, Sheila Watt-Cloutier describes herself as a “a cautious child who didn’t like taking big risks.” That characterization may seem surprising coming from an Inuit woman who has arguably done more than anyone to raise awareness of how environmental pollutants and climate change have affected circumpolar peoples. Read more…
BOUNDLESS:
Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage
by Kathleen Winter
When, in 2010, a friend asked Kathleen Winter if she’d be interested in taking a spot on an icebreaker due to travel the Northwest Passage in a matter of days, everything about the offer seemed propitious: not only had the North always held a powerful allure for the Montreal-based writer, she’d also recently taken a kind of vow of peripatetic spontaneity; her bags were literally already packed. 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…
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…
THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: THE KREMLIN, THE CIA AND THE BATTLE OVER A FORBIDDEN BOOK
by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée
That as recently as the early 1990s novels were considered “instruments of political warfare” by America’s top spy agency might strike you as outright fantasy or else fodder for sketch comedy (think Monty Python’s Killing Joke). And yet for decades, starting in the 1950s, the CIA covertly disseminated millions of books—including Russian translations of Orwell, Camus and Nabokov—to Soviet-controlled countries with the intention of “reinforc[ing] dispositions toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.” Perhaps more remarkable still, the agency concluded that its campaigns had been “demonstrably effective.” Read more…
IN THE SLENDER MARGIN
by Eve Joseph
In 1964, when Eve Joseph was eleven, her older brother Ian died in a car accident. Ian’s death, Joseph writes, swung open the door to the underworld and entered her and her mother, “like a permanent vibration.” Read more…
BIRDING WITH YEATS
by Lynn Thomson
While the hockey mom has carved out a place in the culture as a tireless, minivan-driving enabler of youthful aspirations, the birding mom remains—to borrow from field parlance—an “accidental.” As a pioneer in the role (and no-brainer subject for a future Portlandia sketch), Lynn Thomson traded up frozen arenas for sodden marshlands, lung-shredding screams of encouragement for hours of monastic silence. Instead of playoffs, her season revolved around migratory patterns; success wasn’t a pennant, but a sighting of the elusive prothonotary warbler. Read more…
SO LONG, MARIANNE
by Kari Hesthamar
Marianne Ihlen has the rare distinction of having being muse to not just one but two famous men. She figures in the novels of writer Axel Jensen, with whom she moved from Oslo to the Greek Island of Hydra in 1957, when she was 22. Two years later, when Jensen abandoned the couple’s brief marriage shortly after their son was born, a not-quite-famous Leonard Cohen—who had just arrived on the island and was immediately smitten with Marianne—readily stepped up, and the two embarked on a relationship that endured for almost a decade. Read more…
BLOOD WILL OUT
by Walter Kirn
In 1998 Walter Kirn found himself driving an incontinent, half-paralyzed dog halfway across the United States as a favour to his Montana neighbours, who’d found a home for it with a young member of the Rockefeller clan in New York.
The gesture was magnanimous but not entirely selfless. Kirn, then in his late-thirties, was expecting his first child while dealing with predictable snags in his marriage to the daughter of Margot Kidder and Thomas McGuane, who was fifteen years his junior. Having just bought a sprawling Montana ranch he couldn’t afford, Kirn felt the lure of the “handsome stipend” promised for the delivery. He was also a novelist in search of a character, and Clark Rockefeller sounded like just the ticket he needed. Read more…
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PAUL DE MAN
by Evelyn Barish
When I was studying English in graduate school in the early ‘90s, deconstruction theory was big. Despite its abstractness, deconstruction—which eschewed stuff like history on the grounds that the language through which we access it is intrinsically unstable—was blithely referred to as a “practice,” as if you could get it done at a law office or massage parlour. Read more…
KNOW THE NIGHT
by Maria Mutch
“The dark is a sovereign country of the unknown, and a borderless one, at that,” Maria Mutch writes in this lyrical nocturne about the years she sat vigil with her non-verbal son when, starting at age nine, he gave up sleeping for nightly marathons of shrieking, humming and clapping. Though her husband was more than willing to pull his weight, Mutch doughtily resolved to face these long nights alone. She had various reasons for doing so; “ownership of this odyssey” was one of them. Read more…
SON OF A GUN
by Justin St. Germain
“My mother always had shitty taste in men,” Justin St. Germain understatedly asserts near the start of this astonishing memoir. St. Germain was a 20-year-old college student living with his brother in Tucson when he learned, just days after 9/11, that his mother had been shot to death by his stepfather Ray in their trailer in the Arizona desert. Three months later, Ray was found dead in his truck, a blood bespattered suicide note by his side. Read more…
A HOUSE IN THE SKY
by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett
As a child growing up in small town Alberta, Amanda Lindhout found escape from the dank basement apartment where her mother often suffered beatings at the hands of her boyfriend in the National Geographics she bought from the local thrift shop.
Later, after years of travel in exotic locales, Lindhout would find herself in another dank room—this one in Somalia—where she was gang raped, beaten, and tortured. When her 15-month captivity ended, she learned that her kidnappers’ original target had been a reporter-photographer duo from National Geographic she’d met the day before she and her photojournalist partner Nigel Brennan, with whom she was working as a fledgling journalist, were kidnapped. Read more…
BLOOD: THE STUFF OF LIFE
by Lawrence Hill
When Lawrence Hill claims in this eclectic, wide-ranging essay based on this year’s CBC Massey Lectures to have had “a lifelong obsession with blood,” my first reaction was dubiousness. But as quickly becomes apparent, Hill has had more reasons than most people to think about the life-giving liquid. Read more…