"She was bodacious. She was outrageous. She enjoyed shaking things up." One contributor to the "Jump at the Sun" documentary about Zora Neale Hurston described her this way. Peter Bagge's new graphic biography suggests "unencumbered passion" and "grit" (Fire!!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story). In Alice Walker's essay, which opens
How much of your reading is non-fiction? Does it fluctuate, or are you committed to reading (or not reading) it? When others were participating in non-fiction November last year, and actually reading a lot of the books that I'd been kinda-half-sorta thinking about reading, I realised that tending towards fiction
The Canadian Opera Company is now presenting a new 50th-anniversary production of "Louis Riel", originally written for the celebration of the Canadian centenary in 1967, with an attempt to shift that oh-so-colonial gaze, now including indigenous artists and languages with more nuanced representations of the historical figures. These are powerfully important
Debra Komar creates a narrative which manages to straddle the line between scholarly analysis and page-turner, relying upon court records, newspapers, and other historical documentation to gather evidence surrounding the murder of 14-year-old Annie Kempton in Bear River, Nova Scotia in 1896. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 “This book
Within pages, the bookish will find a niche to inhabit in Rebecca Mead's book, in much the same way that the author has inhabited the pages of Middlemarch. Bond Street Books - Doubleday, 2014 Perhaps not in exactly the same way, for as the author posits, that particularly
