Pióro

I have a “dis-in-waiting” for the next over-zealous Russophile I meet. It’s not a common practice for me—to store up bons/mauvais mots—but sometimes inspiration hits and you think maybe you’ve got a keeper. For example, just yesterday I found the perfect way to translate “shit-tastic” into French: merde-ific. Truly inspired.
I’ve reserved the Russophile dis for [...]

The Globe and Mail has a contest that has caught my attention. They run part of a recent novel for five days and on the last day readers are invited to submit reviews. This routine will go on for six weeks. At the end of each week, ten reviews are drawn and the winners each [...]

Dear Scream Literary Festival,
Thank you for wasting my time. I know artsy types are usually late and start times are flexible. That’s why I arrived at the Metalogos reading half an hour after the posted start time of 5pm. The nice lady at the door then said that the performances by Paul Dutton, Nobuo Kubota, [...]

Few in the crowd waiting for David Sedaris were actually wearing corduroy or denim. They sported lighter fabrics for their shorts and skirts. Fifteen minutes before Sedaris was scheduled to read, the available seating was filled up at the Bay/Bloor Indigo store. People leaked into the surrounding aisles. The two women next to me voiced [...]

[If the title of this post leaves you stratching your head, and you have Windows Media Player, watch this.]
I had a terrible introduction to Henry James. I had to work with him on an undergrad short-story assignment. Each student in the class, after calling out a few random numbers, got a sentence from the prof’s [...]

Umberto Eco stoked interest in his new novel tonight at his appearance at the Harbourfront Centre. Throughout his reading from his new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, his interview and the audience questions, he was charming, gracious and outright hilarious. The reading was 66% English and 33% Italian. The part read in Italian [...]

Daniel Green writes a good post on the continued legitimisation of self-publishing. His discussion reminded me of Jim Munroe’s evangelising of the practice since his departure from HarperCollins in 2000. On Munroe’s site is a good economic argument for self-publishing. (Munro calls it “indie-publishing,” but his brand of indie-publishing is quite close to Green’s self-publishing. [...]

For some reason, I have this image of Russell Smith at a public talk advising that you shouldn’t read the back-cover of a book to find out if you’d like it, but to read the first few pages. In the absence of my own reviewer’s copy, I’ve done something similar: a first-chapter critique. Each week [...]

Traditional literary journals learn slowly, and The New Quarterly is one of them.
Often lit journals have web sites that are little more than poorly designed pamphlets. The largest frustration is that they give no samples of the writing they carry. This situation will lead any web surfer to ask, “What’s the point?” as there’s so [...]

Pierre Berton passed away earlier today.
A few weeks ago, I and my house-mates found ourselves in the odd position of trying to explain Pierre Berton to a German grad-student. I don’t remember what we said about Berton, whose works are on our parents’ books shelves and maybe some of our own, even if we haven’t [...]