Rachel Cusk's radical, creative state of femininity

In Outline, Cusk gets away from speaking for all women, and from the fashionable burden of relatability

Emily M Kelly

September 1, 2015

Rachel Cusk is used to the limelight. After her two memoirs, of motherhood and the end of a marriage, were torn to shreds in the British press, the Toronto-born UK novelist has returned to fiction with Outline, a peculiarly riveting book featuring a creative writing teacher working in Greece, trying, perhaps in vain, to get outside her experience of herself.

 

For Karl Ove Knausgård, it's all the small things

With his wildly popular autobiographical series My Struggle, the author breaks down the banal

Emily M. Keeler

October 24, 2014

Author’s name: Karl Ove Knausgard

Article contentKarl Ove Knausgard

Title: Boyhood Island: My Struggle, Book 3
Events at International Festival of Authors:In Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgård, Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m., Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay West ($18);
Roundtable: Boys to Men, Oct. 26, 12p.m., Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay West, Toronto ($18)

“It doesn’t feel like a memoir to me, partly because it doesn’t reveal enough stories from my life,” Karl Ove Knausgård says over the phone. Considering how it clocks in at close to 4,000 pages in total, it’s hard to imagine that Knausgård has left anything out of My Struggle, his profoundly autobiographical novel that spans six volumes. “It’s much more like the process of a novel,” he says, “much more like an existential search for something.” Five years after the first book of the series was published in Scandinavia, Knausgård’s search continues.

 

Kim Rushing

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Photographer Sally Mann puts her life in frame

"I still feel vulnerable and exposed, and I am even more mistrustful of our culture’s cult of celebrity," says the reclusive Virginia artist.

Emily M. Keeler

June 2, 2015

“I’m from the South,” Sally Mann says as she is handed a foamy cappuccino in a hotel cafe in Toronto on a recent afternoon. “I”m gonna need a lot of sugar.”

Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

 

Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

What you can’t tell from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Marian Engels's Bear is a damn good book; in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.

Emily M. Keeler

Published Dec 08, 2014

Last Updated Mar 30, 2015

Canadiana is a funny and ridiculous thing — maple syrup tins, wooden hockey sticks, Mountie hats, golden-era NFB and CBC logos developed in the socialist ’70s, when the national dream was still so vivid; while Americans have apple pie, we have … I don’t know, roll up the rim? Ours is not a cosmopolitan nostalgia.