Kate Taylor

Towards the end of Rachel Cusk’s new novel Kudos, the narrator, a novelist, is interviewed by three journalists in a plush hotel in an old European city. The narrator has previously appeared in both Outline and Transit, the first two titles in this provocative and innovative literary…

In 2009, the English novelist Rachel Cusk wrote The Last Supper, a memoir about a trip to Italy; a month after it appeared, its publisher was forced to withdraw the first print run and pulp the books because somebody had recognized himself and was threatening to sue for breach of privacy. Cusk has also been excoriated by the British press for her memoirs about motherhood and divorce: the major complaint seems to be have been that she was not a nice…

In Mary Lawson’s new novel, Road Ends, the young but determined Megan Cartwright is the most hopeful of three unhappy protagonists. Having spent her childhood and adolescence looking after the many brothers that her maternity-addled mother and emotionally absent father were too preoccupied to care for themselves, she finally escapes Northern Ontario at the age of 21 and makes it to London in…

Many institutions can lay claim to an uplifting foundation myth, but the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights boasts not one but two. There is the story that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was so moved by a visit to Auschwitz in 1999 that he declared a site would finally be found for a Canadian Holocaust…

When veteran arts administrator Elaine Calder agreed to act as a temporary manager at the National Arts Centre in 1998, the place was in crisis: the Ottawa institution was running an unexpected deficit and had fired two CEOs in four years. On her arrival, Calder met with her development officer to check that at least a $1 million gift from hockey player Alexei Yashin was…