Reading Time: 4 minutes For me, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) remains one of the great writers of the Latin American Boom. He combined his talents as an imaginative novelist and short story writer with an unwavering dedication to participation in the major political and social debates of his time. He operated as a leading public intellectual and cultural ambassador for […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes “True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? -Vaclav Havel I recall an era where progressive politics in Canada was both exciting and a little bit dangerous for the wealthy elite and the power brokers. One of the first politicians who engaged my interest as a […]

Reading Time: 4 minutes You have no doubt heard the expression “the dog that didn’t bark – a wonderful phrase emanating from an old Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. I would like to conduct a little touch of literary sleuthing and ask why E.M Forster, eminent English novelist, declined decade after decade to publish the one and […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes  A remarkable manuscript was bundled out of the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1956. An Italian Communist journalist named Sergio d’Angelo had visited Boris Pasternak to discuss possible publication of his latest work. Pasternak was the famed Russian poet and survivor of the various purges and show trials of the Great Terror that […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes  I have just read a wonderful narrative by the Palestinian human rights lawyer, activist, and now writer of the first rank, Raja Shehadeh. The author lives in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which has been under occupation by Israeli forces for 51 years and counting.  The book, A Rift in Time: Travels With My Ottoman […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes  Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms case, (Delwyn) Vriend v. Alberta. There was some fine reporting in the Edmonton Journal and elsewhere on the case, including where Delwyn Vriend is now and what his experiences have been in the struggle to see gay rights entrenched in […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes  Sayed Kashua wrote his novel, Second Person Singular, as an Arab-Israeli. He has since sadly reflected on his need to leave Israel for the US, after years of trying to find a place for himself in a society that treated him and other Palestinians as second-class participants in a country dominated by hard- right, nationalistic […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes  George Orwell was an outstanding man of letters who is also quite likely the most influential political novelist of the 20th century. Best known for his satiric animal fable Animal Farm, and the dystopian novel 1984, he began his career as an unlikely candidate for literary stardom. His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), reveals his […]

Reading Time: 6 minutes  Doris Lessing left Africa – Southern Rhodesia to be precise, to journey by ship to England with the most meagre of personal possessions – a suitcase, a small sum of money and a manuscript. It was the manuscript which would transform the life of this fearless colonial from the margins of the fast-changing British Empire. […]

Reading Time: 7 minutes  George Orwell famously sought to make writing on politics into an art. It’s important to remember that he wasn’t the only one. So too did a radically different kind of writer, the cocksure American Gore Vidal. I bring up Orwell because I continue to ponder the notion that his dystopian novel 1984 time and again […]