Photo of Emily Schultz from her website. The 21st annual Trillium Book Award shortlist was announced last Friday morning. The six English-language finalists include Barbara Gowdy's Helpless, Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, Robert Hough’s The Culprits, and Dennis Lee’s Yesno. Local indie poet (and Torontoist fave) Emily Schultz is up for the $10,000 English language poetry prize for her collection Songs for the Dancing Chicken. All the nominees will come together for a free public......

The University of Toronto has announced that Ramin Jahanbegloo—academic, author, and former Iranian political prisoner—is returning as a professor of political science and a member of the scholar-at-risk program in Massey College. Jahanbegloo is a former lecturer at U of T who moved to Tehran to lead the Department of Contemporary Studies at a private institution called the Cultural Research Bureau. In 2006, he was detained without charge (which is perhaps unsurprising seeing as we're......

Sure New York based writer Jonathan Ames looks like a badass in this photo, with his fists up in the air like he's ready to deck Torontoist. But after reading his collection of essays I Love You More Than You Know we know that Ames, can be a big softie (he dedicates the book to his great-aunt and the title of the book is inspired by something she said to him). Heck, Ames even describes......

Canadian cities, this one included, seem defined by winter or at least the colder times of year. So when the sun and heat does arrive we are caught physically and psychologically off-guard. The Toronto of Darren O’Donnell’s 2004 novel, Your Secrets Sleep With Me tries desperately to cope with summer. Throw in a refugee crisis from a paranoid USA, a freak tornado which castrates that phallic tower near the lake, an increasingly disturbed government and......