Michael Hingston

The undead weave through Colson Whitehead's Zone One

By Michael Hingston | January 18, 2012

Its vision of a postapocalyptic New York City, where teams of amateur soldiers roam the streets in search of any stray remaining undead, is foreboding and appropriately caked with ash and grime.

Critics make year-end book picks

By Alexander Varty, Brian Lynch, Charlie Smith, David Chau, Jennifer Croll, and Michael Hingston | December 15, 2011

Here’s our annual roundup of the books that struck us as outstanding this year—not exhaustive, not definitive, but an accurate thumbnail of what grabbed us and didn’t let go.

Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is a mind-bending vision of parallel worlds

By Michael Hingston | October 27, 2011

If this much-hyped novel is a dream, it’s an eerily lucid one.

Comments (2)

Distance puts Invermere in perspective for Once You Break a Knuckle's D.W. Wilson

By Michael Hingston | October 19, 2011

When he was a creative-writing undergrad at the University of Victoria, D.W. Wilson came up with some fairly strict rules about how to write a sentence.

Lynn Coady raises the paradoxes of personal histories in The Antagonist

By Michael Hingston | October 13, 2011

Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist plays with the impossibility of bottling life in a story.

Nicholson Baker's raunchy romp House of Holes needs more foreplay

By Michael Hingston | September 7, 2011

It pains me to say so, but the ninth novel from Maine’s Nicholson Baker is exactly the kind of hollow fuck-fest his other sex books were once decried as back in the ’90s.

Comments (1)

Tyrant Memory confronts a dictator's black magic

By Michael Hingston | July 13, 2011

The fourth novel from El Salvador’s Horacio Castellanos Moya to be translated into English takes a small-scale look at a very big-picture event.

Michael Murphy's A Description of the Blazing World full of inspired moments

By Michael Hingston | June 14, 2011

Michael Murphy's debut novel is an unpredictable page-turner with some serious literary heft behind it.

Heads You Lose puts a collaborative spin on the crime thriller genre

By Michael Hingston | June 7, 2011

A few years back, crime novelist Lisa Lutz got the idea to write a new book in tandem with another writer: poet and former boyfriend David Hayward.

Book review: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

By Michael Hingston | April 7, 2011

All of Wallace's hallmarks are here: asides that run on for pages, soliloquies rife with jargon, and a determination to treat his characters with as much empathy as possible.

Book review: The Adults by Alison Espach

By Michael Hingston | March 23, 2011

In her debut novel, Alison Espach takes readers into the grimy world of grown-up emotional warfare.

Book review: The Divinity Gene by Matthew J. Trafford

By Michael Hingston | February 16, 2011

Toronto’s Matthew J. Trafford has an obvious penchant for the fantastic.

Book review: The Big Payback by Dan Charnas

By Michael Hingston | February 8, 2011

The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop is the kind of book that the word exhaustive was invented to describe.

Gary Shteyngart's satirical Super Sad True Love Story offers a clairvoyant look at society

By Michael Hingston | November 15, 2010

Super Sad True Love Story has both war and sex on the brain, and it’s all filtered through a dystopian lens.

Book review: The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, by Andrew Oâ��Hagan

Book review: The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, by Andrew O’Hagan

By Michael Hingston | October 14, 2010

Any breeder can tell you about a dog’s bloodline, but the canine narrator of Andrew O’Hagan’s fourth novel has a pedigree of a very different kind.

Book review: C by Tom McCarthy

By Michael Hingston | October 5, 2010

C is a testament to McCarthy’s skill as a researcher, but not much else.

Book review: Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

By Michael Hingston | August 3, 2010

Widely buzzed as one of the summer’s must-read novels, the debut by Nashville’s Adam Ross is a grisly look at death, marriage, and obsession, told through the prism of three failed husbands.

Book review: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

By Michael Hingston | May 25, 2010

Arriving just 18 months after the man’s suicide, David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself leads the pack of posthumous books about David Foster Wallace.

Book review: Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

By Michael Hingston | April 8, 2010

Union Atlantic, the debut novel from New York’s Adam Haslett, is a bracing gulp of fresh air.

Q & A: Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey

By Michael Hingston | March 18, 2010

The Straight caught up with Mason via e-mail to discuss the compiling of his Lost Books, why so many writers are drawn to Odysseus’s story, and why he sent a custom-built Trojan horse to the New York Times Book Review—complete with a copy of his novel hidden in its belly.

Book review: The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

By Michael Hingston | March 18, 2010

Zachary Mason’s novel makes a compelling case for literature’s fundamental elasticity.

Book review: Point Omega by Don DeLillo

By Michael Hingston | March 11, 2010

Don DeLillo's new novel, Point Omega, clocks in at just over 100 pages, and is consumed on every level with silence.

Book review: The Parabolist by Nicholas Ruddock

By Michael Hingston | March 4, 2010

At the centre of the debut novel by Guelph, Ontario’s Nicholas Ruddock is a highfalutin philosophy trumpeted by a (fictional) group of Mexican poets circa 1975.

Comments (1)

Book review: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

By Michael Hingston | January 14, 2010

The freewheeling eighth novel by Brooklyn’s Jonathan Lethem takes place in an alternate-universe version of Manhattan, though the degree of its unreality is never clearly defined.

Book review: Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

By Michael Hingston | January 7, 2010

When faced with a book of essays, especially one that isn’t tied to a single, unifying topic, it’s tempting to leaf through the table of contents, cherry-pick the best entries, and discard the rest. But this isn’t possible with Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.

Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist avoids getting lost in the details

By Michael Hingston | November 26, 2009

Even if you don’t like poetry, or haven’t read it in years, the fictional Paul Chowder is a lovable, self-effacing dope of a tour guide, one who’s able to poke holes in the gospel of iambic pentameter without putting everyone to sleep.

The Museum of Innocence draws its strength from love and loss

By Michael Hingston | November 12, 2009

The seeds for the grandiose new novel by Istanbul’s Orhan Pamuk were covertly planted midway through Snow, his metafictional murder mystery translated into English in 2004.

Comments (2)

Juliet, Naked

By Michael Hingston | October 29, 2009

With his sixth and latest novel, Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby revisits the spiky terrain of pop music and the obsessives who consume it, but his tone is calmer, more assured, and ultimately more nourishing.

Lorrie Moore makes politics personal in A Gate at the Stairs

By Michael Hingston | October 22, 2009

Author Lorrie Moore's newest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, doesn’t hit nearly as many high notes as Moore’s devout fan base has come to expect.

Inherent Vice spirals toward a loopy kind of sense

By Michael Hingston | October 1, 2009

Inherent Vice, with its gumshoe hero and general air of pot-induced paranoia, may be better equipped to stand on its own.

Douglas Coupland's Generation A springs from natural curiosity

By Michael Hingston | September 17, 2009

Interviews, by their very nature, are stilted affairs for both parties—each with a clear job to do, and all ensuing charisma at least a little premeditated. But author Douglas Coupland shrugs this entire convention away.

Comments (2)

Dave Eggers's Zeitoun weathers disaster

By Michael Hingston | August 13, 2009

Dave Eggers' new work, the nonfiction book Zeitoun, is a quietly devastating account of one man’s experience of Hurricane Katrina and its surreal, frayed, often Kafkaesque aftermath.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier's quest a whirlwind of mischief

By Michael Hingston | July 30, 2009

There are many remarkable ways to describe the hero of Los Angeles–based writer Percival Everett’s 17th novel, and that’s not even counting his legal name: Not Sidney Poitier.

Clancy Martin's How to Sell doesn't close the deal

By Michael Hingston | July 2, 2009

High-end jewellery is the name of the game in How to Sell, the debut novel by Calgary-born philosophy professor Clancy Martin.

Comments (1)

Aleksandar Hemon's eloquence endures in Love and Obstacles

By Michael Hingston | June 25, 2009

Love and Obstacles is author Aleksandar Hemon's third collection of short fiction, and it does not disappoint.

Red April loses its way in spooky netherworld

By Michael Hingston | June 11, 2009

Red April marks the English-language debut of the Peruvian novelist Santiago Roncagliolo.

Fall stirs with fire and menace of high school

By Michael Hingston | March 26, 2009

It’s tempting to describe the core conflict in Fall as a love triangle, but things are slightly more complicated than that. Can it still be called a triangle if two sides are barely aware of the third’s existence?

Comments (1)

Little Bee brings past to doorstep

By Michael Hingston | March 12, 2009

Both kinds of ghosts, the colonized and the physically battered, are contained in Chris Cleave’s titular hero, Little Bee, a shell-shocked Nigerian teenager who flees to London after a savage oil war destroys her village and family.

Literary turns rob Confession of truth

By Michael Hingston | March 5, 2009

Confession, the tempting but bland new novel from Toronto’s Lee Gowan, chronicles the life and times of Dwight Froese, a sullen elementary-school janitor who grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan.

Lawrence Lessig's Remix questions copyright laws

By Michael Hingston | February 12, 2009

Lawrence Lessig's latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, demonstrates just how creaky and antiquated the current American laws are.

Dragonflies

By Michael Hingston | January 29, 2009

Dragonflies, the new novel from Mayne Island’s Grant Buday, does an admirable job of re-imagining the Trojan Horse myth, synthesizing various secondhand accounts (from Virgil, Sophocles, and Homer, to name a few) into one sharp, crisp hybrid.

Death With Interruptions

By Michael Hingston | December 30, 2008

José Saramago’s new book, Death With Interruptions, hinges on a simple question: what would happen if people stopped dying?

The Wordy Shipmates

By Michael Hingston | December 23, 2008

Downtown Owl revisits Chuck Klosterman's obsessions

By Michael Hingston | October 30, 2008

This may be Chuck Klosterman's first novel, but Downtown Owl is hardly a venture into the unknown. It revisits the essayist's two chief obsessions: the sleepiness of small-town America and the unexamined profundities of pop culture.

Will Self's The Butt examines liberal follies

By Michael Hingston | October 23, 2008

Will Self's sixth book is a characteristically sweeping effort, veering with gusto from screwball road-trip comedy to a brooding critique of the West’s lingering imperialist urges.

Coming-of-age given sharp new twist in Out Backward

By Michael Hingston | September 25, 2008

This narrative formula usually drains suspense automatically, but here Ross Raisin deftly pulls it inside out in a chilling and utterly believable descent into self-delusion and obsession.

Murakami sticks to his subject in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

By Michael Hingston | August 14, 2008

The good news is that Running is indeed a memoir, where Haruki Murakami himself is firmly under the microscope. But the bad news is that all he wants to talk about is long-distance running.