Terry Fox. The Spanish Influenza. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Vimy Ridge. The Last Spike. Bob and Doug McKenzie. Wayne Gretzky. Nellie McClung. Winnie the Bear. The Halifax Explosion. The moments and people that define Canada are as diverse and wide-ranging as the country itself. No wonder Beaver editor Mark Reid had such a difficult time selecting photos for 100 Photos That Changed Canada.
Remember how Canadians were locked out from the worldwide Kindle launch last month? Well, whatever was happening behind the scenes conveniently got worked out in time for the holiday shopping season, so Amazon's Kindle e-book reader is now being shipped to that primitive backwater known as Canada. The thing about e-books is that they last for weeks between charging, can be read in direct sunlight, and product can be downloaded via 3G networks "over the air" without syncing with your computer. If you want a Kindle, be prepared to pony-up a cool US $259, plus import fees (what free trade?), which, in Canadian dollars, is a little over three hundred smackers. Don't discount Sony's similar e-book offerings, but Barnes & Noble's sexy little nook isn't on its way north any time soon.
Do you remember when you were seventeen and you thought about being young, and urban, and an artist? Maybe you imagined whitewashed loft spaces with a low-key reek of depravity and beautiful people with their improbable haircuts. And maybe there were poetry readings, and everything was a little bit of a performance, and everything was deeply, self-consciously cool.
Yesterday, Torontoist packed into the charming wood-panelled ballroom of the Gladstone Hotel along with throngs of passionate food lovers for the launch of The Edible City: Toronto's Food from Farm to Fork, hosted by This Is Not a Reading Series. The latest in Coach House Books' ambitious uTOpia series, which selects one broad aspect of Toronto each year and corrals some of the city's most influential writers to tackle it—past publications addressed the city's future (uTOpia), the environment (GreenTOpia), and arts and culture (The State of the Arts)—The Edible City delves into all things food.
Cory Doctorow possesses a strange kind of celebrity. He's famous, but not so famous that you could offhandedly mention him to a stranger on the street and reasonably expect the person to be familiar with Doctorow's life and work. For other notable people, this situation might connote a kind of ignominious C- or D-List celebrity, but not for Doctorow. In his case, it might be more accurate to say that he is extremely, A-List famous, but only among the subset of the population that uses and understands the internet. This would explain why he was able, last night, to pack the third floor of the Lillian H. Smith public library tighter than a college bar. That's right. Cory Doctorow: as appealing to nerdy people as beer is to students.
Freelance journalist and native Torontonian David Sax received death threats from New York, blushing gratitude from LA, and lots of chatter from cities in between, all due to his newly released book, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen. Within its pages, Sax passes judgement on which towns have the best delis (hence all the civic pride), but his real concern is how these emporiums of comfort food are rapidly disappearing from our culinary landscape, disconnecting Jews and the population at large from a vital aspect of Jewish culture. During his travels across North America and Europe, Sax had moments of despair (his working title for a time was The Death of the Deli), but he met too many dedicated and passionate people, fighting to keep the tradition alive, to give up that easily.
Linden MacIntyre! His novel, The Bishop's Man, is a complex, nuanced portrayal of a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of sexual abuse scandals, and bested the four other short-listed authors to take home the most prestigious literary prize in Canada.
The clock is ticking, usually reticent authors are primping, and in a few short hours Canada's literary establishment will be donning tuxedos and evening gowns in preparation for tonight's Giller Prize black-tie gala dinner and awards ceremony. Writers typically tend to elbow patches and cozy knits—the "sequins and spit-shine shoe" look comes but once a year. The Giller is the most prestigious of Canada's literary awards, guaranteeing the winner a firm spot on the bestseller list through the peak holiday shopping season and providing a level of exposure few fiction writers are lucky to find in this country. (To a lesser extent, all the shortlisted writers see these benefits.)
Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people who were way cooler than Torontoist came out to the Gladstone Hotel to see the 175 independent publishers, artists, and writers at Canzine, Canada’s largest zine fair and festival of alternative culture. The day-long event was organized by Broken Pencil, the quarterly magazine dedicated to all things underground culture and the independent arts.
Twelve thousand dollars. That’s the budget the organizers of the first edition of the International Festival of Authors (or Harbourfront International Authors' Festival, as it was called then) had to work with in 1980 to showcase twenty-two writers of varying infamy. Capacity crowds throughout the six-day event proved to organizers and potential sponsors that Toronto could support a literary festival.
In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."
Book season is well and firmly upon us. Like the changing colours of the leaves and the rediscovery of the scarves in the back of your closet, the sudden surge of literary prizes and the annual return of the International Festival of Authors signal that autumn is decidedly here. And it makes sense, really: what better way to combat the chill than with a pile of books that keep you safely indoors?
The internet, many people like to remark offhand, is killing print. With a twenty-four-hour news cycle better served by the instant response times of broadcast and online outlets (including the online arms of print publications who will run those same stories in the next morning's paper), e-books finally taking off, and shortening attention spans that prize bells and whistles over the sedate pleasures of slow perusal, the old-fashioned printed word is facing hard times. Or so this line of thought goes.
With the closure of Pages Books a couple of months ago, Toronto lost one of its great literary institutions. As we reported at the time, however, the news wasn't entirely grim: "There is, fortunately," we said, "the silveriest of silver linings, which is that Pages' much-loved programming, run under the banner This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS), will continue."
After street artist (and Torontoist contributor) Posterchild finished philosopher flâneur Mark Kingwell's recent book, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City, the Vandalist curator and street art advocate noticed that Kingwell's celebration of concrete and the cities built out of it missed one reverie in particular: graffiti.
Now ranked as Amazon's best-selling product, the Kindle has been a remarkable success in the American marketplace, possibly signalling that e-book readers have reached a tipping point. The devices can download books wirelessly without being tethered to a computer, and text is displayed on a reflective electronic paper screen, which isn't backlit and uses very little power. The Kindle has been available south of the border for two years, and in a press release late yesterday, Amazon announced the rollout of their iconic e-book reader in more than a hundred countries. While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.
The contenders for Canada's most prestigious literary award, the Giller Prize, were announced a few minutes ago. On the shortlist this year are: Kim Echlin for The Disappeared (Hamish Hamilton); Annabel Lyon for The Golden Mean (Random House); Linden MacIntyre for The Bishop's Man (Random House); Colin McAdam for Fall (Hamish Hamilton); Anne Michaels for The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart). This is one of those times when just being nominated really is a boon—shortlisted authors routinely see a significant spike in sales and exposure. The winner of the Giller almost inevitably becomes a national bestseller, in addition to claiming the fifty-thousand-dollar prize.
Parkdale was established in the late nineteenth century as a suburban enclave where middle-class families could enjoy parks, the lakeshore, and the new exhibition grounds far from the bustle of the central city. Over the course of the twentieth century, Parkdale became increasingly seen as a slum at the end of a downward spiral. Then, in more recent years, the neighbourhood has been resurrected as a gentrifying urban village. So goes the commonly accepted version of Parkdale's history.
Evan Munday’s Quarter-Life Crisis: Only the Good Die Yung is the first book in a new graphic novel series set in a post-apocalyptic Toronto where only twenty-five-year-olds have survived. In this dystopian future, mindless robots control Queen’s Park, a vile organization runs the Rogers Centre, and brainless thugs in bad suits roam Bay Street. (This is fiction, right?) The story is told from the perspective of Harper Yung, a former record-store clerk and quintessential hipster. Since the disaster, he and his brother Aaron have taken refuge in the "box of doom" over the ruins of OCAD, and the two stay alive by scavenging for copper to trade with the Rogers, a paramilitary outfit that controls most of the resources left in the downtown core.
Remember The NeverEnding Story? That 1984 film about some kid who gets lost in a magic book and ends up having an excellent adventure involving a giant, flying, luckdragon?
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