Readings

The Language of Love

The wedding chamber at Toronto’s City Hall is located on the third floor and is available to rent in thirty-minute intervals. The author witnessed the marriage described below, although the names have been changed and minor details compressed. This week: Can love transcend language?

Resurrecting the Dead, or, Writing about Family

Wayne Grady grapples with the sometimes outlandish demands of his dead relatives, who metamorphose from real people into fictional characters once he begins to write their story.

||Still image from Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, based on the book by Russell Banks
The Closure Delusion

When terrible things happen, we like to believe that our suffering has an endpoint. But within the psychiatric profession, a faction—including Stephen Grosz, author of The Examined Life—believe "closure" is a myth, and maybe a harmful one.

Writing Against Oblivion

Even while writing about the mafia, life under fascism, and Silvio Berlusconi, the underlying theme of Alexander Stille's journalism has been about collective memory and how we conserve the past. With his recently published family memoir, The Force of Things, Stille has created one of the great cultural and social histories of the twentieth century.