Magnificent Octopus

TED Talks: Chip Kidd, a page-turning, dog-earring, notes-in-the-margins-taking ink sniffer.

For all of Sylvia Plath's poetry that I've been reading lately, most of it doesn't speak to me. Sure, I appreciate her nice turn...

With drawings! My edition doesn't have any drawings. (See " And Now a Word from Our Sponsors .")

Humans multiplied and covered the Earth. Dependent on flesh and time, people began to live by the laws of the brain. They thought that the b...

It's been nigh on a month that I hosted a breakfast salon at the 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, in whic...

I loved Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs . It's been a while since a book resonated with me in such a meaningful way. I've r...

The only thing that vaguely excited me was astronomy. Not exactly astronomy itself but the heavenly bodies, hanging in space. Imagining the...

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clar...

Fifteen pages into Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs , and wow — I am thoroughly wowed. I love this narrator, this angry woman, forty-t...

I finished Wolf Haas's The Bone Man the other night, and I enjoyed it, but I also have some mixed feelings about it that I'll try t...

The POP Montreal International Music Festival and Matrix Magazine are again joining forces to, ahem, rock your literary world. Announcing ...

The two Rottweilers, very well behaved now — they obey that wisp of a woman, heel, incredible. And you see, that's why I don't like ...

"Guido, how well you look! Have you been going to the gym over the winter? Are you alone or with a girlfriend?" Here she winked, a...

The Happy Conflagration What happens to those who try to warn the present age? It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. ...

Underground New York Public Library Local newspaper La Presse has built a profile of readers on each of Montreal's metro lines: Oran...

The Newberry Consort performs in Chicago, May 3–5.

Finally, a glimpse of the TARDIS library.

When I enter a house for the first time I check on whether there are books, if they are few, if they are many, if they are too neatly arrang...

I've just seen Uraniborg , an exhibition of the work of Laurent Grasso at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibit is ...

I had the pleasure of seeing Gianrico Carofiglio in interview yesterday evening, as part of the 15th Blue Metropolis Montreal International...