David Bezmozgis, the Toronto-based author whose 2004 collection Natasha and Other Stories bedazzled critics, has written a first novel, The Free World, that is certain to reinforce his reputation as a fine literary craftsman. Bezmozgis, who is still young enough to be included in the New Yorker’s list of 20 best writers under 40, emigrated…
Category: Literary
The Jewish ghetto in literature
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An intriguing collection of essays throws a new light into the dark world of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe as seen by a cavalcade of Jewish writers including Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, and numerous others who have been all but forgotten. Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to…
Profile: E. L. Doctorow
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In a public discussion in Toronto (1995), New York-based writer E. L. Doctorow likened the process of writing a novel to taking a journey by automobile at night. “You can only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way,” he said. The author of such celebrated works…
Mrs. Zhivago of Queen’s Park
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“People often decide that it’s time for them to get married and then marry whomever they happen to be with at that moment . . . so you don’t necessarily marry the right person, you just marry the person who’s there.” That isn’t British novelist Olivia Lichtenstein talking, just the lead character from her first…
Salinger bio is balanced, thorough
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Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life, published by Random House just one year after its subject’s death at age 91, is an impressive, balanced, thorough and masterful literary biography of one of America’s most famous — and famously reclusive — authors. Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield of Catcher in The Rye fame, once…
Gone but not forgotten: author Margaret Mitchell
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Timorous and untested as an author, Margaret Mitchell persuaded herself during her seven-year literary labour that the manuscript she was working on was so terrible it would never be printed. Like a woman enceinte but too modest or superstitious to tell anyone, she kept the project a secret from friends and acquaintances. Only her husband…
The City Man: Fine novel of ’30s Toronto
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Howard Akler has made an auspicious literary debut with his first novel, The City Man (Coach House Books), a crisply written tale that conjures up the look and feel of Toronto in the ‘30s. The story focuses on Toronto Star reporter Eli Morenz who, freshly returned from a convalescence in the country, writes a riveting…
Consolation: New Glimpses of Old Toronto
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If you’re a Toronto lover like me, you’re bound to enjoy and marvel over Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation (Anchor Canada), which delivers a gripping human story, elegantly and poetically told, and a grittily realistic literary portrait of 1850s Toronto that is so well executed that it shines. In alternating chapters, Consolation artfully knits together two…
