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Bookishness: October 22, 2012
The Toronto Reference Library has binders full of women too Catalogued and everything. Another thing they’ve got? Study carrels for exhibitionists. Scribbles In recent Internet meanderings I came across this little app and subsequently lost hours making little drawings that looked suspiciously like art. 10 best films of the 90s Alas, no Clueless. It’s the best films…
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TRB Podcast: Lynn Coady and The Antagonist on the Eh List
On May 17, the Toronto Public Library invited Lynn Coady to speak at the Barbara Frum Branch as part of the 2012 eh List Author Series, which highlights Canadian writers. Reading from her novel The Antagonist, Coady raises questions regarding who has the right to tell stories and considers the ethics of writing a life. Listen…
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Tamil literary voices: An event in preview
“We were shivering. We were locking our doors and waiting. You could hear people shouting and houses burning.” Appadurai Muttulingam’s words express an experience too common to many Tamils, a people forced out of Sri Lanka in droves over the last four decades after facing rioting, killing, and oppression. And while sweeping statements like “great…
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Bookishness: September 17, 2012
Two dots The New Yorker was temporarily banned from Facebook due to Female Nipple Bulges (FNB). Jay is for Just beautiful typographic birdhouses. Meet with the Writer in Residence at TPL Toronto Public Library will be accepting submissions from literary fiction writers until September 29 for meetings with Writer in Residence Farzana Doctor. Hindsight “Not interested in…
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Weird and interesting and funny and emotional stuff: a Q&A with Rebecca Rosenblum
TRB: Where do stories start, for you? RR: Anywhere, really. I don’t exactly “use” or replicate real-life events in my stories, but real life is certainly the mulch from which stories grow. Things that have happened to me and my friends, or things I’ve overheard on the bus get woven into a story that’s largely…
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Kaleidoscope: A Q & A with Gail Bowen
In Kaleidoscope, the thirteenth book in Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn mystery series, released last month, Joanne retires. Happily settled with her husband Zack Shreve and their 14 year-old-daughter Taylor, and at last liberated to take daytime naps, her prospects for a cozy retirement are good. But the trials of her neighbours, blistering unhappily in situations…
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Bookishness: Week of May 21, 2012
“The Daniel Day-Lewis of the method prank” On How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, and Civil Servants, with Illustrations Showing Current Practice “Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Punk-Super-Party-Band” plays exclusive Air Canada show This made me smile so hard. Yay, for sure. Expand your vocabulary (beyond…
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TRB Podcast: Peta-Gaye Nash kicks off Jamaica 50 at TPL
Listen here: [audio:May2012/nash.mp3] Peta-Gaye Nash started the Jamaica 50 series at the Toronto Public Library with readings from her short story collection, I Too Hear the Drums. She is a short-story and children’s book author born and raised in Jamaica; she now lives in Mississauga. In this podcast, recorded at the Maria A. Shchuka library branch…
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Michele Landsberg’s Writing the Revolution
Having begun life as, in her own words, “a docile little girl,” Michele Landsberg became a journalist whose descriptions in a 1981 column on female genital mutilation smacked a reader so hard that he fainted dead away while waiting for a flight to arrive at Pearson Airport. That column is included in “Writing the Revolution,”…
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Toronto Public Library’s Jamaica 50 Series
The Toronto of Review of Books brings you podcasts, interviews and book reviews following the Jamaica 50 series. More than 230,000 people of Jamaican heritage live in Canada; almost 160,000 in the GTA. In celebration of that community’s long history, and of Jamaica’s independence, the Toronto Public Library and the group Jamaica 50 are holding…
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Bookishness: Week of April 2, 2012
A Slow-Books Manifesto “To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.” “The refuge of stories.” Steve Almond on grad school as an alternative to therapy. Please please Mr. Postman So much of life allows us (expects us, requires us) to be passive. The letter, though, invites a response,…
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Bookishness: Week of March 19, 2012
Strike Toronto Public Library workers are on strike as of 5 p.m. last night. I am currently deep in horrifying imaginings of a library-less world. Hoping a resolution is swift, for everyone’s sake. What your favourite author had for lunch The power of the Internet to answer the big questions: Megan Fishmann on life as an author-groupie, then and…