As disparate and fractured as Canada and the enterprise of Canadian literature has always been, one commonality bridges all of our divisions be they political, historical, racial, aesthetic, or geographic. Simply put, this characteristic is complacency. We care about literature; we express enthusiasm for Canadian books, writers, and publishers; but we do so little to [...]

Near the beginning of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake the character of Snowman – survivor of a plague that has carried off most of the human race, leaving behind only a genetically engineered species of primitive beings he has dubbed the Crakers – thinks of keeping a Crusoe-like journal. It is an idea he [...]

We live in dark times. Bookstores are closing, the few surviving newspaper book reviews have atrophied like the legs of a man with a spinal injury, and Toronto, which once claimed to be the cultural capital of our fair nation, is governed by asshole philistines who appear to have engineered a budget crisis with the [...]

Federico Fellini was as brilliant in his prose musings as he was in crafting his cinematic wonders. He bemoaned and lambasted the transfer of movies from the communal house to TV and VCR. The newer technologies profoundly altered the viewer’s experience of those movies. No longer a “prisoner” on a cinema pew, the lucky moviegoer [...]