HOW THE WEST WAS WRITTENThe Life and Times of James H. GrayBy Brian BrennanFifth House Publishers226 pp., $24.95 Review by Frank Moher My father, who was a sportswriter in Alberta for about three decades beginning in the late 1930s, had a simple brush-off for some of the young journalists who started popping up late in […]
Yann Martel’s two-man book club
By Frank Moher In my previous post to this section I said I’d be back in seven days with my thoughts on Yann Martel’s bibliophilic jihad against Stephen Harper. That was, er, um, six weeks ago. But hey, who hasn’t been following the Paris Hilton news coverage 24/7? In any event, in the interim a […]
Margaret Atwood has a nightmare
By Frank Moher Some of my fellow writer-types are being particularly irritating these days, and not in a good way. It is, of course, part of an artist’s job to be irritating some of the time, as, for example, the Dixie Chicks were about George Bush’s war. By the time Americans got through being irritated […]
Salvaging love
Review by Catherine Nutter Saskatchewan writer Leona Theis’s second novel The Art Of Salvage, (Coteau Books, 347 pp., $19.95) deals with classic themes — family, heredity, and the influence of the past upon the present. If this novel were a painting, it would be a prairie landscape with small human figures tenaciously present in the […]
Narrative interruptus
Review by Frank Moher Brett Josef Grubisic’s first novel, The Age of Cities (Arsenal Pulp Press, 240 pp., $19.95), is going to be terrific once he finishes it. For now, we’re offered this odd case of narrative interruptus. For nearly all of its length, The Age of Cities is charming, droll, and absorbing. In unassuming […]
Update
Update to story below: Calgary Herald Editor-in-Chief Lorne Motley has issued a response. He says the paper has commissioned Calgary playwright Eugene Stickland to write a piece on Rick McNair for this coming weekend.
Theatre wiz Rick McNair deserved better
Brian Brennan Rick McNair died in Winnipeg this past week. The Winnipeg newspapers did the right thing. They ran big stories saying what a wonderful contribution Rick had made to the local theatre scene as former artistic director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre, founder of the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, storyteller, actor, playwright, opera librettist, and […]
Trailer Park Girl
Review by Catherine Nutter Tanya Chapman’s debut novel, King (Coach House Press, 224 pp., $21.95), is a coming of age story as gritty as diamond dust. Chapman’s hard-drinking characters are wildflowers, gracing the liminal space between trailer park and open road. Small but shining jewels of truth are revealed in the smoky beer-funk of a […]
October 28, 2000. Saturday Night. “Book Club”
On November 7th, the 2006 Giller Prize went to Toronto MD-author Vincent Lam for his book Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, published by Doubleday Canada. In this column of six years ago from “Saturday Night,” Frank Moher took on the big-publisher, Torontocentric award. The juries and short-lists for the Giller have improved since those days, though […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 10
- 11
- 12
