Sport is cultural. What the star athlete does helps to define the culture. What the star athlete does on a Canadian team, especially if he or she is Canadian, helps define Canadian-ness.

Sport is cultural. What the star athlete does helps to define the culture. What the star athlete does on a Canadian team, especially if he or she is Canadian, helps define Canadian-ness.

Donna E. Smyth - adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter's beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith's malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichs and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don't want to know, but need to know. Smyth's writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language.

A symbolic victory is still a victory.

Keep on being a star in your own right. Keep on defining yourself. Don't be defined by others.

I feel lucky to live at a time when the dominant tennis players are Venus and Serena Williams. And to have lived through the success of a whole slew of boxers and feel I could invest emotionally and psychologically in their victories, and identify with them in their struggles.

All books are merely delayed dust.