Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

to find the time to update this site in a couple of days, but some really interesting stuff has been published in that time. Foremost among these is Timothy Garton Ash’s article in The New York Review of Books: Is There a Good Terrorist? [hat tip to Rebecca’s Pocket]

died yesterday at age 66 following liver surgery to treat his cancer.

: Random House Canada and the Giller Prize have commissioned a font in honour of writer Mordecai Richler, who died earlier this year. I haven’t seen it yet, but it was supposedly “lovingly crafted in a traditional manner, like a fine Scotch” by Toronto designer Nick Shinn.

Caterina points to an interesting article in The Atlantic this month. I’ve had many an argument about this with people in Canada who lamented the arrival of Chapters. I love an indie bookshop as much as the next person, but at the same time, the big boxes are much better than they are reputed to be by the nay-sayers. I know my friends who self-publish, or my friend who has a little publishing house, seem to like Chapters just fine. They can get stocked there more easily than in the small shops, no matter how great a particular small shop might be.

Via Powazek: NoEnd Press looks like a very interesting community-based publishing site. I love seeing all of the different ways old-school webfolk parse this medium’s possibilities.

a copy of a new edition of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces [excerpt], a novel I’d always avoided. I don’t exactly remember why I avoided it - all that remains is a shadowy idea that I was afraid the story behind the book would be more compelling than the work itself. If you’re unaware of the story, the novel was written by a young writer named John Kennedy Toole who committed suicide - with the manuscript still unpublished among his papers - and only later did his mother submit it for consideration to an English professor she met.

In any case, I’ve been reading it for the past few days, and I’m really glad I got over my avoidance - it’s simply beautiful. Confederacy features one of the oddest protagonists since (oddly enough) the Scarlet and the Black, a guy who has really gotten under my skin - who I want to hold by the shoulders and physically shake before he frustrates me any more. But it’s not the writing that’s frustrating - it’s the character, well-drawn.