Literary prizes are often seen as either a barometer or an enforcer of national taste. Gillian Roberts’s Prizing Literature turns instead to how prizes like the Giller and Booker confer upon their Canadian recipients an unofficial certificate of citizenship. With clear prose and theoretical acumen, Roberts probes the vexed relationship between national culture and hospitality, […] More »

Twice over the endless winter of 2007-08, I finished a pleasant-enough telephone conversation with my mother only to have her call me back a couple of minutes later. “I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.” The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt […] More »

Long before communities existed on Facebook, there were tangible places in a city where people with common interests converged. In a place like Toronto, where communities of different cultural groups and ideas form in often isolated pockets, the struggle to define a common identity among them is as old as the city itself. But part […] More »

The ramshackle A-frame house Al Purdy built still stands by the lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. A place “so far from anywhere,” he wrote, “even homing pigeons lost their way.” Inside, it’s nearly as it was when he died 10 years ago. His drawers and cupboards still hold the flotsam and jetsam of a well lived […] More »