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Why Did Alt Lit Cross the Road?
Tao Lin, Taipei (2013). Just think, up until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of or read Tao Lin, 29 (going on 30), the American novelist of Chinese-Taiwanese parentage, whose latest novel, Taipei...
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Children of the Daze
Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, translated by Mark Fried, Nation Books, NYC, 2013 HB, 420p. $30 I picked up this book as an impulse buy, because I like the...
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Real World Happiness
Family stories easily become fools’ tales, full of lies, contradictory reporting, individual fictions, false memory. Everyone’s got their own version of “the story,” the more the merrier depending on...
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Re-re-reading Gore Vidal: A First Anniversary Requiem
Gore Vidal, Selected Essays (2008). 1. The day that the American writer Gore Vidal died, his quarter-century-old prediction about how the obituary would be handled turned out to be pretty accurate....
View ArticleCliffhanger
Paul Socken (ed.), The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? (2013). Paul Socken, a recently retired four-decade veteran of the French Studies department at the University of...
View ArticleDirty Laundry
Tim Teeman, In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master (2013). I was, as usual, minding my own business, when I stumbled on (or should I say, as when we...
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Love in Venice
Harold Brodkey, Profane Friendship (1994). The literary career of Harold Brodkey (1930-1996), which began so promisingly with short stories, many of them initially published by the New Yorker, and then...
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For Interpretation: Susan Sontag
Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography (2007; tr. by David Dollenmayer, Northwestern University Press, 2014). Sontag revisited. The great American intellectual event of 1963, just over a...
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Self, with or without Selfies
Barry Dainton, Self (Penguin, 2014). One of the notable features of human beings is our ability to sleepily glance at the bathroom mirror in the morning, and not only recognize ourselves, but also...
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Hobo with a Shotgun
Dreamland Theatre. Rob Budde, Dreamland Theatre (Caitlin Press, 2014). Rob Budde’s Dreamland Theatre is dedicated to Devil’s Club or Hoolhghulh in the Carrier language, a plant that “hailed” Budde...
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Letter from Berlin: Quo Vadis, Greece?
James Angelos, The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins (2015). Berlin — The Sunday evening (July 5, 2015) that Greek voters delivered a resoundingly loud “No!” — 61 per cent marked...
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A True Blast from the Past
The Evening Colonnade, by Cyril Connolly, Harcourt Brace Janovitch, London and New York, 1975, HB, 469 pages Cyril Connolly was a type of writer that no longer exists. He was a literary critic—an...
View ArticleSome Second Growth Poetry (and it’s good!)
Fabienne Calvert Filteau, Second Growth (Creekstone Press, 2014. $18). Fabienne Calvert Filteau is in her late twenties and from an old Central BC family. Her great grandparents settled in Vanderhoof...
View ArticleLosing Sleep
Sleep, by Nino Ricci, Doubleday Canada, Toronto, 2015, 235 pages, HB, $30 Nino Ricci is a serious novelist, among the most skilled Canada has. He chooses substantial things to write about, does his...
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Letter from Berlin: What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy?
I sort of stumbled back into the Cold War at roughly 10,000 metres above the Atlantic Ocean. I was on the longish flight – I was going to say “hellishly long flight,” but I don’t want reader-trolls to...
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Twitter Storm Spatters Elderly Writers Talese and Trillin
An Old People’s Review of Books Special Investigation. Here at Old People’s Review of Books (OPR) we like to define our terms: “Twitter Storm” (a.k.a., Twitter Shitstorm; a.k.a., Twitter Bullshit...
View ArticleSay Something: Chomsky (& others) on language
CONTRARY TO THE biblical Gospel of John, in the beginning was not the Word. More important, in the beginning was not the sentence (or even the poet’s line). One obvious preliminary question here is,...
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Say Something
Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016). Contrary to the biblical Gospel of John (1.1), in the beginning was not the Word. More important, in the beginning was not the sentence (or even the...
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In Madrid: Landscape with Ghosts
1. Lorca A couple of weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the assassination of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca — August 19, 1936 — his bronze statue in Madrid’s Plaza de Santa Ana was bedecked...
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Mein Trumpf, or Through a Cracked Crystal Ball Darkly
Mitch Wolfe, Trump: How He Captured the Trump White House (2016). I found Mitch Wolfe on Facebook (FB), lurking around the “news feed” of Canadian novelist Susan Swan, sort of like a child molester...
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