When did the visual arts become so encrusted with words? Not just the decent apparatus of a label with notes on artist and artwork, or the more expansive catalogue essay, or even the occasional book celebrating an artist or exploring a scene or movement – but this whole dense verbal screen, like a mass of [...]
Posts Tagged
True Dat
Nathan WhitlockReview of Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness
To say that a given novelist or short story writer’s work is full of “truth” is to risk relinquishing all credibility as a critic or reviewer and to join the ranks of the professionally enthusiastic and unfailingly uncontroversial book talkers who clog most weekend book review sections and lit-themed [...]
Highbrow Harlequin
Nathan WhitlockFebruary
Lisa Moore
House of Anansi Press, 2009
hardcover, 320 pages, $29.95
“Without the reflection of characters scarred by traumatic events, such as war, depression, natural disasters and genocide, to name a few, Canadian literature would lose its essence, not to mention its most celebrated authors.”
That is one of the more harsh and sweeping (not to mention deadly funny [...]
the ink stained wretch: Eric Ormsby on Literary Criticism
Daniel WellsThe new issue of The New Quarterly arrived yesterday and among its many pleasures — new work from Heather Birrell, Zsuzi Gartner, Caroline Adderson and James Pollock — was what may be one of the best essays on reviewing I’ve read in recent memory. Eric Ormsby’s ‘Fine Incisions: Reflections on Reviewing’ gets to the heart [...]