At the heart of The Joyful Child, the new novel by Norman Ravvin (Gaspareau Press) is a subtle, charming sketch of a father-son relationship. The joyful child of the title is four-year-old Nick, innocent, playful, wide-eyed and curious. His father is Paul, whose life seems to be drifting away from its moorings even as his…
Category: Literary
Essential Canlit from William Weintraub
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Iconic Canadian author Mordechai Richler figures prominently in Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s, by William (“Why Rock the Boat?”) Weintraub (McClelland & Stewart, 1999). As a young print and radio journalist stationed in Europe, Weintraub kept up a lively correspondence with Richler, Mavis Gallant and Brian Moore during a period of heightened literary…
Rapoport’s ‘House on the River’
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Nessa Rapoport, a New York writer-editor originally from Toronto, has written House on the River, a meditative account of a summer journey by houseboat through the Trent-Severn waterway of southern Ontario that contains reminiscences of her happy visits to her grandmother’s cottage in Bobcaygeon when she was a girl. Motivated by a desire to show…
Oral bio of Richler
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When Michael Posner began his oral biography of Mordecai Richler, his plan was to assemble a collection of entertaining anecdotes about the legendary Montreal writer, but soon realized that psychological insights about Richler would produce a more revealing portrait. “When I began to do the interviews, I thought, ‘This could be more than just anecdotes,…
Leonard Cohen bio
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It seems so long ago that Leonard Cohen, the gravelly-voiced songwriter-poet from Westmount, first won international acclaim with compelling songs like Suzanne and So Long, Marianne, at once deeply romantic and mystical. With ten books of poetry, two novels and a dozen albums to his credit, and three more tribute albums of his songs in…
Legendary Passion: Hellman & Hammett
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From the moment Lillian Hellman met Dashiell Hammett in a Manhattan nightclub in 1930 until his death in 1961, she was “not only his best friend but also his only friend,” yet so thoroughly did she mythologize their relationship, and so widespread was her reputation for lying, that Gore Vidal once wickedly pondered: “Did anyone…
Mordechai Richler bio
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A new critical biography of Mordecai Richler by Reinhold Kramer, a Manitoba English professor, offers an engaging, thorough and microscopic examination of the life and letters of the iconic Canadian Jewish novelist and essayist, complete with some penetrating psychological insights. In researching Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), Kramer attained access to…
The Tailor’s Daughter
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Writers who dedicate their pens to preserving community history generally do so as a labour of love, knowing their literary efforts will probably not capture a large reading audience nor generate large royalty cheques. Over the last decade, Miriam Bassin Chinsky has revisited the lush vineyards of her north Toronto childhood to write a series…
Ride ‘Em Jewish Cowboy
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Hy Burstein can’t quite explain his passion for riding horses, only that it first hit him as a teenager and that it’s still going strong six decades later. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Toronto in 1928, he recently published Ride ‘em Jewish Cowboy (Devora Publishing, 2005), a book describing his riding experiences. Sometimes known as…
On ‘Max And The Cats’
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Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar, who died earlier this year at the age of 73, was a proponent of “magic realism,” a category of fiction prevalent among South American writers and especially evident in two of Scliar’s best known novels, Max And The Cats (1981) and The Centaur In The Garden (1984). As it happens, the…
