Rye Observations, by Kenneth Radu

18 April 2012

Why a town becomes a gathering place of the literati is a subject for literary histories. In Rye’s case, it may well have been the seductions of the past, which certainly seduced Henry James.

Conduit Street, Rye

The Embattled Life and Early Death of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, by Linda Leith

12 March 2012

The legacy of 11 September, the rise of radical Islam, and the persistence of revolutionary elements in some of Canada’s ethnic groups is likely to call forth the McGee who took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethnoreligious community, who challenged self-righteous political and religions certainties, and who argued for a broad, tolerant, decent, open-minded, and compassionate society in which people did not push others off the path.

A Literary Friendship: Hazzard on Greene, by Linda Leith

9 March 2012

Shirley Hazzard's book has the effect of sending us back to the novels of Greene and of Hazzard herself, but that has more do with the quality of her writing than with any literary genre. It also has something to do with her love of her subject.

 

Books, in Guatemala?

27 February 2012

by Guy Tiphane

A visit to schools supported by Child Aid, an organization that sets up school libraries and reading programs in poor areas of Guatemala.

For a Literary Salon

21 February 2012

Contributing editor Marie-Andrée Lamontagne’s introductory text for the French online Salon .ll. argues that literature has never thrived as much as it does today, when it has all but disappeared from sight.

Translation by Jonathan Kaplansky.

Contributing editors Felicia Mihali, Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, and Annabelle Moreau planning the  
literary salon, October 2011.

          

        

         
The Best Company - 25 Years of the Public Lending Right Commission, by Katia Grubisic

21 February 2012

In the must and age and rainy days of those European libraries many moons ago, I was in a place that was mine; I was home. I might have been in another time; I was outside of time. Back then, I hadn’t yet published a line, and now I wait, along with thousands of other writers, for a slip of paper that reminds me not only that my words exist in the world, but that they are alongside countless other worlds. In libraries we are utterly ourselves, and we are in the best company.

 

Better than Downton Abbey: Nabokov's Ecstasy

8 February 2012

"This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love." -- Vladimir Nabokov

Review of A Wicked Company

3 February 2012

by Kenneth Radu

Wicked company, therefore, is to be understood as the hostile official attitude towards men (mostly men) of intellectual daring who challenged the assumptions of religion and society. Inconvenient thinkers could be imprisoned and atheists could still be executed at the time, a practice I believe some would wish to continue today. That was the purpose of the radical salon: room for a coterie of free thinkers to converse bravely on many subjects, including dangerous critiques of the ancien régime and the Church, without fear of reprisal, at least from their fair hostess.

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