by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell The Room is a bad movie, but it’s more than that. It’s a special kind of bad, an elite kind of bad, described as a modern Plan 9 from Outer Space or the Citizen Kane of bad movies––the kind of bad movie with a lasting legacy. The Disaster Artist…
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by Carolina Maria de Jesus Child of the Dark is the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, who lived in a favela, a slum, of São Paulo in the late ’50s. (Well, longer than that in truth, but this is at least the period recounted within these pages.) With only a second-grade education, she sold…
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edited by Rosalind Maki and Deborah de Bakker Coming from humble beginnings in 1997, The Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop has grown over the years to become the largest literary organization in the region––definitely cause to celebrate. Twenty Years on Snowshoes is a fitting celebration, a collection of winning entries from the short fiction and memoir…
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by Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Wolfe’s account of the psychedelic adventures Ken Kesey, the author, and his band of “heads” (acid heads), the Merry Pranksters––often in their crazy hippie bus. Having met Kesey in the midst of his drug possession trials in the late ’60s, Wolfe cobbled his book together from…
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by Steven Martin I think I’m far too impressionable, and arguably for the wrong reasons. I mean, if I was picking up good habits and useful knowledge it’d be one thing, but it was only in the midst searching up opium pipes on eBay that I really had to stop and think about what I…
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by William S. Burroughs That Jack Black’s You Can’t Win influenced Junky in a significant way, it becomes an interesting exercise to read both for comparison’s sake. You catch hints of similarity between the two, although Burroughs’ book doesn’t necessarily compare favourably to Black’s. Both concern an individual navigating the American underworld, with stronger storytelling…
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by Paul Kalanithi When I spent this past holiday season down in Florida, I decided I should bring some light reading to help me pass the time. (My family was kind enough to respect my need to bask in the sunlight in peace for sizeable chunks, and I greatly thank them for it.) In hindsight,…
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by Jack Black This is probably the first instance of Goodreads suggesting a book that I both never heard of and got super excited upon seeing it on my suggestions feed. I initially wondered why I should care about something written by Jack Black. (No offense to the man, but he doesn’t strike me as…
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by Douglas Livingston If you’re anything close to a regular reader of my reviews, you probably caught a bit of my love of Beat literature, and you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that we had something of a Beat poet right here in Thunder Bay. Of course, while I have had the…
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by Hunter S. Thompson This was actually my third time reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its entirety. When I first made my way through it, I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read, so it’s become one of those things I revisit from time to time, for a…
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