Ontario book news, interviews and more

Trash

 I have entered middle age.   I am overweight, and I live with a little dog and two cats. I have been alone for more than seven years.   I keep a journal, as Jenny Craig suggests, about what I eat ...

Craving a Talent Not My Own

Those who work in London are all either going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu—even though most of the people going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu don’t ...

Grounds for Communion

  People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the conditions tellingly described as “dwelling ...

Modest Portraits of My Mother

So perhaps my mother doesn’t need to be my queen; simply being my mother is already a lot, even if the rare kisses I place on her cheeks aren’t so majestic.  —Kim Thúy, Ru**As a statue:Bootprints ...

A Story That No One Owns

I’m sure my point is only too plain… Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think…. ...

His Gravity

We shun those who bear the mark of death, and this is a form of baseness to which even I succumbed. Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months ...

Tending Toward Liquid

Habit makes time relative for us. At twenty, the faces surrounding us have no history except in the present of the gaze we turn toward them. So, young adults, old people, and children seem forever framed ...

Our Lives of No Interest: the Compulsion to Confess

In middle age there is a mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that ...

A Month in the Life of the Launching Author

Today marks one month since May 31, the official publication date of my new novel The Oakdale Dinner Club, and one month since I started my residency here at Open Book Toronto.Within the month of June, ...

The Dirty Dozen, with Brecken Hancock

June 30, 2014 - Brecken Hancock is Open Book: Toronto's July 2014 writer-in-residence. Get to know her by checking out her edition of our Dirty Dozen interview series!Broom Broom (Coach House Books), ...