http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs Fearless. Thoughtful. Witty. Canadian. And Opinionated. Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:35:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Featuring: Haruki Murakami, Arthur Conan Doyle, Junot Diaz, Stephen King, and John Reibetanz. 1. Running Man In their summer fiction issue a few weeks ago, the New Yorker published an essay by Haruki Murakami about his simultaneous birth as a novelist and long-distance runner. Like most Murakami, it was ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/07/04/friday-miscellany/ Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/06/26/the-little-literary-press-that-could/ Last weekend, as I was shuffling around BookExpo Canada, searching for catalogs and in need of fresh air, I came across the booth of Ten Speed Press, who really are a top-notch operation. I was drawn by what appeared to be a finished copy of Grant Achatz’s new Alinea ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/06/19/the-meat-of-the-matter/ In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/06/06/guy-ritchie-kills-sherlock-holmes/ Lincoln Hall's new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/06/05/death-on-mount-everest-a-conversation-with-lincoln-hall/ I've been meaning for some time to write some posts about short stories. Not so much the idea of the short story, but reviews of individual stories themselves, considered as stand-alone works of art instead of as a part of a collection or larger body of work. With tomorrow’s tonight's ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/05/27/pasha-mallas-big-city-girls/ Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford's new book, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, is one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever read. Duguid and Alford have compiled twenty-five years of personal history, observation, photographs, travel narratives, and recipes into a collection that illustrates just how ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/05/20/five-questions-jeffrey-alford-and-naomi-duguid/ Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work "No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time" (Much like Damien Hirst, Bigfoot considers his work "No dark, just misunderstood and ahead of time.") This month marks the release of the third book in a series of collaborative memoirs by Bigfoot and Walrus contributing ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/05/14/five-questions-bigfoot/ "To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived." --Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/05/08/cut-out-the-poetry-watson/ This past November, when he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson couldn't make it to the ceremony because he was in Iraq reporting a piece for Portfolio. At the time it seemed like strange news. But one can only imagine that, after spending ... http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/05/02/all-the-nerdy-middle-aged-genre-loving-men/