By Katherine Ashenburg. Reprinted from the Literary Review of Canada. The Rise and Fall of Great PowersTom RachmanDoubleday Canada380 pages, hardcover In 2011, when this novel opens, 30–something Tooly Zylberberg owns an unsuccessful bookshop in a small town in Wales. The second chapter takes us back to 1999, when a younger Tooly is trying to walk every …
Katherine Ashenburg wins Gold at the National Magazine Awards for her article “The Long Goodbye” published in The Walrus (March 2011).
When the end of life comes later in life, the consequences are often unexpected—and often painful.
Since Katherine’s appearance in a Sunday New York Times Style piece on October 31, 2010, “The Great Unwashed,” about the demise of the daily shower, she has been booked to appear on Irish, American and Canadian radio — everyone wants to hear how the woman who styled herself (jokingly) as “Dirty Katherine” still gets invited to dinner …
Articles by Katherine have been chosen for the anthologies, “Best Canadian Essays 2009” (for an article in Toronto Life magazine, “The New Death Etiquette”) and “Best Canadian Essays 2010” (for an article in Vancouver Magazine, “Skin Deep,” about the Vancouver doctors who discovered the cosmetic use of Botox). “Best Canadian Essays” are published by Tightrope Books. “Skin Deep” was …
The Dirt on Clean was published in Britain in March 2008 and Australia in May 2008 by Profile Books (the prizewinning English publishers who brought you Eats, Shoots & Leaves). The Portuguese word for “clean” is limpo (think “limpid”). The Dirt on Clean‘s first foreign-language publication will be in Portuguese, from Larousse in Brazil.
Print: The August 23, 2007 issue of Chatelaine magazine carries an excerpt from The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. A review appeared in the November 2007 issue of Elle Canada. The book was a Canadian Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback alternative selection. A feature article on the book appeared in the Life section of the Globe and Mail, …
Katherine’s prize-winning essay, “Sue Barton and Me,” about re-reading the nurse books she loved as a child, appeared in the anthology Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2005.