See, Hear, Read: eight hot new books, albums and shows—including Stephen Harper’s hockey tome
The scoop on the month’s red-hot releases
A Canadian Prime Minister writing a book about hockey is a little like an Australian PM writing about kangaroos: the stuff of hack comedy. And yet—A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey, a nostalgic look at the sport’s pre-history, is the literary debut of Stephen Harper (a more writerly “Stephen J. Harper” on the cover). Harper, who laced up for the Leaside Lions as a kid and is a member of the Society for International Hockey Research, has been dropping hints about the book for years and claims to have spent a whopping 15 minutes a day on the tome. (He reportedly also employed a researcher and got advice from sports writer Roy McGregor, though his publisher claims every word in it is his own.) You could fill a small-town arena with the number of hockey books that come out every year, but Harper’s is the only one with a prorogued Parliament as part of its pre-publication build-up.
The indie-rock group Yamantaka//Sonic Titan makes music that sounds like thrash metal performed on a malfunctioning computer. UZU, their noisy new album, is packed with adventurous sonic pleasures.
Fugitive Pieces author Anne Michaels collaborates with illustrator Bernice Eisenstein on Correspondences, a beautifully designed volume that contains a book-length poem by Michaels.
S.E.C.R.E.T. Shared is the sequel to the bestselling erotic thriller S.E.C.R.E.T. by L. Marie Adeline (the alias of author and CBC producer Lisa Gabriele), about a shadowy organization that exists to fulfill its members’ wildest sexual fantasies.
The Condo Game, a documentary airing this month on CBC TV’s Doc Zone, examines our city’s obsession with building glass boxes in the sky. Airs November 21 at 9 p.m. on CBC.
Notorious, the latest schtick-tastic comedy special from Russell Peters, is available on Netflix only. It comes with a behind-the-scenes doc called Russell Peters vs. the World.
Some politicians shouldn’t be writers, and some writers shouldn’t be politicians: in Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, the former leader of the federal Liberal party muses on his disastrous attempt to land the prime ministership.
Bisexual succubus Bo returns, presumably from the dead, in the fourth season of the supernatural series Lost Girl. Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showcase, beginning Nov. 10.
Photographs: Harper courtesy of Simon and Schuster; Yamantaka//Sonic Titan courtesy of Paper Bag Records; S.E.C.R.E.T. courtesy of Random House; Russell Peters courtesy of Netflix
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[caption id="attachment_244702" align="aligncenter" width="656"] Stephen Harper as a budding young right-winger[/caption]
A Canadian Prime Minister writing a book about hockey is a little like an Australian PM writing about kangaroos: the stuff of hack comedy. And yet—A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey, a nostalgic look at the sport’s pre-history, is the literary debut of Stephen Harper (a more writerly “Stephen J. Harper” on the cover). Harper, who laced up for the Leaside Lions as a kid and is a member of the Society for International Hockey Research, has been dropping hints about the book for years and claims to have spent a whopping 15 minutes a day on the tome. (He reportedly also employed a researcher and got advice from sports writer Roy McGregor, though his publisher claims every word in it is his own.) You could fill a small-town arena with the number of hockey books that come out every year, but Harper’s is the only one with a prorogued Parliament as part of its pre-publication build-up.
The indie-rock group Yamantaka//Sonic Titan makes music that sounds like thrash metal performed on a malfunctioning computer. UZU, their noisy new album, is packed with adventurous sonic pleasures.
Fugitive Pieces author Anne Michaels collaborates with illustrator Bernice Eisenstein on Correspondences, a beautifully designed volume that contains a book-length poem by Michaels.
S.E.C.R.E.T. Shared is the sequel to the bestselling erotic thriller S.E.C.R.E.T. by L. Marie Adeline (the alias of author and CBC producer Lisa Gabriele), about a shadowy organization that exists to fulfill its members’ wildest sexual fantasies.
The Condo Game, a documentary airing this month on CBC TV’s Doc Zone, examines our city’s obsession with building glass boxes in the sky. Airs November 21 at 9 p.m. on CBC.
Notorious, the latest schtick-tastic comedy special from Russell Peters, is available on Netflix only. It comes with a behind-the-scenes doc called Russell Peters vs. the World.
Some politicians shouldn’t be writers, and some writers shouldn’t be politicians: in Michael Ignatieff’s Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, the former leader of the federal Liberal party muses on his disastrous attempt to land the prime ministership.
Bisexual succubus Bo returns, presumably from the dead, in the fourth season of the supernatural series Lost Girl. Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showcase, beginning Nov. 10.
Photographs: Harper courtesy of Simon and Schuster; Yamantaka//Sonic Titan courtesy of Paper Bag Records; S.E.C.R.E.T. courtesy of Random House; Russell Peters courtesy of Netflix){kind=link}