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Charles Taylor Prize Finalists
Five finalists for the Charles Taylor Prize were announced this morning, the shortlist emerging from a total of 115 books read by the jury. They are Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill, The Measure of a…
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Bookishness: Week of January 9, 2012
Rejoice! Issue 2 Our second issue has arrived! Please enjoy, and do join us at our launch party tomorrow evening (Tuesday, January 10) at Poetry Bar in Kensington (224 Augusta Ave), starting at 8 pm. *blink blink* And so we emerge, more or less bright-eyed, into 2012.While the last days of December are all about looking back (plus sleeping and…
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Bookishness: Week of December 19, 2011
Independent bookstore lovers unite Book and bookstore lovers spent much of last week raging at Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo’s essay on the superiority of Amazon over independent bookstores. The piece, a response to Richard Russo’s op-ed on Amazon’s recent thuggish price-check promotion, decries bookstores as user un-friendly (user!?) and “mistakenly mythologized.” Not surprisingly, bookstore…
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Bookishness: Week of December 12, 2011
Gold medal stories In celebration of the 2012 olympic year the BBC’s annual short story award, usually known as the BBC National Short Story Award, is going international. Says this year’s chair, Clive Anderson, “Given the popularity nowadays of the Tweet compared to the full length letter, the YouTube clip compared to the boxset and a…
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The Charles Taylor Prize announces its first ever longlist
The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction has announced the 11 finalists on its first ever longlist. Prize founder Noreen Taylor commented on the decision to release a longlist in a statement: “Last year, at our 10th anniversary, the jury informed us that there were so many additional titles so close to being named to the…
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Bookishness: Week of December 5, 2011
On the couch Rather than plumbing the depths of your subconscious, look, perhaps, to your bookshelves. Bibliotherapy offers a literary cure for what ails; after an in-depth conversation about a patient’s reading life, the bibliotherapist prescribes a reading list meant to address the patient’s “area of curiosity or concern.” Bibliotherapy is offered through Alain de Botton’s London-based School of…
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Bookishness: Week of November 28, 2011
No sleep please, we’re novelists We’ve entered the final days of National Novel Writing Month. Particpants have until Wednesday night at 11:59:59 to finish the mandated 50,000 words that will mark their works as novels according to the people at NaNoWriMo. Anyone needing inspiration for these final laps might want to try Written? Kitten! (via Huff Post Books), or, for…
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Your Ideas for the TRB
In her introduction to The Toronto Review of Books, editor Jessica Duffin Wolfe noted, “The conversation about reading is happening in the street. We’ll be there from Toronto, scattering what confetti we can in this international thoroughfare.” She meant it. Two Sundays ago some of the TRB crew set up on a street corner (Queens Park…