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TRB Live: October
With TRB Live I’m going to be posting monthly roundups of literary events you might enjoy. Get in touch with me (@kathmcleod) or the TRB (@TorontoReview) on Twitter if you’d like to suggest an event to include next month. Toronto The Coach House Books Fall Launch ushers in autumn with the launch of six new books: Lisa Robertson’s 3 Summers, Jordan…
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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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Bina Shah’s A Season for Martyrs
The funeral congregated in Liaquat National Bagh park. Angry clerics denounced the government for allowing the execution to proceed, and an ambulance strewn with flowers carried Mumtaz Qadri’s body slowly through the crowds. When Qadri was executed for the murder of Punjab governor and Benazir Bhutto loyalist Salman Taseer on February 29th, Pakistan’s sharp ideological…
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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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The Talk of the Canadian Writers’ Summit
Last week at the Canadian Writers’ Summit in Toronto many people who work with words walked around blearily, carrying canvas bags, seeing old friends, wilting in the heat. Things are tough for us writers, publishers, and editors. There is great gloom, there is despair! Gentle reader: there is also hope. The Canadian Writers’ Summit is…
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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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After the Prophet: Leigh Fondakowski’s Stories from Jonestown
The paradox of utopias is that while their failure is assured, their appeal is eternal. 800 years ago, tens of thousands of ordinary people left their homes, their families, and the innumerable small ties which made up their lives to march on Jerusalem and retake it in the name of God, in the deadly mass…
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What is What is Man? On Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man
Few recent works of academic cultural criticism have received such rapturous, widespread, and indeed almost universal acclaim as Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man has over the last several months. Lorin Stein in The Paris Review calls it “exhilarating.” Adam Kirsch, in The Tablet, says that it’s “a brilliant contribution to the…
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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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Costume and Bone and Thirty Years in Literature: a Chat with Lucinda Johnston about her First Book
Writer, bookseller, anti-censorship advocate, and longtime Parkdale resident Lucinda Johnston worked at Queen Street West’s legendary Pages Books and Magazines from 1989 until its doors shut in 2009. TRB had a few questions for her as her newly published first book, Costume and Bone, inaugurates a new stage in a thirty-year career in the literary…
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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…