Dear Readers,

To round out our first year of publishing quarterly issues of thoughtful, playful, and provoking essays and poetry, we bring you a themed issue: we’re thrilled to announce the June 20th launch of The Toronto Review of Books Issue Four: the Occupy Issue.

WHAT: Occupy Issue Launch Party Masquerade!
WHEN: June 20th, 8pm until late
WHERE: Poetry Jazz Café, 224 Augusta Ave, Kensington Market, Toronto. (Poetry can seem a little hidden: look for the Stella sign)
BRING: A mask (if you feel like it)
HOW MUCH: PWYC, suggested $10 or $5 (students and arts workers)

We’re intrigued by what the Occupy movement has done to the word “occupy,” so we decided to let our writers have their say with it. Some pieces in the issue don’t address the movement directly, others critique its aims, still others take the conversation to unexpected places (like a magnificent literary festival in Trinidad and Tobago). This Occupy Issue is about how regular folk live in streets and homes, nations and prisons, how books occupy places, and how histories inhabit each other.

By launching on June 20th, we’re also using this issue to mark the week of the two-year anniversary of the G20 meetings in Toronto. The episode so wounded the peaceful flow of everyday life in our city that we feel it’s important to keep finding new ways to talk about it.

We’ll be celebrating a bundle of fine work in our fourth issue: a rare English publication by influential Chinese poet Wu Ang, essays on solitary confinement, naphtha lighters, and the BBC, an exposé of Stephen Leacock’s occupation of Orillia, and much more.

So—join us—and bring your masks!

Given the delight Canadian legislators are now taking in banning masks, as well as the preferred costume of Toronto riot police and student protestors in Quebec, among others, we feel only a masquerade could provide the right sort of welcome to this issue.

As Dylan Reid writes in his Occupy Issue essay on the history of masks, “we are going through a moral panic about adults wearing masks in public.” On June 20th, let’s party instead of panicking.

Yours always,

Jessica Duffin Wolfe