Nicole Krauss weaves a tangled yet breathtakingly beautiful web in the History of Love. Her second novel tells the story of precocious 14-year old Alma Singer, busily trying to cope with the loss of her father and her mother's depression. Across town there's Leo Gursky, a Holocaust survivor, writer and man desperately afraid to die alone. Their lives are brought together by a book that miraculously survived war and genocide. The end product is a......

If film buffs get the TIFF, art buffs get the Queen West Art Crawl, and hockey buffs get the NHL playoffs, then literary types get the IFOA. This year's fest packs in dozens of authors and into 10 days worth of readings, panel discussions, interviews and parties. Yes, once in a while literary types put down their books and drink. Torontoist lists the five events that piqued our interest in chronological order. 1) Mark Z.......

...only a ridiculously adorable little puggle. On a frigid Friday morning like this, we like to sit around in our sweatpants browsing through our referral logs. And this morning our referral logs tell us that an inordinate number of people have been coming here lately looking for genitalia, severed limbs, and puggles (these numbers are matched only by instances of Torontoist contributers Googling themselves, and people wondering about the heights of obscure celebs - they......

College-age guy and girl standing behind us as we wait to cross Dundas. Guy: So, you go to the gym and then you change, and then you put the same socks that you exercised in back on? Girl: Oh...um, yes, well you see, no, what I do is...no, I don't wear the same ones. Guess she didn't want to be seen pulling a Jonathan Safran Foer. --- In Kensington, the kids were out in......

Torontoist has been busy as a beaver (we wish we could think of a more literary allusion than that, but we're a little exhausted) at the IFOA this week. Monday night found us at a rollicking party full of the week's literary stars. Amazonian Zadie Smith held court in one corner of the room, while we demonstrated why handshaking should be outlawed at cocktail parties in front of our crush-of-the-week Charles Montgomery. Beer in one......