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In a 2005 review of Camilla's gibb's Sweetness in the Belly for now magazine, Susan G. Cole praises Gibb's bravery in choosing the topic of the Ethiopian diaspora for her [...]

Russell J.A. Kilbourn and Eleanor Ty, eds. The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier up, 2013. 342 pp. $85.00. Contemporary media is obsessed [...]

The article focuses on household journal "The Western Home Monthly" as a tool of technological nationalism that highlights the idea of Canada as a modern nation. It links this modernity to domesticity by looking at how the journal is structured as a familiar national print public. It also discusses the question of reading methods considering the methodological challenges presented by the banality of the periodical form.

Studies of historical isolates inform on the evolution and emergence of important pathogens and phenotypes, including antimicrobial resistance. Crucial to studying antimicrobial resistance are isolates that predate the widespread clinical use of antimicrobials. The Murray collection of several hundred bacterial strains of pre-antibiotic era Enterobacteriaceae is an invaluable resource of historical strains from important pathogen groups. Studies performed on the Collection to date merely exemplify its potential, which will only be realised through the continued effort of many scientific groups. To enable that aim, we announce the public availability of the Murray collection through the National Collection of Type Cultures, and present associated metadata with whole genome sequence data for over half of the strains. Using this information we verify the metadata for the collection with regard to subgroup designations, equivalence groupings and plasmid content. We also present genomic analyses of population structure and determinants of mobilisable antimicrobial resistance to aid strain selection in future studies. This represents an invaluable public resource for the study of these important pathogen groups and the emergence and evolution of antimicrobial resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as a report from the field in the midst of the collaborative digitisation of The Western Home Monthly (1899-1932), a Winnipeg-based middlebrow magazine. It reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that face periodical scholars and on how those challenges are sometimes addressed and sometimes exacerbated by digitisation. Most importantly, it explores the unique reading perspective afforded by the process of digitising an archive, and asks how this process might help to develop new methodologies for reading periodicals that are more attentive to the media-specificity of the middlebrow magazine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques books about Burma by author Karen Connelly including her novel "The Lizard Cage," memoir "Burmese Lessons: A Love Story," and poetry collection "The Border Surrounds Us." Topics discussed include the way Connelly used her travel experiences on the Thai-Burmese border in writing said books, the fictional setting and characters of her novel which focused on the Burmese prison system, and the intention of Connelly to introduce the Burmese political crisis to Western readers.

The article discusses the book "Unless" (2000) by Carol Shields. At the conclusion of this novel (her final novel), the mysterious trauma that has been haunting the narrator Reta's teenaged daughter, Norah, is climatically revealed.

Michael Helm's most recent novel, "Cities of Refuge" (2010), takes as its starting point an act of violence that reverberates through, and intertwines, the lives of a group of disparate people living in Toronto. Raising questions about contemporary regimes of racialization, art's capacity to respond to violence, and the ethical ambiguity of fiction's attempts to account for historical and political atrocities, the novel constitutes a challenge to familiar notions of family, justice, and truth. In this interview, Helm addresses the "resistance" of nontransparent language and the power of literature to lift readers out of the "white noise" of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camilla Gibb discusses how and why her creative impulse finds its inspiration elsewhere—in Ethiopia and England for her novel "Sweetness in the Belly" and Vietnam for her novel "The Beauty of the Humanity Movement"—the limits of the cultural appropriation debate, and the relationship between her training as anthropologist and her fiction writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Kim Echlin discusses Canadian writers' interest in writing about other cultures, which requires research and an empathic imagination as well as the responsibility to people who cannot tell their own stories of trauma. She addresses primarily her process of writing "The Disappeared," her novel about Cambodia, in which the central character tests the limits of empathy and witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karen Connelly's poetry and prose has dealt extensively with her experience of living abroad and writing about foreign places—notably Thailand, Burma, France, Spain, and Greece. In this interview, she discusses how learning a foreign language offers her a point of entry into a new culture and transforms her sense of self as well as how her books—especially "Touch the Dragon," "One Room in a Castle," "The Lizard Cage," and "Burmese Lessons"—engage with concepts of the foreign and the fraughtness of empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years that poet P. K. Page spent in Brazil as wife of the Canadian ambassador are widely considered to be a transformative episode in her literary career, marking a dramatic shift in her aesthetics. Critical work on Brazil's influence on Page tends, however, to deploy Brazil as a trope of the foreign, eliding her affiliation with the Canadian embassy. This construction of Brazil mirrors Page's own narrativization of her time there, exemplified in her 1969 essay "Questions and Images," originally published in a special tenth anniversary issue of Canadian Literature but most frequently cited in its 1991 republication in "The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New." This essay examines the different print contexts of "Questions and Images" to call for a rereading of Page's Brazilian work that is more attentive to the geopolitical realities of Canadian-Brazilian relations and the alignment of Page's travels with a particular moment in Canadian cultural nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the case of a male patient with bacillary dysentery that he acquired during World War 1 and from a bacterial isolate deposited in the British National Collection of Type Cultures. It discusses the symptoms experienced by the patient, military deaths attributable to disease, and the prevalence of bacillary dysentery in military populations during World War 1.

The National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) was founded on 1 January 1920 in order to fulfil a recognized need for a centralized repository for bacterial and fungal strains within the UK. It is among the longest-established collections of its kind anywhere in the world and today holds approximately 6000 type and reference bacterial strains - many of medical, scientific and veterinary importance - available to academic, health, food and veterinary institutions worldwide. Recently, a collaboration between NCTC, Pacific Biosciences and the Wellcome Sanger Institute established the NCTC3000 project to long-read sequence and assemble the genomes of up to 3000 NCTC strains. Here, at the beginning of the collection's second century, we introduce the resulting NCTC3000 sequence read datasets, genome assemblies and annotations as a unique, historically and scientifically relevant resource for the benefit of the international bacterial research community.

Here, we report on the 47 bacterial strains made available by the National Collection of Type Cultures in 2021, alongside a commentary on these strains and their significance.

The EGD Murray collection consists of approximately 500 clinical bacterial isolates, mainly Enterobacteriaceae, isolated from around the world between 1917 and 1949. A number of these "Murray" isolates have subsequently been identified as Klebsiella pneumoniae. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of these isolates showed that over 30% were resistant to penicillins due to the presence of diverse blaSHV β-lactamase genes. Analysis of susceptibility to skin antiseptics and triclosan showed that while the Murray isolates displayed a range of MIC/minimal bactericidal concentration (MBC) values, the mean MIC value was lower than that for more modern K. pneumoniae isolates tested. All Murray isolates contained the cation efflux gene cepA, which is involved in disinfectant resistance, but those that were more susceptible to chlorhexidine were found to have a 9- or 18-bp insertion in this gene. Susceptibility to other disinfectants, e.g., H2O2, in the Murray isolates was comparable to that in modern K. pneumoniae isolates. The Murray isolates were also less virulent in Galleria and had a different complement of putative virulence factors than the modern isolates, with the exception of an isolate related to the modern lineage CC23. More of the modern isolates (41% compared to 8%) are classified as good/very good biofilm formers, but there was overlap in the two populations. This study demonstrated that a significant proportion of the Murray Klebsiella isolates were resistant to penicillins before their routine use. This collection of pre-antibiotic era isolates may provide significant insights into adaptation in K. pneumoniae in relation to biocide susceptibility., (Copyright © 2015, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.)