Back Pages 1526 Queen Street, 423-4750 A wee bookstore on busy Queen Street, its little storefront hides a large selection of non-fiction and fiction titles. The owner was away on vacation for a good chunk of August, but the nice lady at the counter said the shop carries, in addition to its history and literature, […]
Books
Posted inArts + Music
Under This Unbroken Sky, Shandi Mitchell (Viking Canada)
In Depression-era northern Alberta, Theo Mykolayenko returns to the family homestead an almost-broken man. He was imprisoned for breaking bureaucratic regulations regarding his own wheat. (He’d similarly suffered under the Ukraine’s Stalinist regime.) Shandi Mitchell, a screenwriter and producer (see story on page 32), describes Theo’s slow movements, the family’s uneasy readjustment, with trimmed, precise […]
Posted inArts + Music
By the book: literary news round-up
It’s been a quiet summer, literary-wise, but book season is upon us, heavier than last weekend’s lame hurricane. Next Thursday, September 3, is Shandi Mitchell‘s book launch at Pier 21 (6:30pm, reading at 7pm) for Under This Unbroken Sky. This is the first novel for the film producer-director (Baba’s House), which has attracted Canadian, American […]
Posted inArts + Music
February doesn’t grow old
For 25 years, Helen O’Mara has been living with the ghost of her husband Carl, who died, along with 83 other men in 1982 when the off-shore oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland. A historically true story that shattered many lives, Moore filters a painful event through one woman and her […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Alain de Botton (M&S)
In each of these 10 essays, London-based writer Alain de Botton enters a different world of work, travelling locally and globally in pursuit of an answer to a commonly asked question: What makes us happy and sad about/at our work? In short, the occupation that keeps a person “appropriately alive to some of the most […]
Posted inLifestyle
How to pick a summer book
Summer is all about compromise and eating popsicles before they melt. It might not be the best time—humidity kills ambition—to pick up that 1,000-page tome you’ve been telling everyone you’re going to read. The purists are gasping, but if Jane Austen can be torn apart in terrible “chick” movies, why not let the undead have […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Greater racial diversity needed in humanities
Picture this. Three white graduate students are earnestly discussing the future of post-colonial studies. It’s happening at a symposium to honour a white English professor—a pioneer in studying the work of non-white writers from former colonies such as Jamaica, Kenya and India. During the question period, a black PhD student points out he’s the only […]