.ll.

Madeleine Thien has, bravely I think, chosen to write about a particular evil reality. Through Janie she unveils a dreadful truth.

Bharati Mukherjee’s territory is cultural shock. Born in Calcutta, she has been chronicling the traumas of displacement for more than four decades. She is a marvellously accomplished writer, and her new novel represents not only a new departure but also the latest instalment in a substantial and satisfying body of work. For readers new to Mukherjee’s fiction, this is a rich vein to mine.

With the book industry undergoing a period of unprecedented change, Montreal writer Linda Leith today announces the creation of Linda Leith Publishing Inc., which will publish short works of narrative non-fiction both as electronic and as print books. Books will appear in English from Fall 2011 and in French from Spring 2012.

The translation, from Slovenian, of Tom Ložar's column in the Maribor daily Večer on March 29, 2011, soon after Germany’s Defence Minister Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg resigned when it was discovered he had plagiarized his doctoral thesis.

These young people are part of an exciting movement of university students across North America who are using their expertise to help the less advantaged and to promote social entrepreneurship at home and abroad.

The O’Briens, a stand-alone follow-up to The Law of Dreams dramatizing the story of Fergus O’Brien’s descendants, will inevitably be compared to The Law of Dreams. If anything, it has an even greater scope. The O’Briens spans a historical sweep from 1887 to 1960 and a geographic reach from the Atlantic to Pacific. Members of the eponymous family are so bicultural that their conversation often and readily slips from English to French. It’s difficult not to read into the author’s intent the desire to pen “a” if not “the” great Canadian novel.

The family feel comes from the vivid sense of a movement, even quite literally of clubbiness that comes from the "Club" where artists and hangers-on congregated in a loft on East Eighth Street. Individual as they were and very different as is their work, they also knew each other and were keenly aware of themselves as a group.

[And the side? Edward Burtynsky's stunning "Oil," at the ROM.]

Not just Monsieur Culture Montréal, in other words, but Monsieur Montreal Culture. Brault wasn’t playing to a particularly mixed crowd. There might have been 300 of us in the audience, and I saw only a couple of other Anglos and one Spaniard; there were undoubtedly other non-Francophones I did not recognize, but there were no Anglophone media other than myself, if I can be counted a journalist. La Presse covered the event, but The Gazette did not. There are times, even today, when Montreal seems to live on one planet in English and on another one in French.

When Raboy passed the torch to the audience, a young woman went up to the microphone to ask Vidal, “What is the most important thing in life for you?”

Vidal thought for a moment before saying a single word, “Anaesthetic.” 

Anaesthetic there had been and anaesthetic there would be.

THERE IS NO ROOM

FOR SECOND PLACE.

THERE'S ONLY ONE PLACE,

AND THAT'S FIRST PLACE.

-- Inscription on Davis soccer ball gravestone, Hope Cemetery, Barre VT.