Stretching between turn-of-the-century Paris and contemporary Canada, Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen is the story of three women whose lives intersect across time to reveal the intrinsic bonds of our collective and personal histories. It is a rich and compassionate debut, a novel that encourages us to explore the depths of love and memory, of life and of art. Unable to escape the pain of her unrequited love for Max Segal, Marie Prévost travels to Paris in order to study the writing of her other great amour: the novelist Marcel Proust. Marie is bilingual and works as a simultaneous translator in Montreal, and believes that reading Proust’s original papers will give her insights into love and loss that just may mend her broken heart. But when Marie arrives in Paris, Marcel remains as elusive as Max: the strict officials at the Bibliotèque Nationale only allow her access to the peripheral papers of File 263--a much ignored and poorly catalogued collection of the diaries kept by Jeanne Proust, Marcel’s mother. Despite the head librarian’s opinion that they contain only the “natterings of a housewife,” Marie begins to translate them, and discovers that Jean Proust’s diary is as illuminating for what is not said as what is there. Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen is Kate Taylor’s first novel, and has been highly praised by reviewers. Most comment on Taylor’s wonderful ability to weave together three distinct stories in such a way that the larger truths emerge from among their combined details, and on the subtle way she is able to meld history and fiction. As one literary critic has stated, “Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen marks the stunning emergence of a writer from whom we can expect much in the future.”

The story of three women, whose lives criss-cross between Paris in the 1890s, at the height of the Dreyfus affair, France again in 1941 and Canada today. The first-person narrator, a contemporary Canadian simultaneous translator, goes to Paris to research Proust and escape an unrequited love, and finds instead Mme Proust's 'unpublished diary' in the archives. Then there is Sarah, a Jewish French girl whose parents send her out of Paris in WWII to escape the round-ups; she ends up in Canada and never sees them again. She marries into an orthodox Jewish family and becomes more kosher than they are, constantly consoling herself with cooking - and we finally discover that it's her son with whom our narrator is unrequitedly in love... and he's gay. The third woman is Mme Proust herself, whose 'diaries' are fictionalised in a wonderful pastiche by Taylor, with irresistible and impecccably researched details of the mother's worries about Marcel, his late-night habits, his diet and his friends, and about the Dreyfus affair - being Jewish though completely assimilated she observes it with very different eyes from her husband's. Everything comes together poignantly and satisfyingly: the new

The essays in Canadian Cultural Exchange / Échanges culturels au Canada provide a nuanced view of Canadian transcultural experience. Rather than considering Canada as a bicultural dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, this book examines a field of many cultures and the creative interactions among them. This study discusses, from various perspectives, Canadian cultural space as being in process of continual translation of both the other and oneself. Les articles réunis dans Canadian Cultural Exchange / Échanges culturels au Canada donnent de l’expérience transculturelle canadienne une image nuancée. Plutà ́t que dans les termes d’une dichotomie biculturelle entre colonisateur et colonisé, le Canada y est vu comme champ oÃ1 plusieurs cultures interagissent de manià ̈re créative. Cette étude présente sous de multiples aspects le processus continu de traduction d’autrui et de soi-mÃame auquel l’espace culturel canadien sert de théâtre.

"Proust/Warhol : Analytical Philosophy of Art employs three key intellectual tools : the aesthetic theory of Arthur Danto, the account of Proust by Joshua Landy, and the analysis of the art of living by Alexander Nehamas. Proust/Warhol concludes with a discussion of an issue of particular importance for Warhol, the relationship between art and fashion."--Jacket

The essential companion for lovers of the contemporary novel Over the past fifty years, fiction in English has never looked more various. Books bulkier than Victorian three-deckers appear alongside works of minimalist brevity, and experiments with form have produced everything from verse novels to Twitter-thread narratives. This is truly a golden age. But what unites this kaleidoscopic array of genres and styles? Celebrated writer and critic Peter Kemp shows how modern writers are obsessed with the past. In a series of engaging and illuminating chapters, Retroland traces this novelistic preoccupation with history, from the imperial and the political to the personal and the literary. Featuring famous names from across the United Kingdom, United States, and the wider Anglophone world, ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison to Hilary Mantel, this is a work of remarkable synthesis and clarity--a wonderfully readable and enjoyably opinionated guide to our current literary landscape.

This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.

Selected from thousands of pages of the daily journals of George Fetherling - the inexhaustible novelist, poet, and cultural commentator - The Writing Life reveals an astute and candid observer of his contemporaries as well as himself. Hundreds of figures in the arts and public life crisscross the pages of Fetherling's journals, from Margaret Atwood and Marshall McLuhan, to Gwendolyn MacEwen and Conrad Black. The book begins in mid-1970s Toronto, a time of cultural ferment, and carries on to Vancouver and a new century. A captivating and intimate narrative, The Writing Life provides a compelling portrait of the last three decades of Canadian cultural life. From the book: Tuesday 4 February 1992 / Toronto Early this morning the latest in a series of strange phone calls from Edmund Carpenter in New York to discuss successive versions of his Canadian Notes & Queries piece on Marshall McLuhan. He falls to reminiscing and at one point says: "Marshall always reminded me of that passage in Boswell in which Boswell says that if you chanced to take shelter from a rain storm for a few minutes in Dr Johnson's company, you would come away convinced that you had just met the smartest man in the world. Marshall was like that too. Of course, if you spent an hour with Marshall, well, that was something quite different."