Thirty years ago, I got my first cheque for something I had written: a play, staged in Toronto, inspired by the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie for publishing The Satanic Verses. I knew precious little about stagecraft, but I sensed the whole process of working with a director and actors would probably require me to speak about character and motivation and how much of the play’s plotting was evocative of the world Rushdie created with his…
John Delacourt
John Delacourt recently received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his story “Liner Notes.”
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John Delacourt
In the third movement of André Forget’s In the City of Pigs, a young music journalist named Alexander Otkazov takes a walk up Toronto’s Yonge Street to look for a second-hand copy of Goethe’s Faust in Eliot’s Bookshop, which is run by a churlish “dyspeptic Frenchman” with the best of literary intentions (Alex once saw the man turn his nose up at a box of Harry Potter books that a couple from the suburbs tried to sell to…