Underrated & Overrated in CanLit

Over at the National Post, Alex Good and Steven Beattie give their list of overrated and underrated Canadian writers. Among those who are have been too widely praised: Anne Michaels, Douglas Coupland, Michael Ondaatje, and Yann Martel. Those deserving of more attention include Clark Blaise, Caroline Adderson, Russell Smith, Douglas Glover and Lynn Coady. These [...]

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Canadian Notes (No Queries)

I’ve been on a CanLit kick lately. Here are the fruits of my recent obsession with Canada’s literary and visual culture: 1. Over at the National Post, I review Camilla Gibb’s new novel The Beauty of Humanity Movement, a novel that uses cooking as a prism for viewing the recent history of Vietnam. The book left [...]

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James J. Kilpatrick: Death of a Bigot

I’ll be curious to see what the obituaries are like for James Jackson Kilpatrick, the newspaper columnist who died last night. Although his name has lost its luster in recent years, Kilpatrick was a very important figure in the 1960s and 1970s, ranking only behind William F. Buckley as the nation’s leading conservative writer. Kilpatrick [...]

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Learning to Sympathize with Conrad

  I did a column for the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago on what Conrad Black learned in prison. You can read the column here or below: From the Globe and Mail, Friday, Jul. 23, 2010 When Conrad Black joined the ranks of convicted felons in 2007, he was disappointed to find out how quickly [...]

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Tony Judt, RIP

Tony Judt Tony Judt was always admirably blunt and would have wanted nothing but the truth in his obituaries. So I hope I can be forgiven for saying that he was not an agreeable man. I mean that in reference to his public persona, not what he might have been like in private: it was [...]

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