Photo by raveneye | José. This week Toronto's favourite literary voyeur, Julie Wilson, relaunches her Seen Reading site, giving her very entertaining habit of spying on readers a whole new look. The biggest new feature is a podcast for every entry—lit geeks can listen to Julie while on transit, sitting beside someone who’s reading on transit, while listening to Julie talk about someone who’s reading on transit. As Julie herself said to Torontoist, "Very......

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......

Photo by micgormit from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. This week internationally acclaimed author Maggie Helwig launches her new novel Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books) at the Toronto Women's Bookstore (73 Harbord Street). Torontoist is always happy to see local writers using Toronto as a setting for novels, and Helwig doesn't disappoint. In her rendering, a biological outbreak on the TTC sends the city into a panic, as stricken citizens are collapsing in subways......

Photo by gp0256 from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. If great female writers is what you're after this week, you're in luck. Tonight you can catch the always entertaining and edgy poetry of Tara-Michelle Ziniuk (Emergency Contact) at The Art Bar Poetry Series. Rumour has it that she'll be publishing her next collection, tentatively titled Somewhere To Run From, with Tightrope Books in spring 2009. The writer, performer, and activist will be joined by Sharon......

Photo by Tom (hmm a rosa tint). Get ready for an overload of launches—spring has finally sprung in the book world. Things certainly start off right as tomorrow Coach House Books hosts their spring launch at Stones Place. As far as book parties go, Coach House has a real knack for showing revelers a real good time. The evening will feature performances by writers from their current catalogue, including Maggie Helwig, Claudia Dey, Jordan......

Photo by blimpa. A welcome literary sign of spring is National Poetry Month, a country-wide event that kicked off locally this morning with a shindig at Ben McNally Books featuring Poet Laureate for Canada, John Steffler. Until the end of April Toronto will see a wide variety of events and readings, each devoted to celebrating the cultural value of poetry. The first poetry event of note is this Wednesday's NicholBack, an ingeniously titled tribute......

The fantastic Ibi Kaslik is back with a follow-up to her stunning debut novel, Skinny (a book that cracked the New York Times best sellers list for two consecutive weeks earlier this year—no small feat for a young Canadian writer). Kaslik's latest offering, The Angel Riots (Penguin Books), is the fictional chronicle of two up-and-coming Montreal bands, and speculation has already surfaced that the author (who, while in high school, was in a band with......

Photo by Jonathan Ponce from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's a bit of a slow week on Toronto's literary event calendar, as most publishers are in the final, frantic phases of producing their new spring catalogues. Enjoy your rest now, because things are going to get real busy come April. Having said that, there are a few gems for book lovers to attend before the snow finally melts and a packed schedule of spring......

Panel from Emily Pohl-Weary and Willow Dawson's Violet Miranda: Girl Pirate #4, courtesy of Willow Dawson. Ten weeks of fantastic, free writing workshops have just been announced as part of the Parkdale Street Writers program. Coordinated by the multi-talented poet, YA author, and Kiss Machine founder Emily Pohl-Weary, the workshops start April 1 and are led by some kick-ass local writers and artists, including Mariko Tamaki, Willow Dawson, and Kristyn Dunnion. You don’t have......

Photo of Julie Wilson, courtesy of Julie Wilson. Julie Wilson has become a favourite in literary entertainment over the past few years. Since 2006, her popular blog Seen Reading has been keeping Toronto book geeks amused by tracking the city's public reading habits. The concept is both simple and ingenious—Wilson spots a stranger reading, guesses where they are in the book, transcribes the passage onto her blog, and then lets her imagination run wild.......

Detail of photo by the Frankfurt School from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.. This week is Freedom to Read Week, a national event that encourages Canadians to value their right to choose what they read, and to recognize the individuals who fight to protect that right. Celebrations against censorship are happening across the country—locally PEN Canada is presenting an evening of readings and performances to promote a new anthology, Writers Under Siege: Voices of Freedom......

Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in last night's primaries. Obama for the first time won the majority of Latino voters, the majority of women voters, and the majority of senior citizen voters, while broadening his support in the demographics he was already winning. On the bright side for Hillary, she did manage to win the vote of nearly 87 percent of the voters who thought she was more qualified to be President than Obama.......

Oh, the seemingly endless toil and frustration of being an underpublished and underappreciated writer. There's the mailbox full of polite, predictable rejections and the depressing rite of passage otherwise known as "open mic night." When you finally emerge from it all, it's certainly time to rejoice. Thankfully Pages Books & Magazines’ This Is Not A Reading Series has stepped up to celebrate some of the lesser-known but soon-to-be-well-known players in Toronto’s vibrant literary scene.......

The short story is an unfortunate middle child. Not romanticized like poetry, nor widely read like novels, the short story finds refuge in literary journals, the New Yorker, and writing contests. In fact, the Toronto Star, Broken Pencil, and Eye Weekly all have contests ready for your masterpiece. First, stalwart Toronto Star has its annual short story contest. The top prize includes $5,000 and tuition to the Humber School for Writers for Creative Writing.......

If you're into the idea of kids with bigger, shinier brains and programs that facilitate such things, you might be familiar with Now Hear This!, Toronto's very own not-for-profit literary outreach organization. With a mandate of education through the arts, they do good things like hold Satire and Fake News Writing workshops for kids, complete with handouts from The Onion. Kind of idealistically akin to Dave Eggers' ass-kickingly progressive nonprofit, 826 National. Anyhow, these......

If you’d like weekly emails full of Toronto literary listings, sign up at Patchy Squirrel, a new offering from Stuart Ross and Dani Couture. Stuart launches a new collection of poetry, I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press) with Kate Sutherland's All In Together Girls (fiction from Thistledown Press) Sunday, April 22, 8 p.m. at Clintons Tavern (back room), 693 Bloor West. For a monthly overview of the Toronto scene and beyond, Word: Canada’s Magazine for......

It's 1:42 a.m. You're finally finished replying to e-mails.You settle down to continue that novel that you've been writing for, what, six, seven years now? But now you have a headache. The faucet is dripping and you can't concentrate. You eye the "To File" pile of papers on your desk and figure it wont hurt to make the stack smaller. By the time you're finished, it's pushing 3 a.m. and you didn't write a single......

In the post-Christmas period, there aren’t usually a lot of films released, and this year it's no different; really we’re all just twiddling our thumbs waiting for the new Cinematheque season, right? Well, there’s still some things of note this week; this Wednesday the first Doc Soup screening of the year hits, with a screening of Jesus Camp at the Bloor (506 Bloor W.) at both 6:30 & 9:15 pm. The filmmakers will be present......

Here we go. The biggest week of the year for book lovers, the International Festival of Authors, is upon us. Torontoist will have extensive coverage of this year’s IFOA. For now, here are a few non-IFOA events taking place this week. Monday Tonight, you have the choice of heading over to the Smiling Buddha Bar – 961 College – for this week’s Freedom Readings, starting at 6pm (and free) or checking out Margaret MacMillan......

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.......

Excuse me for the lateness of this week’s listing. I’m still on Nuit Blanche time. And yes, I made it until 7am. This is an absolutely fantastic week for word nerds. And check this – if one of your friends is more into sports, you can bring them to a literary event disguised as a boxing match. For a boxing fan like me, it doesn't get any better. Tomorrow at noon, there’s a special launch......

Ok, so the city is in the grip of full-blown festival mania. Red carpets, Gala screenings, and celebrity sightings are all great, but so are poetry readings, right? Right? Anyone??? Tonight at 8pm, head north to Zemra Lounge – 778 St. Clair W. – for this month’s installment of the Diamond Cherry reading series. Stephen Humphries and former director of the Art Bar, Allan Briesmster (The Other Seasons), will be reading. It’s free, and you......

We bet few of you have been to the Toronto Archives. We didn’t even know where it was until last night, when we attended theToronto Book Awards. But stepping into the foyer to be greeted by a room covered in photos and maps of our city’s history, it struck us at just how fitting it is to hold the ceremony here -- books honoured for their fluent portraits of Toronto stories in a building that......

CopyCamp is an "unconference" (hateful term) coming to Toronto September 28, 29, 30, at Ryerson Student Campus Centre. It's very much a planned do-it-yourself-you-participants affair, so there's no agenda (yet) and the wiki doesn't go up until a couple of weeks prior. From their site:CopyCamp is a place to meet people making art and making waves, an opportunity to discover how the Internet can work for artists and fans, and a chance to debate......

Strong Words, the indie reading series put on by Indiepolitik, is celebrating its first year anniversary. Why, it seems like just a few months a go we were coddling baby Strong Words, burping it, changing its diapers and now it's all grown up and publishing anthologies. People who'll be reading at the event include award winning writer George Elliot Clarke, indie-culture Emilys Schultz and Pohl-Weary and more. The book will actually include works by the......

Yorkville is renowned for its high proportion of fancy ladies with small dogs inside of expensive handbags and men in designer pinstripe suits driving oversized vehicles down narrow streets. Although you may not visit frou-frouland frequently, the new Toronto Writers' Centre (TWC) at 101 Yorkville Ave. could make a trek to the area worthwhile. Ex-lawyer and novelist Mitch Kowalski is the brains behind Canada’s first writing centre, which he modeled after similar writing centres......

Things are going great for previous Torontoist interview subject Howard Akler. His debut novel the City Man has been getting rave reviews and was recently nominated in the first-time authors category for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region). Akler joins a list which includes long-time poet and writer, but first-time novelist George Elliot Clarke and Calgary author Jacqueline Honnet. The winner of the regional prize goes on to compete against other fine books......

Whenever springtime approaches, it's almost natural to feel fresh, young, even spring-like. Perhaps these feelings come from the obligatory spring clean-up chores, or just watching television shows directed at a teenage demographic. But maybe the youthful sensation comes from an unnatural and illegal attraction to premature females. In Adrian the Adorable Sports Writer's case, it's the latter. The more mature and sophisticated Paige Six, however, is starting to recognize the distance between the interests of......

Now that the much-maligned Rochester ferry has been ferried off to jumbo catamaran neverland, Torontonians may find it difficult to commit the grave Spongebob felonies that have gripped Burger King's latest US film tie-in promotion. BK's across the country have been given 10-ft inflatable Spongebobs to decorate their buildings. But, and this is a real shocker, people are stealing up to the fast food chain and making off with these Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade-size toys......