Articles by John Burns.
December 27, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Straight.comWhat a year it was. And thanks to the wonders of the Internet (and the subtle retinal scanning we use here at Straight.com), we have the opportunity now to look back at the stories that helped define 2007. So herewith, the most popular stories of the year on Straight.com.
December 20, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsI wanted to like Unmarketable, but although Moore has assembled the makings of a trenchant magazine article on cool-hunting and how big-budget PR firms co-opt small-scale artists to infiltrate urban youth, she’s not equipped to stay the course of a book
December 20, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsJim Shepard has constructed entire novels on the sticky bedrock of boyhood shame, but it’s in his stories that he most compellingly cores the male soul
December 10, 2007 - 09:36 AM
News FeaturesHon. Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour - better know to the world as
Conrad Black, the world's third most powerful press baron, according to Naomi Klein - is expected to receive sentencing today in a Chicago court.
December 6, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBunnies, bigheads, broncos, and Bart fill the illustrated pages of this year's gift suggestions
December 6, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsGastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations From the Golden Age of American Cookery sticks to what James Lileks knows best: cooking gone terribly, terribly wrong
December 6, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsStephen Colbert's I Am America is as hypnotic and hilarious as The Colbert Report
December 6, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsIan McAllister’s deep love for the animals is palpable, and throughout the well-written account, we come to know and care for them
December 6, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Choice of the WeekThe city has announced the four finalists for this year's City of Vancouver Book Award. The shortlisted titles are:
Grant Arnold and Michael Turner's Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (Douglas and McIntyre);
Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Knopf Canada);
Brett Josef Grubisic's The Age of Cities (Arsenal Pulp Press);
Michael Kluckner's Vancouver Remembered (Whitecap Books)
Mayor Sam Sullivan will present the $2,000 prize on January 29.
December 4, 2007 - 1:27 PM
Blog - Music Adam Sandler sings his Hanukkah song.
November 27, 2007 - 4:00 PM
News FeaturesThe latest stage of the trial against alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton wrapped up Monday (November 26) when the defence presented its summary comments to the jury.
November 22, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsWatada’s story rises above genre in its details of Depression-era life among first-generation Japanese Canadians
November 15, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsWhat is Clive Barker thinking? His latest, the short horror novel Mister B. Gone, is so introspective, so filled with interruption and qualification and self-doubt and such, it’s never scary. Yet if it’s not scary, what is it?
November 15, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsThis leads, naturally, to questioning whether books contain any enduring content at all and, ultimately, to the most unsettling paradox: this book asks if books have any function at all. Bayard concludes they are merely the passageway leading passive readers to become active creators of meaning. In this, he quotes Oscar Wilde’s maxim, "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so."
November 15, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsChabon and McCall Smith, our modern-day Dickenses, inherit different strands of Dickens’s craft. Chabon’s work to date has been naturalistic, urban, New Yorker–y. Here, he explains in an afterword (but why does he feel the need?), "you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of my characters…were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure." Where Chabon is all thesauruses and Silk Road merchant maps, McCall Smith falls squarely into the Dickens mode of closely observed, deftly delivered character
November 15, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Choice of the WeekThere won’t be swords at this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, but there will be comic novelist Howard Jacobson (Kalooki Nights) coming all the way from England for an opening-night discussion with CBC broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) closing the fest. In between, look for readings and performances by—among others—culinary writer Norene Gilletz, former Mossad agent Michael Ross (in conversation with Vicki Gabereau), and photojournalist David Rubinger.
November 8, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsIn Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes sifts the half-century between World War II and the dissolution of the USSR to understand the hysteria that brought the supergiants (and the rest of us) to the brink of Armageddon. The result is a meticulously researched, compelling examination of the 20th century’s dread-wracked second half
November 6, 2007 - 2:11 PM
Blog - Quickies So CBC reports that YouTube Canada launched today. The odd thing is that I think there's been an active .ca version of the popular user-posted vid site going for at least a month. The .ca version culls from the larger site's storehouse, highlighting Canadian content. Canada, according to the CBC story, is one of 15 international sites for the YouTube powerhouse.
November 1, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsProtagonist Stanley Moss is at death's door as the novel opens, disappointed by but resigned to (how Canadian) his own demise. Then: "There was within him a pressure so great he thought his heart had stopped.…Everything he had learned about death was wrong. It was not easeful or romantic…"
October 25, 2007 - 10:25 AM
Blog - Quickies Lovely that the constabulary of Hampshire wanted to reach out with back-of-the-bus advertisements.
October 18, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Choice of the WeekThe Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival is under way, bringing together authors from across town and around the world–and, more importantly, putting them in contact with the readers who make the whole thing worthwhile. Tickets remain for several promising events–if you can't find something to bestir you, you just aren't trying.
October 11, 2007 - 2:46 PM
Book FeaturesNew nonfiction from Carellin Brooks.
October 11, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsGraphic Novels with and without words.
October 11, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book FeaturesNew nonfiction from Massey Lecturer Alberto Manguel.
October 4, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Reviews By A.L. Kennedy. House of Anansi Press, 280 pp, $29.95, hardcover
October 4, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy George Saunders. Riverhead Books, 257 pp, $17.50, softcover
September 27, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Choice of the WeekIf you attend Word on the Street at and around Library Square this Sunday (September 30), make time in your day's agenda to chat with the library-worker members of CUPE 391, on strike for over two months now. (For more on the strike, see Arts Notes ) Speaking of intractable differences, Alberto Manguel delivers the 2007 Massey Lectures in five Canadian cities in October.
September 27, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy David Chariandy. Arsenal Pulp Press, 192 pp, $19.95, softcover
September 27, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Douglas Coupland. Random House Canada, 275 pp, $32, hardcover
September 20, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book FeaturesFirst-time novelist Ameen Merchant is worried.
September 13, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Stephen Marche. Viking Canada, 254 pp, $32, hardcover
September 13, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Featurest's fitting M.G. Vassanji won his second Giller Prize for a novel called The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.
August 30, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsIt doesn't get much more provocative than South Korean Young-Ha Kim's first translated work into English. In this brief, chilly novel, written in 1996, an unnamed narrator recounts a few of his more aesthetic encounters with clients who want to design their perfect suicide. Though the book's title reminds us that self-destruction can be seen as choice, the suggestion remains that until the narrator came along they hadn't perhaps realized they were seeking an exit strategy.
August 30, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Choice of the WeekSeptember’s literary calendar is filling up fast; ink in these three ways to fete our local heroes. The Capilano Review launches its latest issue on September 13 with readings by Clint Burnham, Ryan Knighton, Daphne Marlatt, Lisa Robertson, and more. The event, $8, starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Cultch.
August 23, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book Reviews Eclipse , like Twilight (2005) and New Moon (2006) before it, is about Bella, who moved to the tiny town of Forks, Washington, for the start of Grade 11.
August 16, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsThe Dark River, like The Traveler before it, pits current Traveler Gabriel Corrigan against his turncoat brother, Michael, as they battle for freedom, or human souls, or…well, you get the point. The plot is incidental (in fact, it strangely repeats the first book's) and characterization is shaky (watch out for weak men and strong women!), though there's lots of fight and flight.
August 16, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsThese are just appetizers for the main event: the novella that gives the collection its name. They are amuse-gueules meant to give us Pendarvis's measure, which essentially falls into the McSweeney's school of thinking that everyone's a chump, and the more you think you're the exception, the chumpier you are.
August 9, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book FeaturesThink you know William Gibson, Vacouver speculative-fiction author, father of cyberpunk? He recently sat down with the Straight to discuss his new, ninth novel,
Spook Country.
August 9, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Movie ReviewsStarring Peter Dinklage, James Belushi, and Patrick Warburton, and featuring the voice of Jason Lee. Rated G.
August 2, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsEverything is connected. We know that, but even in talking about natural systems and ecology, connections are all around. At least, that's the impression you get from Alan Weisman's thought experiment The World Without Us.
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Melinda Long, with illustrations by David Shannon. Harcourt, 32 pp, $19.95.
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Kari-Lynn Winters, with illustrations by Ben Hodson. Orca Book Publishers, 28 pp, $19.95
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsHow to summarize the 600-page conclusion to a modern epic?
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Carrie Mac. Puffin Canada, 306 pp, $25
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Anita Daher. Puffin Canada, 214 pp, $12.99
July 26, 2007 - 09:00 AM
Book ReviewsBy Catherine Jinks. Harcourt, 486 pp, $21.95