J.S. Porter

George Grant is our William Blake, a visionary in prose rather than poetry, a thinker who sees more than he can say, who speaks in notes, asides and intimations. Despite their philosophic differences, Grant, like Blake, sees and opposes technology’s invasion of the mind, and its consequent reshaping of society and language. Like Blake, he sees and opposes “Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep,” and in its stead advocates multidimensionality and attention to the…

If he were stopped at one of the many borders he transgresses and forced to declare only one nationality, I suspect that the French-residing, Argentinian-born Canadian Alberto Manguel would respond “reader.” It seems to me that, like his mentor Jorge Luis Borges, this is what he principally is. Again and again in his career, he returns to the book — most…

Leonard Cohen’s narrator in Beautiful Losers begins his bizarre confession with a question: “Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you?” In almost the same breath, he asks, “Can I love you in my own way?” He later gives himself a task: “Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits.” Biographer-historian Allan Greer in Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits comes to clarify late 17th-century Mohawk-Jesuit relations and place…

Kristjana Gunnars shines best in the short lyric novel. She writes less magically and musically in the short story. Although Any Day But This is a stronger collection of stories than her previous volume, The Guest House and Other Stories, written more than ten years ago, it is not the place where she exerts her fullest linguistic…