Every Tuesday afternoon, Torontoist rounds up the city's literary news, including book deals, events, local sales, author happenings, and insider information from the book industry. The Eden Mills Writers' Festival—the Toronto literary community's annual out-of-town oasis—is celebrating its twentieth birthday this summer. This year's festival, a mere forty-five minutes west of Toronto, starts this Friday and includes workshops, seminars, and the popular "festival day" on Sunday. Some of the big appearances this year include David......

It's almost August, and some of us know that means it's almost SummerWorks. The juried theatre festival has taken a bit of a different turn this year, under the new artistic leadership of Michael Rubenfeld, and is branching out into music and performance art. In a shockingly tech-savvy move for the Toronto theatre community, it also has a blog. Last week, the blog started posting viral videos, including one where veteran Canadian actor/playwright Michael......

Photo by petite corneille. Torontoist's lit pick this week? On Thursday award-winning Winnipeg author Chandra Mayor is in town to launch her short story collection, All The Pretty Girls, at Toronto Women's Bookstore. The evening is a bonus triple bill, as Mayor will be joined by two local femme favourites—Debra Anderson (Code White), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts). Rumour has it Whittall will be reading from a draft of her latest, currently untitled......

Necessary Angel has just announced a totally cool event planned to take place on March 3, 2008. Three playwrights will be given the opening lines for a new play. Each playwright will have 4 hours in which to write said play, after which three different teams will have 5 hours to rehearse the works. When those 5 hours are up, the plays have to be performed at Necessary Angel's annual gala at the Capitol......

We'd like to box the Rivoli for their anti-peanut allergy stance, but tonight a couple of writers do the boxing for us, by way of The Box Salon. Golda Fried will read from her newly thatched and hatched Coach House press title. And Claudia Dey, Paige Gratland, Karen Hines, and Greg Hollingshead will also be on hand to read, and eat things that may or may not contain peanuts, but even if they do not......

Let's say you go to see Poochwater, the Dora-winning play by Winnipeg-born Mike McPhaden which opens in previews at the Theatre Passe Muraille tomorrow. And then, let's say you come out with a craving for something else from Winnipeg: Old Dutch Chips. Well, fear not! You're just a hop, skip and a jump away from Super Queen Market, the convenience store located at 596 Queen St. W. Conveniently close to both Theatre Passe Muraille AND......

Of all the shows that have opened in Toronto in the past week or so (Bea’s Niece, Little Dragon, Swimming in the Shallows), none have received as consistently good notices as Trout Stanley, the new play by Claudia Dey on at Factory Theatre. "It's like meeting a spellbinding person at a party and finding that you can't get them out of your mind the next day," writes Richard Ouzounian in the Star. (And that’s one......

Two shows are opening in previews in Toronto today and –- to either the delight or the dismay of those who have been complaining lately about the under-representation of women on the city’s stages -- they are both written by female playwrights. Keira Loughran's Little Dragon, a story about a Chinese-Canadian woman who is introduced to martial arts and begins to suspect that Bruce Lee may be her father, is at Theatre Passe-Muraille, while Claudia......

Only the hottest director in town right now with two shows running concurrently. There's the critically-acclaimed production of Helen's Necklace at the Tarragon, and Side by Side by Sondheim, which opened at CanStage last week and is not-so-critically-acclaimed. (Though -- as a sidenote -- Kamal Al-Solaylee's comment that he owns at least three recordings of "I Remember" shows that he is decidedly not the target audience for this let's-discover-Sondheim cabaret.)But wait! That's not all. Come......