Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for literature. In the Sept. 15, 2001 edition of Saturday Night magazine, Frank Moher, backofthebook.ca’s editor, wrote with tongue only-slightly-in-cheek about the great volume of short story collections published in Canada, perhaps inspired by having the great Ms. Munro among us. His suggestion for a short-story moratorium did […]
Every day is culture day
By Rachelle Stein-Wotten This weekend a lot of Canadians rejoiced in the cultural mecca that is this nation by participating in some 7,000 free activities in 850 communities. Creatively named Culture Days, the annual event celebrates, well, culture in its many forms – artistic, ethnic, regional, social – with events across the country. “Creative people” […]
Broken Big
By Mark Leiren-Young So on Friday I got to interview the man who created the man who knocks. The interview with Vince Gilligan, creator and show runner of Breaking Bad, ended at about 2:40 pm. I raced out of Vancouver’s Sutton Place Hotel to find a place to transcribe it and write my story for […]
Son of “Midnight’s Children”
By Mark Leiren-Young When I walk into the downtown Toronto hotel room to meet Salman Rushdie, I can’t help scoping the halls for bodyguards. Even though he’s no longer in hiding, there’s still a three million dollar bounty on the writer’s head and he’s still the most buzzed about celebrity at the 2012 Toronto International […]
Paul Gross walked the plank on “Battleship”
A BoB short: Paul Gross tells The Calgary Herald he was fired as screenwriter from the Hollywood mega-film Battleship, which opened in North America last weekend to generally lousy reviews and even worse box-office. “Alongside fellow Albertan scribe John Krizanc, Gross took a run at revising a screenplay originally written by Jon and Erich Hoeber,” […]
Joe Bodolai’s final hit
A BoB short: A last blog post by Joe Bodolai has gone viral today after the L.A. Police ruled the well-loved comedy writer’s death a suicide. Bodolai, who worked on both “Saturday Night Live” and the “Kids in the Hall” before helping to launch Canada’s Comedy Channel, apparently intended the post as a combination suicide […]
On Blatchford, Hitchens, and why babies suck
By Frank Moher One is impressed by just how credulous the reading public can be. That would be you. You see what I just did there? I just insulted you. And while conventional wisdom would suggest that insulting one’s readers is not the best way to start an article, conventional wisdom is pretty stupid, too. […]
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, […]
Where is James Moore?
By Frank Moher Two weeks ago in this space I wrote about the Conservative government’s politically-motivated decision to withdraw funding from the Toronto theatre and arts festival, SummerWorks. To recap: Last year, the company presented a play, Homegrown, that the Prime Minister’s Office decided (in advance, without seeing it), glorified terrorism. So this year, after […]
The Conservatives’ Homegrown censorship
By Frank Moher (Update below: Jim Flaherty translated) We can now begin to see how the Conservative government intends to use its majority to chop arts funding in Canada, particularly to any artistic expression it doesn’t like or agree with. In the short term at least, it will be a death by a thousand cuts. […]
