Bolshoi Confidential by Simon Morrison (No credit) BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL By Simon Morrison Can you tell the story of a country through dance? Certainly. Like other art forms, dance offers great opportunity for both narrative and emotional expression. But can you tell the story of a country through a single dance company? That’s the challenge taken […]

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (No credit) THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS By Tim Wu Humanity is in crisis, Tim Wu asserts—not so much because of climate change, or inequality, or the rise of the alt-right, but because . . . look, a baby sloth! Sorry. Where was I? We’ve become, in Wu’s words, “‘homo distractus, a species of ever-shorter […]

Looking for the Stranger by Alice Kaplan (No credit) LOOKING FOR ‘THE STRANGER’ By Alice Kaplan Published on the heels of Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel and Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair—fascinating works about the cultural, historical and personal provenance of Henry James and Boris Pasternak novels—Kaplan’s equally stellar new book […]

THE WITCHES OF NEW YORK By Ami McKay The Salem witch trials were, to be sure, a nasty, misguided affair. But in The Witches of New York, Ami McKay—whose 2007 debut, The Birth House, was a No. 1 bestseller and Canada Reads finalist—overcompensates for past misrepresentations by declawing her titular subjects to the point of […]

DISTILLED By Charles Bronfman with Howard Green Entrepreneur and philanthropist Charles Bronfman, youngest son of Sam and Saidye Bronfman, readily admits he was born with the “proverbial silver spoon” in his mouth. During the Great Depression, as other Montrealers were struggling to put food on the table, the Bronfmans were ensconced in their Westmount mansion. Charles […]

SOMETIMES BRILLIANT By Larry Brilliant This world-renowned physician, epidemiologist and public-health crusader comes by his sense of civic duty honestly. His father, an ex-boxer who had a jukebox route in the American Midwest, testified in Washington about the Mafia’s extortion practices. By way of thanks, Bobby Kennedy visited the family home in Detroit. When Larry’s […]

THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS By Hal Niedzviecki The powers that be in fictional Wississauga want to run a new expressway through a river gorge. Various inhabitants of this very contemporary “edge city” on the border of a giant metropolis are unhappy about it, not that—being contemporary edge-city dwellers—any of them are happy about anything at all. In […]

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY By Rabih Alameddine This novel makes heady use of multiple crossroads—personal and political, cultural and social. Over a single gruelling evening in the waiting room of a psychiatric clinic, we come to understand that the main character, Jacob—a gay Arab-American poet—has lost his grip. He seems to be looking for an […]

  THE FRENCH CHEF IN AMERICA By Alex Prud’homme Before there was the Food Network, there was Julia Child. She wasn’t the first celebrity chef to appear on U.S. television—that honour went to her friend James Beard in 1946—but she was the first to do it well. With a personality worthy of satire on Saturday […]

FLOAT By Anne Carson Anne Carson has some nerve. She treats poetry as a casual high-wire act, and knows how to get our attention. Poets tend to occupy the ultraviolet end of the literary spectrum, invisible and under-compensated. Carson is a radiant exception to the rule. Having won some $700,000 in prizes, the 66-year-old writer […]