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Fiction: Entitlement: A Novel by Jonathan Bennett

November 14, 2008 admin 0

Canada owns a contemporary tradition of producing authors who are also working poets. In recent years wordsmiths like Helen Humphries, Andrea MacPherson and Anne Simpson have made room between books of poetry to write novels that are understandably quite unlike those being created by authors whose backgrounds are less focused on the sound a single word makes when dropped upon the page. Now understand: this is not a bad thing. But it does explain the […]

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Holiday Gift Guide: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

November 11, 2008 admin 0

Half a century on, Holly Golightly is as fresh and compelling as she was the day Truman Capote first skated her across the page.Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, turns 50 just as holiday shopping gets going in earnest. Vintage has published an anniversary volume that goes on sale today. The film, of course, won’t join the anniversary for another couple of years. According to The New York Observer, Capote didn’t want Audrey Hepburn for the […]

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Fiction: The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

October 31, 2008 admin 0

The Book of Lies (Grand Central Publishing) is an interesting, even arresting read. I can’t say I loved Brad Meltzer’s new novel, but I sure wasn’t bored. I read somewhere that Meltzer said this was the book he was born to write and that he was actually sort of afraid to do it … though I can’t imagine why. I mean, yeah, the plot’s a stretch — to say the very least — but since […]

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New This Month: The New Annotated Dracula by Leslie S. Klinger

October 30, 2008 admin 0

In 2004 he rocked us with The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a look at the classic fictional detective that was closer — and in some ways more intimate — than any that had gone before. Author Leslie S. Klinger offered up an almost line-by-line commentary on the great work. In the process, he unearthed bits and pieces that had been left behind over the years — a bit of literary archeology, if you will. Fans […]

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New This Month: The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack

October 23, 2008 admin 0

If your tastes run to beach reads or other light going that makes you smile in the sun, give The Show That Smells (ECW Press) a wide berth. Toronto artist, author and fashion journalist Derek McCormack here pushes the envelope on what is fiction, what is story and what is satisfying read. And while such envelope pushing can often be tiresome and even yawn-inducing, in this novella-length tale, McCormack delivers a staccato epic with punch […]

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New Today: The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig

October 13, 2008 admin 0

There’s something sweetly sentimental in all the testosterone lurking not far beneath the covers of The Eleventh Man (Harcourt), a football novel that melds into World War II from Ivan Doig (This House of Sky, The Whistling Season). That would seem a contradiction in terms — sweet sentiment. Masses of testosterone — but somehow it’s not. Somehow it works in a book that manages to be epic in scope and fact. The war licked its […]

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More from the Maritimes

October 2, 2008 admin 1

Though authors hailing from the Canadian Maritime provinces are no slouches in the lining-up-for-awards department, it seems that 2008 — particularly this latter half — has produced some especially astonishing fiction. We recently contemplated Kenneth J. Harvey’s Blackstrap Hawco: Said to Be About A Newfoundland Family (Knopf Canada) and though that book is wonderful — and epic and masterful — it’s also not alone. Other books with strong Maritime ties that have been wowing both […]

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New this Week: Death With Interruptions by José Saramago

October 1, 2008 admin 0

The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal […]

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New this Month: Blackstrap Hawco by Kenneth J. Harvey

September 30, 2008 admin 0

If you don’t believe that the words “epic,” “masterwork” and “Canadian” have any business in the same sentence, think again. In this intense, sprawling and almost insanely detailed novel, Kenneth J. Harvey (Inside, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe) delivers over 800 pages of fictional Maritime memories, all linked around the title character “named in anger.” Before you even crack the cover, Blackstrap Hawco (Random House Canada) daunts with its sheer physical presence. It’s […]

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New Today: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

September 23, 2008 admin 0

The author of Mystic River and Shutter Island pushes still further from his crime fiction roots with The Given Day (William Morrow), an epic look at the politics and morality of America after the First World War through the lens of the events leading to the Boston police strike of 1919. If that sounds like a departure for Dennis Lehane, think again: this is an author whose impressive career thus far has been built on […]