Inside Read is our sampler of new Canadian books we think merit your attention. InDOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains, Toronto poet and music journalist Natalie Zina Walschots brings a distinctly erotic edge to her examination of comic book evildoers. Says her publisher: “DOOM addresses the results of abuses of power and presents a case study […]
Jan Wong’s Globe and Mail blues
OUT OF THE BLUE By Jan Wong Self-published by Jan Wong, distributed by Dundurn 264 pages, $21.99, paperback Reviewed by Brian Brennan Jan Wong was a star of The Globe and Mail newsroom, a driven, gutsy, award-winning reporter who observed the Tiananmen Square massacre at first hand, and tested the limits of Canada’s airport security […]
The Inside Read: “Crossing the Continent” by Michel Tremblay
We’re pleased to unveil backofthebook.ca’s Inside Read, in which we’ll introduce you to new Canadian books with an excerpt that we think will whet your appetite for more. In this passage from Michel Tremblay’s new novel Crossing the Continent, translated by Sheila Fischman, 10-year old Rhéauna (based on Tremblay’s mother as a child) must leave […]
Put to bed: The strike that broke the news at The Calgary Herald
The Calgary Herald told its striking workers they were about to “jump off a cliff.” By the end, the Herald had gone over the edge, too ~~ Excerpted from Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way From Dublin to Canada, by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Books By Brian Brennan I never envisaged it would end the […]
GG gee we need to rethink this
By Frank Moher The Governor General’s Award finalists were announced on Tuesday and, as usual, I looked at the drama list and sighed. Not because I wasn’t on it — I didn’t have anything eligible — but because I was reminded once again that we don’t have a proper playwriting award in this country. Now, […]
Potter too much
By Rachel Krueger As though the tenterhooks weren’t tight enough for Harry Potter 7.2: The One Where It Actually Ends, the Rowling megalith taunted its fans last week with the mysterious offer of . . . Pottermore. Pottermore, the powers promised, was a Thing That Was Not A Book But Was Still Very Great And […]
Young Adult fiction: the poison is the antidote
by Rachel Krueger Meghan Cox Gurdon’s Wall Street Journal article on the “explicit abuse, violence and depravity” grown rife in YA fiction must come either from a place of willful blindness or an actual dark rock, under which she has been living. Granted, YA fiction has gotten more sexually explicit since 1973 when Judy Blume’s […]
The Protocols of Jonathan Kay
AMONG THE TRUTHERS By Jonathan Kay Harper Collins 368 pages, $32.99 hardcover, $25.99 ebook Reviewed by Frank Moher On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning […]
On the outskirts of Salacioustown
ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM By Elizabeth Hay McClelland & Stewart 320 pages, $29.95 Review By Rachel Krueger The blurb-o-matics must be killing themselves over this. Alone in the Classroom has NO PLOT. Or it has many plots. A surfeit of plots. Thank god it also has ssssssecrets. (And is weirdly amazing.) It begins with the […]
A Dance With Dragons: Worth the Wait?
By Rachel Krueger George R R Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, while long a big deal in fantasy basements, is now officially a Big Deal™. The HBO series based on the first installation, A Game of Thrones, has both brought the series into the fantasy-abjuring eye and put a much-appreciated amount of pressure […]
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