Kathleen Winter @ Rower's in Toronto, March 2nd

Torontonians! Kathleen Winter will be reading at Rower's alongside Waubgeshig Rice, George Murray, and Elisabeth de Mariaffi this Monday, March 2nd @ Central, 603 Markham. Readings start at 6:50 sharp.

Biblioasis Bonanza @ Lit Live in Hamilton, this Sunday March 1st

For those of you who are in Hamilton this weekend, Lit Live has a wonderfully distinguished and stacked bill featuring Elisabeth de Mariaffi, George Murray, and Biblioasis trio Ray Robertson, Nancy Jo Cullen, and Diane Schoemperlen. The event takes place at 7:30 PM on Sunday, March 1st @ Homegrown on 27 King William St., and will be opened by emerging writers Taylor Wilson and Geoffrey Line. 

Hope to see you there!

Diane Schoemperlen in Quill & Quire, The Bull Calf

In the December issue of Quill & Quire, Diane Schoemperlen offers up a introduction to found text and collage, and the genesis of her latest book, By the Book: 

The stories in By the Book are in the tradition of the objet trouvé – taking the form of a found narrative or conversation or meditation – each being an expanded, exploded, and embroidered rearrangement of the original material. The selection and ordering of the sequences in each story was a very labour-intensive and time-consuming process, but one that I found immensely enjoyable and satisfying.

Reading and rereading each old book with a pencil in hand, I searched for its hidden treasures and marked each sentence that resonated for me. Then I moved them around like puzzle pieces, working out of instinct and my love of language and its unpredictable largesse, until the whole thing began to gel. More often than not, I was happily surprised by the power of the juxtapositions and how far I could take them. It was a matter of simultaneously trying to control the material while remaining open to accident, chance, and serendipity.

For the full review go to: http://www.quillandquire.com/people/2015/02/04/last-word-diane-schoemperlen-on-found-text/ 

In The Bull Calf, Sarah Bezan offered up a positive take on By the Book:

Perhaps the most successful section of the book, entitled “By the Book or: Alessandro in the New World,” reads between the lines of the Nuovissima Grammatica Accelerata: Italian-Inglese Enciclopedia Popolare (1900), a book intended to be read by new Italian immigrants to the United States. The original text, which includes advice, notes on grammar and nomenclature, and a background on the American Constitution, also traces correspondence that can be used by its readers to navigate “everyday situations such as discussing the weather, looking for work, getting a hair cut, buying groceries, and visiting the doctor,” as Schoemperlen writes in the section’s introduction (2). Interspersed with extracts from the Nuovissima (indicated by Schoemperlen with the use of boldface), this section imagines a real world of love and loss in the character of Alessandro, who longs for his home country, and for the beautiful young women of the New World, in equal measure...Redeeming personal accounts and stories left untold between the lines of remaining documents, By The Book toys with the notion of completeness. Pieced together “the old-fashioned way by the traditional cut-and-paste method with real paper, real scissors, and real glue” (xi), her most recent book explores the enigmatic possibilities of juxtaposing unfamiliar elements in a bold creative practice of scission and adhesion.

For the full review go to: http://www.thebullcalfreview.ca/dianeschoemperlen.htm

Cast Your Vote: All Saints and Paradise & Elsewhere up for 2015 CBC Bookies

Prepare your ballots, dear readers: it is time again for the annual CBC Bookies.

We're pleased to say that this year both All Saints by K.D. Miller and Paradise & Elsewhere by Kathy Page are up for the 2015 Short Story Category! Click here to vote. (Note: if you wish, you can skip categories by pressing the "Next" button). Voting is open until Monday, February 23rd. 

Ondjaki interviewed in Numero Cinq + John Ralston Saul shows love for Good Morning Comrades on Twitter

Earlier today on Twitter, John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International and author of The Comeback, expressed his admiration for Good Morning Comrades, Ondjaki's "magical 1st novel."

To learn more about this up-and-coming star of Angolan fiction, check out this great interview with Benjamin Woodard, just posted on Numero Cinq. Woodard also wrote an excellent review of Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret, Ondjaki's second novel in English, released in 2014.

Biblioasis is currently at work at translating Os Transparentes, winner of the 2013 Jose Saramago Prize, and generally considered Ondjaki's masterwork.