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December 20, 2021
Book Therapy: Favourites from my favourites
Every year, in the back of my agenda, I keep a simple running list of the books I’ve read. More than anything, it’s a handy way to remember what exactly I consumed and when, but it also offers a useful ...
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February 09, 2022
Excerpt Month: Peek into a Dark Near Future with Thomas Harding's Future History 2050
It's a normal day in a quiet converted factory in 2020, where the researcher sifts through boxes of documents. What he finds is anything but normal though: a handwritten 30-year history recorded by an ...
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March 09, 2022
"Our Stories Will Still Be There" Kathy Friedman on Processing Complex Personal & Political History in Her Debut Short Story Collection
A life drawing model, a former political prisoner, a man unpacking his father's complex legacy—the fascinating characters in Kathy Friedman's debut short fiction collection, All the Shining People ...
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March 09, 2022
Book Therapy: Sunny Days Inside
“Is it safe?” “It’s safe now but when won’t it be safe?” “It’s not actually bad here.” “It’s not bad there either.” “What about the money.” “But what about the kids? They’ll ...
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March 25, 2022
Locked Down and Longing for Community: The Genesis of The Quarantine Review
It started in a pub on the Danforth, the bar filled with older gentlemen dejected at the cancellation of the Dave Mason concert at the Music Hall a half-block away. COVID wasn’t real to them yet, as ...
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May 15, 2022
The Stories I Shelve, Part I
With the advent of the Kindle, the refrain among publishing analysts was that the book’s days were numbered; the e-book would change accessibility for stories as the printing press had all those centuries ...
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May 19, 2022
The Stories I Shelve, Part II
In Part I of this blog post, I looked at the importance of physical books in my life, how the books represent more than just the stories within them, that they also hold the stories of their acquisition, ...
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May 26, 2022
The Soul of Story: Authenticity
My first car was a 1980 Toyota Tercel hatchback, payment for which I had earned working 60 hours a week at two jobs all summer. It was a gutless four-speed manual with a top speed of eighty km/hour. But ...
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August 04, 2022
"All the Good Stuff [is] Inevitable" Ray Robertson on First Sentences, Epigraphs, & Bookstore Love
There have been a lot of unexpected casualties of the pandemic. For Phil Cooper, the protagonist of acclaimed writer Ray Robertson's newest novel Estates Large and Small (Biblioasis), who has battled ...
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October 03, 2022
Excerpt: Gwynne Dyer's The Shortest History of War Details the Two Surprising Conditions that Predict a Species' Likelihood to Wage War
Historian and military expert Gwynne Dyer has written about the Iraq war, climate change, and the very invention of war as we now understand it. His acclaimed television series have won awards, and his ...