Pop culture figures don’t come more polarizing than Yoko Ono. Some 60 years after she scrambled brains – including John Lennon’s – from New York to London with fearlessly outlandish music, films, art installations and performances, the Tokyo-born multimedia artist remains something of a peculiar punchline. As recently as December 2023, pop star Taylor Swift […]
Lorne Michaels is, as New Yorker writer Susan Morrison puts it, “almost comically elusive.” Despite his household name and prominent role at the helm of America’s favourite and longest-running sketch comedy show, Michaels is famously private and very rarely grants interviews (believe me, I’ve tried). “A subject who is a great talker but who has […]
Forget winter, spring, summer or fall, The Talent is a novel for those whose favourite season is “awards,” as Schitt’s Creek matriarch Moira Rose would say. Daniel D’Addario, chief correspondent for Variety magazine, spends his days interviewing A-listers like Kate Winslet, dissecting award snubs and nominations, likening Emilia Pérez Best Actress nominee Karla Sofia Gascón […]
Edmund White, once dubbed “the paterfamilias of queer literature,” tells all in a frisky new memoir, The Loves of My Life, which the prolific American writer, scholar and essayist calls a “summing up” of his estimated 3,000 sexual encounters. “I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them […]
Don’t be fooled by its curious title: The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, the debut novel by Canadian author and entrepreneur Emma Knight, isn’t a biology book. “It’s not about octopuses, and it’s a mouthful, I know, but it’s a fun conversation starter,” the 36-year-old writer says from her home in Toronto. After penning […]
In a hard year, at least the reading was good. Of the 147 books I’ve read to date, the worthwhile titles I most often press onto people include Susan Fletcher’s character-study/retirement-home mystery, The Night in Question, and Percival Everett’s latest brilliance, James, a subversive retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from his enslaved […]
On a warm summer Wednesday, about 50 Lucy Maud Montgomery devotees, some in historical costume, travelled to Leaskdale, Ont., where the Anne of Green Gables writer watched her husband deliver Sunday sermons more than 100 years ago. Instead of a certain saviour, Canada’s bestselling author is depicted in an engraved triptych on the wall of […]
American writer Dorothy Parker is remembered as a purveyor of withering bon mots, but her influence is enduring and wide ranging, whether as a ruthless cultural commentator or an early voice of resistance. Lesser known, for instance, is her commitment to progressive causes and social justice issues, like helping to form the Screen Writers Guild […]
Whatever book-minded conspiracy theorists on the internet may say, American novelists Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White – or Team W, as they call themselves – were already friends when they met up in a bar at a writing conference and started commiserating about the lonely lives of authors on tour. How great would […]
When investigative journalism is as considerable as it is at The New York Times, deeply buried skeletons are routinely dug up, even if reporters don’t always know what they’re getting into, or for how long. In Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, Susanne Craig and Russ […]