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To the Lighthouse: A review of Christy Ann Conlin’s new novel, The Memento
Christy Ann Conlin, the author of Heave, has published her second novel, and the result is nothing short of dazzling. The Memento is as much a gothic, often mordantly funny meditation on the persistence of memory as a living, perhaps undead thing, as it is the story of Fancy Mosher, a twelve-year old Bay of…
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Death is Not the End: A Review of Patience by Daniel Clowes
Few artists have done more to elevate the status of comics in the public imagination than Daniel Clowes, and Patience, as befits a graphic novel billed as “a cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love,” is his longest and most ambitious work yet. It opens in 2012, as underemployed schlub Jack Barlow…
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Evan Munday on Toronto’s Word on the Street, 2016
The Word On The Street festival happens at the Harbourfront, Sunday September 25th 2016, 11am-6pm I sat down with Evan Munday, Interim Director of Toronto’s premiere day-long free lakeside literary event, for a chat about what to look out for at this year’s Word on the Street Festival, its place in Toronto literary culture, and the life…
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Tonight: Sarah Barmak’s Closer Launches with an Adult Colouring Party
Tonight Coach House Books launches Toronto author Sarah Barmak’s Closer: Notes From The Orgasmic Frontier Of Female Sexuality, the latest in its Exploded Views series. Coach House is promising “light refreshments, adult colouring pages – and we mean adult – and other titillating surprises.” Details: Wednesday, July 6, 2016 Studio Bar 824 Dundas St. W 7pm. More…
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Fresh Blood and New Words at The Toronto Review of Books
I’m thrilled to announce that The Toronto Review of Books is opening a fresh call for submissions and contributors to mark the arrival of two new staff members. Novelist Damian Tarnopolsky is joining us as Managing Editor, and CanLit scholar Katherine McLeod comes on board as Poetry and Community Editor. Damian is the author of the novel Goya’s Dog,…
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Three Generations of Magic Between E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, and Lev Grossman
As I read E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, a tale of children’s magical adventures, a feeling of familiarity came over me. This 1906 book seemed to anticipate C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, published almost exactly half a century later (1955) but, unlike the rest of the Narnia series, set back in the…
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Being Harmless: James Grainger on Horror, Fiction, and Toronto
Toronto author James Grainger’s debut novel, Harmless, reveals the potential for horror in everyday life when a weekend in the country among old friends turns into a search for their daughters who’ve vanished in the nearby woods. TRB sat down with Grainger to situate his new book in the haunted landscape of Canadian horror. TRB:…
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The Toronto Public Library Welcomes its First Aboriginal Writer in Residence
On March 7, 2015, a small crowd gathered to celebrate the appointment of award-winning Métis author Cherie Dimaline as the Toronto Public Library’s first Aboriginal Writer in Residence, a position she will hold at the North York Central Library. “I really see it as a tremendous beginning for a partnership between the Aboriginal literary community…
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Newfoundland Off the Map: Michael Crummey’s Sweetland
The demographics don’t lie. In a couple of decades, a generation at most, dozens of Newfoundland communities will have disappeared, and there seems to be no way to reverse the flow. Soon, all that will remain will be a ghostly assembly like the one that closes Michael Crummey’s Sweetland – a scene reminiscent of some…
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Gathering Around Books in Karachi: The Sixth Annual Karachi Literature Festival
The 2015 Karachi Literature Festival runs the 6th, 7th and 8th of February. A dedicated group of Pakistanis have set out to prove that security concerns should not trump a love of literature. Next week they will host the sixth annual Karachi Literature Festival (KLF). The festival is reclaiming space for books in a city…
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Under the Radar: An Interview with Olivier Matthon
Olivier Matthon, itinerant labourer and ethnographer, is the author of Under the Radar: Notes from the Wild Mushroom Trade. It tells the story of the seasonal migrant labourers who harvest wild mushrooms in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and is out now from Pioneers Press. Dylan Gordon caught up with Olivier between wild harvests…
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Nuptial Bibliocide: Veronica Spencer’s Pop-Up Wedding Books
At a recent Toronto wedding, between green-silk placemats, flowers and vintage cutlery, sat a novel wedding guest, an open book with faded edges and delicate paper, and the words, “A Love Story,” popping up from its centre. Veronica Spencer has used books that were once gathering dust at a bookstore, or being sold at a…