Articles of Section 'Summer Books'.

Summer Books

Magic reads to slide under a child's nose

By John Burns

Yes, we all know a certain wizard-in-training will be dominating kids' reading this summer, but if Harry Potter is truly to justify all the hype and the presales, it better lead to children developing a heightened interest in all sorts of books. Otherwise, what's the point? Why should J.K. Rowling bother to continue dominating the shelves? Just for the money? Or is it a magical spell cast on all and sundry? Or fate, written in the stars?

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Summer Books

Trevanian fan gives thanks

By Ron Yamauchi

Thanks to the diversity and ubiquity of the creative impulse, and also being easy to please, I've praised countless artists. But I've only written one fan letter.

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Summer Books

Whitman permeates novel's layers of time

By John Burns

Michael Cunningham has a thing for the past, for the way stories can build by laying new thoughts over old ones, accreting but not erasing. He did it with The Hours, riffing on the words of Virginia Woolf all the way to cineplex stardom. (The film netted nine Oscar nominations.) His latest, Specimen Days (HarperCollinsPublishers, $32.95), does a similar dance to the tune of Walt Whitman.

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Summer Books

Campbell happy to meet fans for Make Love

By Steve Newton

Bruce Campbell won the hearts of horror fans everywhere with his role as the comically intense demon killer Ash in Sam Raimi's low-budget 1983 horror hit, The Evil Dead. He went on to portray the manic, blood-soaked hero in the increasingly slapstick follow-ups, Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness, earning an enormous cult following.

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Summer Books

So Long Been Dreaming

By Joe Wiebe

Edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Arsenal Pulp Press, 270 pp, $24.95, softcover.

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Summer Books

Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace

By John Burns

Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp, $35.95, hardcover.

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Summer Books

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris

By Jacqueline Turner

Little, Brown and Company, 272 pp, $36.95, hardcover.

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Summer Books

Cyberpunk Nemesis Really Against Defeatism

By Mark Harris

Kim Stanley Robinson is quick to affirm that he didn't actually start the famous dispute. In town recently to promote Forty Signs of Rain (Bantam Books, $37), the Hugo and Nebula prize--winning author of the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy clearly wanted to set the record straight.

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Summer Books

Free Comics Boost the Luck of O'Reilly

By Shawn Conner

Last summer, Sean O'Reilly took what he calls "the biggest gamble of my life". The Coquitlam schoolteacher had just paid to print up 1,000 copies of Kade, his first comic book, and had driven to San Diego for what has become one of the largest comics conventions in the world. He had rented a booth for the gathering's five-day duration at a cost of US$2,000. There was just one problem: he had nothing to sell.

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Summer Books

No chains can bind him! The Escapist...hero who never was!

By John Burns

Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist Volume 1 (Dark Horse Books, 160 pp, US$17.95) is recursive fiction that will delight pop-culture profs and comix completists with its mirrors-reflecting-mirrors complexity. For the rest of us, though, it's 11 exciting graphic stories taken from a series that never really existed.

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Summer Books

How Fleming Hollowed Out His 007

By Dave Watson

James Bond is one of the most famous of fictional characters. Somehow, superhumanly, he always triumphs. The problem is that most people know him only from the often-cartoonish series of movies and not from the original novels. Admittedly, the books won't improve your mind much, but they are an entertaining way to pass a summer evening. Like the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, though, Bond author Ian Fleming's books have the literary style to transcend their genre.

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Summer Books

Transmission, by Hari Kunzru

By John Burns

Dutton/Penguin Canada, 276 pp, $36, hardcover.

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Summer Books

Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson

By Mark Harris

Bantam Books, 358 pp, $37, hardcover.

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