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Santa’s Choice Zine Fair, Leslieville Gallery Crawl, and Long Winter Takeover: T.O. Events for Dec 20 – Jan 3
Storyteller Ariel Balevi will be performing stories by the 13th-century Sufi mystical poet Rumi at La Boheme Cafe. 7:30 PM. Dec 20. Free. Come by the 4th annual Santa’s Choice Zine Fair and check out zines, comics, small presses, prints, t-shirts and tote bags, jewellery, crafts, and other handmade goods by local artists and designers.12 PM.…
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Fifty Shades of Mild Canuck Humour
Reviewed in this essay: Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black, Douglas & McIntyre, 2013 Fifty Shades of Black collects the latest humour by Arthur Black, an ex-CBC broadcaster and two-time Stephen Leacock award winner. Mostly reprints from his syndicated column, these 82 essays showcase the same colloquial style and easy wisdom of his fifteen…
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Cherries and Gems in Eat It: Sex, Food and Women’s Writing
Reviewed in this essay: Eat It: Sex, Food & Women’s Writing, edited by Nicole Baute and Brianna Goldberg. Feathertale, 2013. There are some gems in this mixed-genre anthology from Feathertale, an offbeat Canadian writer’s collective. The pieces are varied in tone and style, taking the form of short fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, letters, and poetry.…
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Julie Maroh, Michael Ignatieff, and a new Brick Anthology: T.O. Events for Dec 5 – 19
Julie Maroh will be signing copies of her graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color, which was adapted into the Palm d’Or-winning film of the same name. 7 PM. Dec 5. The Central. Free. Join the fine people at Brick Magazine for the launch of their second print anthology, which features the best of the magazine’s…
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Bad Sex in Fiction and Many Kinds of Love
Let’s take a minute to talk about bad sex. On Dec. 3, a group of literary men and women gathered at the In & Out Club in the district of St. James, central London, united with this single-minded purpose. They were gathered to announce the winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.…
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Community Strangeness: On Fredericton’s Owl’s Nest Bookstore
Owl’s Nest Bookstore, 390 Queen St., Fredericton, New Brunswick. “If nothing else, we add some strangeness to the community,” says Debbie of Owl’s Nest Books, Fredericton’s principal secondhand bookstore. And indeed, with its endless rooms and motley décor, the store glows with haphazard charm. Owls hang on the walls. Q plays on the radio. Room after…
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Podcast: A Brief History of Books in Indigenous North America, by Matt Cohen
On November 7, University of Texas at Austin Professor Matt Cohen spoke to the Toronto Centre for the Book about early printing and indigenous communities. Read Cohen’s abstract below, or listen to the full talk here: [audio: Fall2013/CohenTRBpodcast.mp3] The first Bible printed in North America was in a Native language. Many of the influential early printed…
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Drones in Theory and in Practice
Reviewed in this essay: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley J. Strawser, Oxford University Press, 2013. Academic philosophers working on topics in applied ethics, such as drone usage, insist on distinguishing between permissibility in theory and permissibility in practice. In claiming that current U.S. drone policies are impermissible in practice,…
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Will Munro, The Andrew Project, and Our Very Own Tasting Menu: T.O. Events for Nov 22 – Dec 5
Shan Syed, the Toronto artist responsible for The Andrew Project, is launching his new book at Scrap Metal Gallery. 4PM. November 23. Free. Support Canadian authors, free-thinkers and magazines and small presses at the LeftWords Festival of Books and Ideas. Enjoy thoughtful presentations on Food Activism, Body Activism, and Women in a Globalizing World. 12…
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Nowhere Land: Writing Eastern Europe in Canada
When I was a child reading Batman comics and Hardy Boy books in the fifties and early sixties, it seemed as if Canada was a nowhere land compared to the United States. Nothing happened here, and never would. If a man had put on a Batman cape in Canada, he would have been arrested. If…
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Buy Tasting Menu at The Paper Hound
Good news! The TRB’s Tasting Menu has landed at The Paper Hound, Vancouver’s most charming new indie bookshop. TRB collaborator and Vancouver expat Katherine McLeod sent us this picture to prove it. Vancouver readers! You know where to go and what to do. Toronto folk: why not pick up your copy at the…
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CanLit Canon Review #18: George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism
There is a lot of great stuff jammed into the 100 pages of Lament for a Nation: it is a short history of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism; it is an analysis of Canada’s changing place in the world during the Cold War; and it’s an emotional tirade by a brilliant thinker who no longer recognizes…