23 July 2014
"Let’s remember that Venice is a fish, after all. She sprang from the lagoon like a miraculous birth. If she is to swim freely, her waters must be respected and protected. How can we allow these titans of steel and smoke to threaten the vitality of the most original city in the world?”
23 July 2014
The chances of an oversized vessel getting into trouble increase markedly, as is evidenced by some thrillingly close calls, such as the Mona Lisa incident.
11 July 2014
All along I have been led to believe that New York or Toronto or Montreal or Paris is the centre of the known universe, when it is really this egg-shaped boulder on a mountainside in Greece.
The Temple of Apollo, Bassai
10 July 2014
Hermes and the Infant Dionysos
One is always tempted to go naked in Greece: heat and history seem to demand it, and Irving Layton probably did, even though in the first Olympic games athletes wore protective jock straps, nudes on vases notwithstanding.
9 July 2014
The Erechtheion
The Acropolis can lead to poetry or hallucinations of deities. I failed to see divinity, but I absorbed the beauty of the Erechtheion, especially the six caryatids forming the Ionic columns of its so-called Porch of the Maidens. Absorption seems the accurate term.
27 June 2014
Marie-Soleil, a woman approaching forty, wants to have a baby. She has no partner and no opportunity of finding a donor whose identity she knows in her host country, Canada.
Translation by Jonathan Kaplansky of an excerpt from Cristina Montescu's unpublished novel A Hole in the Belly.
27 June 2014
Review of André Alexis's novel Pastoral (Coach House Press)
24 June 2014
The Cipriani Pool [Photo: Marco LoVerso]
24 June 2014
Tourists who really care to experience the living Venice should ask their gondoliers to forget “O sole mio” and “Torna a Surriento.” The real Venice is in songs like “Giudecca” and “Stucky.”
The Stucky Pool
17 June 2014
On the eve of publishing his own new book, A Migrant Heart (LLP 2014), Irish-born Canadian essayist and biographer Denis Sampson rereads John Doyle's memoir A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age (Doubleday, 2005).
28 May 2014
Ann Charney is an award-winning writer who was born in Poland and has spent most of her life in Montreal, where she has worked as a columnist for Maclean’s and a feature writer at Saturday Night as well as publishing four novels and a collection of essays entitled Defiance in their Eyes.
20 May 2014
Chantal Ringuet, who has written a series of Letters from Israel on this website, has just published Under the Skin of War (BuschekBooks, Ottawa), a collection of poetry inspired by the work of British photographer Don McCullin. The launch takes place this evening at Librairie Le port de tête, 6 - 8 p.m.
6 May 2014
Novelist Jennifer Quist meets the Mormon book scene in Salt Lake City.
30 April 2014
Fatima Soualhia Manet brings Marguerite Duras to life on stage.
[Photo: Yan Duffas]
24 April 2014
Miley Cyrus’s eyebrow-raising “twerking” is a bland white-bread facsimile of what happens all over Jamaica, every night, when the selectors program hot songs the deejays rap, and partiers dance until dawn.
Rising dancehall queen Tifa at the Montreal Reggae Fest
24 April 2014
Reggae music linked up to the anti-colonial, back-to Africa, enlightenment-seeking Rastafari movement that originated in the 1930’s. It became the only widely popular recent music to transmit religious and political beliefs, and many other outgoing messages. Jah-struck roots reggae (or “culture,” pronounced “culcha”) works like gospel music.
9 April 2014
Joy Sorman
[Photo: C. Hélie. All rights reserved.]
Part I of this translation can be found on this site here.
The original French text of part II can be found here on Salon .ll.
5 April 2014
Like a Beast tells the story of a young man, Pim, who loves animals. He loves them so much that he learns to butcher them. Perfectly. The author’s meticulous research helps carry the reader deep into the realm of its subject.
Translated by Ellen Sowchek
[Photo: C. Hélie. All rights reserved.]
6 March 2014
III. Delinquency and Writing
The final in a series of three excerpts from a talk presented to the Atwater Library in Montreal, March 6, 2014.
Mavis Gallant
6 March 2014
II. Escape
The second in a series of three excerpts from a talk presented at the Atwater Library in Montreal, March 6, 2014.
Mavis Gallant, née Mavis Young
[Photo: Glay Sperling]
6 March 2014
![McCord Museum](http://<a href="http//www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/VIEW-23291/" title="More information about this image"><img src="http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/ObjView/v23291.jpg" width="385" height="305" alt="Photograph | Sherbrooke St. from roof of Ritz Carlton, Montreal, QC, 1925 | VIEW-23291" /></a>){kind=link}