Book Reviews

  Back when I was learning the nuts and bolts of copyediting, one of the tenets our instructor came back to repeatedly was “The Five Cs”: our goal as copy editors should always be to render text that is correct, consistent, clear, concise, and complete.  So when I spotted a slim volume entitled The Subversive Copy Editor on a colleague’s shelf, I was instantly intrigued.   Editorial subterfuge? Track changes turned...

Book Reviews

Jan Wong has become something of a household name for newspaper reading Torontonians. Her hard-hitting journalistic style being her claim to fame. It also became the reason for her to step aside from the love of her life: her career.   In her memoir, Out of the Blue, Jan Wong shares the most painful aspects of her life, taking us through her work-related distress that led to severe...

Book Reviews

In Emily Schultz’s The Blondes, women’s preoccupation with hair (especially blonde hair) plays a major role. But there is, of course, something deeper going on here. And it is through the protagonist Hazel Hayes that these deeper meanings are explored.   Hazel is a somewhat innocent yet resourceful young woman working on her dissertation in aesthetology, or the study of looking, at New York University when a viral pandemic...

Book Reviews

In support of the Toronto Public Library’s city-wide reading event, One Book Toronto, we at TEC obtained copies of Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down (published by Coach House Press) and started our own office book club.   While our opinions of the story of Alex and Susie-Sue varied, we all agreed that this poetic novel — filled with local colloquialisms and endless references to the streets and neighbourhoods of our fair...

Book Reviews

In one of my first classes in Ryerson University’s publishing certificate program, my teacher alluded to some of the goings-on at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest trade publishing book fair, and the most important when it comes to international deals, publishing rights, and licensing fees. He joked that the Frankfurt cabbies were well used to ferrying about publishing types for their various illicit liaisons.   I was therefore...

Book Reviews

Sheila Heti was TEC’s second adopt-an-author at last September’s Word On The Street Festival. I enjoyed reading Sheila’s earlier works — a short story collection, The Middle Stories, and her first work of fiction, Ticknor — and I was eager to read her third book, a (mostly) fiction tale in which the character “Sheila” explores the title question, How Should A Person Be?   This was a difficult read for me....

Book Reviews

In September, The Editing Company adopted two authors at the Word On The Street Festival, Sheila Heti and Richard B. Wright. As thanks for our sponsorship, we were generously given copies of each author’s latest book: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Richard B. Wright’s Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard. After moving to our new office, I was finally able to sit down and finish...