Results tagged “theeconomist”

Warren Kinsella has a diatribe in today’s Post (that’s National, not Midtown) about trashy celeb magazines. Their circulation is up, Time’s circulation is down, more people care about P. Diddy than national politics, yada yada yada. At the end he encourages us to "pick up quite a few more copies of The Economist and U.S. News and World Report. And the National Post, naturally."

When Canadians want satire we turn TV figures like Rick Mercer, but satire, that most difficult of comedic genres, is virtually dead in CanLit. Or is it? Randy Boyagoda's debut novel The Governor of the Northern Province is a satire so dark that you can almost hear all of the squirming amongst those expecting the typical Canadian novel. Boyagoda tells the story of Bokarie, an African war criminal who somehow escapes to Canada and finds his way into the circle of a small-town woman eager to make it to Parliament Hill and power. The novel skewers the peculiarities of small-town Canada, and some of the more ridiculous aspects of multiculturalism and immigration. In Boyagoda's hands literary satire isn't dead, it just might have a fighting chance.

CBC Unplugged describes these rankings as less about most good, and more about least bad("the honour is based in large part on an absence of awfulness"), but who are we to quibble, when a body or researchers as fastidiously named as the Economist Intelligence Unit tells us we're livable, or liveable, when we dispense with translating from the British.