At home. Mentioning Ulysses might conjure up a range of associations – important, classic, difficult, even unreadable – but “at home” isn’t likely to be one of them. Sixteen people felt anything but comfortably home on a Monday morning this past July as they awaited the start of a Toronto […]
Ann will be off on the Camino in a couple of weeks. She is busy putting in long miles, checking her feet, gathering her gear, and rechecking her feet. Along with taking long daily walks through some of the most beautiful countryside imaginable, the group will gather over wine […]
I’ve spent the better part of my professional life encouraging people to talk about books, and not just any books, great books. It turns out that these great books are often times difficult books too. Occasionally I get the prickly questions: Why would a bunch of equally ignorant people even […]
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“It’s in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear,” writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman’s insightful memoir Hogs, Mules and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm . “Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they […]
Here was the headline in the book review section of the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper that caused me to stop and take notice. “Vincent Lam’s first novel, about Vietnam, has makings of a masterpiece.” Vincent Lam is an emergency physician Toronto who also writes – very well. His […]
I discovered a poem, “How Much of That is Left in Me?” some years ago and was immediately drawn to it and continue to be. I did not know the poet Jack Gilbert, even though I think he is widely celebrated. Today I found another of Gilbert’s poem, written in […]
A true confession: When I am intent on something, I can be more dogged than any canine wth a bone. One of the books we will be discussing in India this coming February/March (Confounded & Bewitched: The Strange Rise of Modern India) is a personal favouite, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I learned the extraordinary Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta recently […]
“Out of India”: three writers – Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee and K. Satchidanandan — reflect on the country of their childhood and its dynamic changes today. Eleanor Wachtel spoke with them, onstage, at this year’s Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. Listen to Eleanor Wachtel’s panel interview, Out of […]
“Stories are the way we organize our response to the world… Listening to others, and having them listen to you, is a way to grow..” So says American journalist and public commentator Bill Moyers. Moyers’ 1996 Mini-Series for PBS, Genesis: A Living Conversation, is a wonderful example of the two […]