Bronx-born Cynthia Holz first came to Canada as a correspondent for Business Week, then left journalism so she could focus on writing fiction. She’s been a resident of Toronto since 1976. After two dozen of her stories were published in Canadian magazines, Random House published 10 of the best in Home Again, a short story…
Category: Literary
Powerful stories from Nora Gold
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Fortunately for lovers of fiction, Warwick Publishing, a Toronto-based publishing house that usually publishes non-fiction, has departed from its specialty to present Marrow and Other Stories, a debut collection of short stories from Toronto author Nora Gold. Gold, a professor at McMaster University, offers seven literary creations of varying lengths in the book. They range…
Novel set in Bathurst Manor
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Whereas writers of first novels often agonize over finding a publisher, that was not the case for Elyse Friedman, a 36-year-old Torontonian who has produced four screenplays and much comic material for radio and television. Friedman’s first novel, Then Again, was snapped up by Random House, a major Canadian publisher, which has championed the book…
Three by Cary Fagan
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When Toronto author Cary Fagan began writing the first draft of the novel that would become Sleeping Weather (Porcupine’s Quill), he had little notion that its protagonist, Leon Stone, had been in prison or that Leon’s father, Mordecai, had been an habitue of the racetrack. “I knew nothing about the racetrack,” says Fagan. “When I…
Howard Engel’s Memory Book
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Howard Engel, creator of the popular Jewish literary detective Benny Cooperman, was perplexed to discover, one morning about four years ago, that the pages of his morning newspaper seemed filled with an unfamiliar foreign typescript, resembling Serbo-Croatian. Actually, an overnight stroke had left him with alexia sine agraphia, a rare mental condition that had deprived…
Literary Tribute to Matt Cohen
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Uncommon Ground, a fresh collection of articles, essays, excerpts and interviews just published by Knopf Canada (2002), offers a wonderfully luminescent window onto the legacy of the multifaceted and elusive Canadian writer Matt Cohen, who died in December 1999. The book is being offered as a “festschrift” or celebration of Cohen and his work. It…
Matt Cohen’s Last Seen
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Matt Cohen strides into the Future Cafe on Bloor Street West wearing a hat that looks suspiciously like the hat favoured by one of the two brothers who are the main characters in his latest novel, Last Seen (Knopf). Over a cup of coffee, however, the fifty-four-year-old Kingston-born novelist insists that it isn’t strictly necessary…
Burstow’s House on Lippincott
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Bonnie Burstow had been thinking about writing a non-fiction book about “trans-generational trauma in Holocaust survivor families,” but then she decided to handle the subject as a novel instead. “I wanted something that would appeal to a broader audience than Jews and psychologists,” explains the 61-year-old psychotherapist and instructor at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies…
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead
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Lisa Appignanesi, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Montreal, recounts her parents’ wartime experiences in Losing the Dead (McArthur & Co., 2000), a family memoir that takes the form of a personal quest of research and discovery. Appignanesi (nee Borensztejn), born in postwar Poland and now living in London, has already proved her…
100 Great Jewish Books
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In a bid to promote notable Jewish books written in the past 150 years, the National Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Ma., has announced a list of “The 100 Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature.” The list includes works in all languages and will serve as a “redefinition of the Jewish canon,” said Center president…
