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When a renowned author dies, two critical processes begin: first, placing the writer in the pantheon; and second, digging out every jot, every piece of juvenilia, every previously unseen word the deceased wrote.
Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review—the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s—since they have dropped the hyperbolic “DNA of literature”...
Listen: Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time and space. Kurt went into a deep sleep on April 11, 2007, in New York City. In the language of the earthling humans called "English," he "died." So it goes. Free from his body, he...
At times I am secretly (actually more openly) jealous of my colleagues in the English department who get to teach literature day in and day out. What a treat. So I always make sure to sneak at least one fictional story whether...
Image courtesy of foxtongue under a creative commons licence For Canadians in London, seeing Dan Mangan play at the Brixton Windmill is supremely surreal. Vancouver's newest and favourite indie folk-rock hero has already won...
TO THE EDITORS:In the thought for today on Nov. 11, Kurt Vonnegut makes an important observation: "Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this but they insist on amassing...
Monday’s release of Vladimir Nabakov’s The Original Laura has generated considerable fanfare, in large part because the famed writer expressly requested in his will that the works be destroyed. Meanwhile, the posthumous...
Luna "Loony" Lovegood from the later Harry Potter books seems to suffer from a mild-to-medium case of this. As her father publishes the Wizarding World's equivalent of the Weekly World News (without the "for entertainment...
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, the Maybach experiment was a conspiracy between Daimler and the rich to make the rest of us feel smart. The ultimate zombie brand, exhumed during the go-go nineties as a way for Daimler to charge...
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human...
