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Doctors healing themselves

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BENEVOLENCE By Cynthia Holz Alfred A. Knopf Canada 310 pages, $29.95 Review by Tara Hughes From its shocking opening to its moving conclusion, Cynthia Holz’s new novel, Benevolence, examines the destructive effects of fear and spiritual exhaustion on a marriage, and the rough healing that sometimes follows. Holz takes the reader deep into the lives […]

Bad jokes are good PR

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by Rachel Krueger Amy Chua is terrible at jokes.  She told one in early January about forcing her seven-year old daughter to practice piano “through dinner into the night” with no breaks, and no one laughed.  The punchline is that the daughter got good at piano.  Har. An excerpt from Chua’s memoir, The Battle Hymn […]

Editing for nothing for Dire Straits

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By Frank Moher You will have heard that an American publishing house has plans for an edition of Huckleberry Fiinn in which the character “N***** Jim” is to be renamed “Slave Jim.” Now comes word that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits is unfit for […]

Revolting, but not worth fighting

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By Rachel Krueger Book banning is for right-wing fundamentalists and crotchety spinsters and very tense parents of pristine children and also EVERYONE who saw The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure on Amazon last Tuesday and immediately clutched their pearls.  Including me.  The site has since kowtowed to pressure and pulled the book, which will […]

The sentimental publishers of “The Sentimentalists”

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By Frank Moher Okay, so I was set to go all crazy right-wing on Gaspereau Press and suggest that its federal funding should be pulled because of its refusal to capitalize on its Giller Prize victory. Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists won the $50,000 award on Tuesday night, and immediately her Nova Scotia-based publisher, who handcraft […]

Why I won’t listen to Canada Reads 2011

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By Steven W. Beattie Thirty seconds. That’s the approximate amount of time it took after the announcement of the 40 titles in contention to appear on the 2011 edition of the CBC’s “Canada Reads” program for Twitter to explode with tweets from authors, publishers, friends, and fans, all of them advocating for one title or […]

Book Review: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

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By Eric Pettifor Reading Daemon, one can’t help but compare it to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, perhaps because both deal with rogue artificial intelligences (AI) and can probably be considered science fiction. If I sound a bit tentative about that, it’s because, while Neuromancer neatly fits the mold, set in a time at least some distance […]

Fanfiction: flattery or thievery?

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By Rachel Krueger Diana Gabaldon either needs to stop writing such effortlessly good historical fiction, or she needs to keep her ignorant viewpoints on fan fiction to herself, because I am having trouble reconciling my shameless adoration of her Outlander series with my urge to kill her blog with fire. Ditto goes for George Double-R Martin, […]

Fame is the new “skill”

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By Rachel Krueger Books are shit nowadays, and I blame you.  You may not have made the book deal with “Jersey Shore”’s bronzed illiterates Ronnie and J-Woww (I wish that was a typo), but you will probably read it.  And even if you bypass what is sure to be the most gloriously misspelled Gym-Tan-Laundry manifesto, […]