Review: Bookmark Now, Writing in Unreaderly Times

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2006

Editor Kevin Smokler explains in his introduction to Bookmark Now that the voices behind these essays were encouraged as a response to Reading at Risk, a National Endowment for the Arts report that warned literary reading is in sharp decline in favour of the internet, TV and video games.  Responses were swift and alarmed, but not often complex or useful: literary types should regroup and push on with the idea of convincing people to read, as...