Reading Writers Reading


Book Description

"I am a writer because I was a reader first." Alison Gordon. "Nobody has ever written who never read." Mavis Gallant. "Reading is a connection, at once a way and a goal, a liberating destiny." Robert Kroetsch. Over 160 Canadian writers, in English and French, write about their experiences of reading. With striking photographs of each writer, Reading Writers Reading offers a sublime voyage into the heart of literary creation.




The Playing Field


Book Description

Collected short fiction and poetry from national award-winning writers, leaders in new fiction and up-and-coming authors, who have read at the I.V. lounge in Toronto.




Lost Classics


Book Description

An Anchor Books Original Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission. Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics. Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more.




Side/Lines


Book Description

This anthology offers refereshing, cogent and insightful explanations of why young poets and writers do what they do. The thirty pieces in side/lines OCo by a unique variety of Canadian writers working in numerous genres OCo reflect on why writers write. Their reflections are not to be held as gospel or lifelong theories, but can be considered writing strategies drawn up at specific points in time, informed by certain unavoidable material conditions, such as current politics and emotions. Ask these writers to explain their craft in ten years, and you may be surprised by their answers."




Literature and the Glocal City


Book Description

The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection’s most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of ‘glocality’, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.







The I.V. Lounge Reader


Book Description

Since May 1998 book lovers have gathered in a small, inconspicuous cafe across from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto to hear some of Canada's best writers read from their latest works. From national award-winning poets such as Dennis Lee and David Donnell, to the leading writers of new fiction such as Lynn Crosbie and Derek McCormack, to first-time authors and local favourites, the I V Lounge Reading Series has provided an intimate space for members of the literary community to share their craft with the public. This anthology offers samples of the best and most memorable readings of the past two years, including fiction and poetry never before published. Each entry captures the spirit of the I V Lounge Reading Series.




The New Quarterly


Book Description




American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron


Book Description

American Impersonal brings together some of the most influential scholars now working in American literature to explore the impact of one of America's leading literary critics: Sharon Cameron. It engages directly with certain arguments that Cameron has articulated throughout her career, most notably her late work on the question of impersonality. In doing so, it provides responses to questions fundamental to literary criticism, such as: the nature of personhood; the logic of subjectivity in depersonalized communities; the question of the human within the problematic of the impersonal; how impersonality relates to the “posthuman.” Additionally, some essays respond to the current “aesthetic turn” in literary scholarship and engage with the lyric, currently much debated, as well as the larger questions of poetics and the logic of genre. These crucial issues are addressed from the perspective of an American literary and philosophical tradition, and progress chronologically, starting from Melville and Emerson and moving via Dickinson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Henry James and Wallace Stevens. This historical perspective adds the appeal of revisiting the American nineteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, and even rewriting it.




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