...well, not literally, but he certainly took the town by storm when he was there for a whirlwind visit this October. Here are a few pics....
(all of these gorgeous photos are courtesy of Huge Galdones Photography, with many thanks to Bon Appetit Cookbooks!)
Outside the Corona Theatre....
...and inside the Corona Theatre!
And here are Anthony and Martin Picard at dinner at Liverpool House:
Anthony was on the road in support of his new book, No Reservations, as well as photographer Melanie Dunea‘s My Last Supper (in which you’ll find the most strategic placement of a bone you’ve ever seen...)
Hanna Rosin, author of GOD’S HARVARD: A Christian College On A Mission To Save America, and Daniel Noah, a graduate of Patrick Henry college, were interviewed by Scott Simon on NPR at the weekend.
Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school located in Virginia near Washington D.C., aims to provide their young evangelical students with religious training and an Ivy League-quality education.
Hanna Rosin, who has written for The Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, The New Republic, GQ and The New York Times, spent a year and a half ‘embedded’ at the college and got to know Patrick Henry’s students.
In the fascinating GOD’S HARVARD, she follows the lives of students as they struggle to cope with the temptations of modern life whilst trying to retake a godless nation.
Praise for GOD’S HARVARD:
“Whether these kids terrify or delight you has everything to do with your political and religious views but, one way or the other, they are people that you should probably start getting to know. God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin offers an intriguing introduction.” - The Christian Science Monitor
“The challenge for any responsible journalist approaching this subject, then, is twofold. She must approach with compassion, avoiding the stereotyping that so often characterizes books and articles about religious groups.... At the same time, she must retain her skepticism.... With God’s Harvard, Hanna Rosin aces this balancing act.” - Newsweek
“The fun of God’s Harvard is in Rosin’s perspective—it’s clear that although she doesn’t always agree with the kids, she likes them… As a secular reporter trying to understand an evangelical campus, Rosin is actually in a perfect position to empathize: She’s in a world dramatically different from her own, but not of it.” - Mother Jones
Click here to listen to the interview.
Click here for Hanna Rosin’s debate with David Kuo, editor of beliefnet.com, at Slate.
This one’s for all the book lovers out there… Fwis’ Book Covers blog has posted their annual feature on the best bookshelves of 2007.
Lots of brilliant and crazy bookshelves this year! The see-saw bookshelf pictured here is my favourite of the bunch; it’s designed by BCXSY. Though the bookshelf house would be pretty sweet, too…
I recently discovered a MUST SUBSCRIBE TO SERVICE for any new parents out there. It’s called YoYoMama.
Here’s their motto:
At yoyomama we know mums are not a renewable resource so we’re making your life less yoyo-like with weekday hits of helpful, hip info delivered directly to your inbox.
Sign up and daily you will receive a wonderful newsletter in your inbox with all kinds of helpful, kid friendly items and tips such as events and activities around Vancouver, ways to Go Green with your little one and my favourite Mama’s (and now Dada’s) who rock.
Chris Mizzoni the author of Clancy with the Puck was just selected as the very first YoYoMama Dada Who Rocks!
Here’s a snippet from the article:
The father of two-and-a-half year old Dreya (who’s already strapped on her first pair of skates), Chris began working on the book in earnest when she was about six months old. He worked in the evenings, during naptime, late into the night, whenever he could, continuing to work as the Location Designer and Layout Supervisor on Ricky Sprocket, Showbiz Boy by day.
Chris gets a thrill of seeing his book on the shelves at the bookstore and from his daughter waving it around saying “It’s Daddy’s book.” He’s also filling in Clancy’s back story, with two more books on the way. And that’s not likely to be the last of Clancy. In Chris’s head is an entire interactive Clancy universe, including a league of eight hockey teams, their lineups, stats and standings.
To read the full review visit YoYoMama and while there make sure that you sign up for their fabulous daily newsletter.
Also make sure to check out our Clancy Website for all kinds of amazing extra materials including a podcast with Chris Mizzoni, downloadable hockey cards and a Clancy with the Puck Avatar.
Happy Reading!
I was just sent a wonderful review for King of the Lost and Found on a blog called Jenn’s Book Bag. It contained one of the best quotes I’ve ever read so I thought I had to share:
Every once in a while, a true gem of a book comes along. King of the Lost and Found is a diamond of a gem.
Read the full review here.
King of the Lost and Found can be found at fine bookstores everywhere. Pick up your copy today, you won’t regret it!
This week is TD Canadian Children’s Book Week 2007, bringing the magic of books and reading to children all across Canada! Victoria Miles the author of Old Mother Bear and Frieda Wishinsky the author of The Canadian Flyer Adventures were selected to participate in the tour this year.
TD Canadian Children’s Book Week is the single most important bilingual, national event celebrating Canadian children’s books and the importance of reading. Every November, thousands of children and adults participate in activities held in every province and territory across the country. Hundreds of schools, public libraries, bookstores and community centres host events as part of this major literary festival.
All of us at Raincoast are very proud to have Frieda and Victoria participating in this amazing opportunity. Victoria will be visiting schools in Ontario and Frieda in Newfoundland.
Victoria Miles offers presentations for Grades 1-12! Here is some information about the presentation that she offers focused around to her book Old Mother Bear:
Old Mother Bear (Grades 1 - 3)
Look up the word “bear” in any library catalogue and you could find hundreds of titles. But a book about an old bear, a very old bear? That would be a rare find. When Victoria Miles set her heart on writing a bear story, she had a particular bear in mind. An aged mother grizzly, and her last litter of cubs. In writing “Old Mother Bear”, Victoria explored what it means to be an old bear. Teamed up with Caldecott-honoree artist Molly Bang, Victoria and Molly viewed grizzly bears in the wild, a special experience she shares when presenting “Old Mother Bear”.
For those of you in Newfoundland who are lucky enough to hear Frieda speak here is some information about her presentations:
Frieda loves writing children’s books. Her picture books, chapter books and novels are full of humour and engaging characters. She makes history” come alive” for readers. Published in eight languages, her many books have won numerous international awards and acclaim. Frieda is an accomplished workshop leader and presenter, who consistently draws enthusiastic reviews from children and adults alike.
Frieda’s presentations and workshops are interactive, informative and curriculum-linked. She uses drama, storytelling, a lively Q&A period, and humour to engage her audience.
She encourages kids to use their experiences and feelings to tell their stories and shows them how they can do that.
Both authors give amazing school presentations! If you are interested in having Victoria or Frieda come to your school contact me at and we can put you in touch!
For more information about Canadian Book Week visit the TD Canadian Children’s Book Week Website.
Happy Reading!
Want to test your sports trivia genius?
Here are a few downloadable puzzles from Raincoast’s new sports puzzle books, written by Jesse Ross: ALL-STAR SPORTS PUZZLES: HOCKEY and ALL-STAR SPORTS PUZZLES: BASKETBALL.
Click here to download hockey puzzles (PDF).
Click here to download basketball puzzles (PDF).
These puzzles are great for sports fans of all ages—kids, teens, as well as grown-up sports nuts. They’re also ideal for pre-holiday car/plane/bus/train trips, or just to relax with over the break.. well, during those brief moments when you won’t be out on the ice or on the court…
For more info on the books, check out the All-Star Sports Puzzles website.
In the Spring, watch out for two new All-Star Sports Puzzles books: SOCCER and BASEBALL.
Jamie Trecker’s rip-roaring LOVE & BLOOD is reviewed today by Ben Knight on The Globe & Mail’s new soccer blog!
The World Cup is the biggest single-sport tournament in the world - and also the planet’s biggest party. In a brisk, entertaining new book, Fox Sports soccer columnist Jamie Trecker does a fine - if frazzled - job of chronicling both.
If you’re interested in soccer, Ben’s blog posts are shaping up to be an invaluable resource, especially if you’re following Toronto FC and the MLS. Jamie Trecker, who, as Ben mentions, just happens to be the senior soccer writer at Fox Sports, also blogs about the game here. He doesn’t pull his punches…
And, just in case you missed it, you can read my interview with Jamie here.
TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes is a collection of photos and stories about objects with unexpected personal significance. Inspired by the book, Maisonneuve Magazine have been running a contest to find the ‘thingamajig’ of special significance to their readers. The five winning entries are being posted daily on their website this week.
Personally, I love the story about the Savory industrial toaster:
I picture a bustling but cozy café where espresso is always brewing, and where piece after piece of fresh, perfectly toasted bread shoots out the bottom of the industrial antique, to the delight of all.
Congratulations to Frieda Wishinsky! Frieda is the author of the Canadian Flyer Adventures series, published by Maple Tree Press. The second book in the series, DANGER, DINOSAURS!, has been named one of the “Great Books for Children 2008” by the Canadian Toy Testing Council.
The book presents a good mix of fact and fiction and is a great read for boys and girls who are fascinated with prehistoric creatures.
The Canadian Flyer Adventures series is a great way for growing readers to experience Canada’s history—with a good dose of fun and adventure. For more info on the series, visit the Canadian Flyer Adventures website.
Click here for the Canadian Toy Testing Council’s entire list of “Great Books for Children 2008”.
Thanks to everyone who entered our Adrian Tomine contest and left comments about his work. Adrian definitely has a lot of fans out there. (I knew I wasn’t alone!)
The winner of the contest, selected at random, is..... Bill Hine!
Congrats, Bill! Your poster will be in the mail shortly.
For everyone else, be sure to check back here for more contests and news and other goodness.... And I hope to see some of you tonight at the Adrian Tomine event at Sophia Books!
“Moonlight transforms the ordinary into things of beauty; The garden at night. Lush flowers emerge from darkness in book of Linda Rutenberg’s photos"-Montreal Gazette
In 2005 while on an assignment for Landscape Architect Magazine she was taking photographs at the Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Quebec, it was suggested early in the morning would be the optimum time to get the best light. She took up an offer at the garden’s to stay the night and click away. To her amazement her film produced the most beautiful images. And beautiful images they are!!
“The photographs I took using basic ambient light and long exposures were spellbinding, and I knew at once I had discovered an original and exciting project."-Linda Rutenberg
“I intended my images to transcend the literal and unveil the extraordinary poetic, lyrical, and sensory richness of the nocturnal garden.” She then went on from that garden to visit twenty other public gardens across the United States and Canada to produce her book THE GARDEN AT NIGHT, published by Chronicle Books
Reviews of The Garden at Night
Please check out Linda’s website for upcoming events or any information on her photographic journey.
If you ever feel socially stigmatized and wracked with guilt by the sheer volume of books that you kinda, sorta, meanta read but never quite managed to (or, in my case, chronically embarrassed by the TWO 3 feet high piles of unread books on the floor by my bed), help is at hand! French literary professor Pierre Bayard has written an blessedly short book called HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ that actually proves that you’re doing yourself and literature (and the world!) a service by ‘non-reading’.
Now, I wouldn’t want to suggest for one minute that you shouldn’t read Mr. Bayard’s book, but just in case you feel it is all a bit much, here is a quick primer to help you bluff your way through it…
In a fabulous review in The New York Times Sunday Styles section , Liesl Schillinger, gives a neat summation of HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ:
In Mr. Bayard’s opinion, reading books is overrated. “In my experience,” Mr. Bayard declares, “it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read—including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn’t read it either.”
Generously and recklessly, like a professor handing out cheat sheets to his own final, he shares his tricks. Here’s a walk-through.
Assume you are asked to offer your opinion on a book all clever people were supposed to have read last summer—say, for example, the newly reissued cult novel ‘The Dud Avocado,’ about a brash young American girl set loose in Paris. It was written by Elaine Dundy in 1958 and lately championed by O magazine and the arts critic Terry Teachout, who wrote the introduction.
Assume that, for you, it falls into one of Mr. Bayard’s categories of nonreading: books you don’t know, books you have skimmed, books you have heard of, or books you have forgotten.
If the novel happens to be on a coffee table, glance at the cover—a nude Jean Seberg-like blonde stares at the camera with unselfconscious eyes - - and wing it.
“You know, that book reminds me of the movie ‘Breathless,’ “ you can opine. If your comparison turns out to be off base, laugh it off and keep talking.
The point is not to be correct, but to have an opinion, he explains. If you are alive and sentient, you are more than qualified to discourse on everything from ‘Silas Marner’ to Lance Bass’s ‘Out of Sync,’ whether you’ve cracked the spine of either.
Jay McInerney also reviewed the book (on the same day!) for the New York Times Book Review supplement. Click here for the review.
Martin Levin, the esteemed Book Review Editor of The Globe and Mail, reviewed the book on November 3rd. He had this to say:
This is not meant-to-be-amusing bluffer’s guide to famous books, or a checklist of views one might plausibly hold about them without being embarrassingly challenged. Rather, it’s a witty, intelligent essay in anti- criticism by a professor of French literature at the University of Paris. Bayard is also a psychiatrist, which, in concert with his Gallic intellectualism, allows him to confess straight-facedly that he has neither much time nor much inclination for reading.
Sadly the full review is not available online (unless you wanna pay), but you can read Morley Walker’s great review for the The Winnipeg Free Press:
Bayard’s central point is not that we shouldn’t read, but rather that we shouldn’t feel guilty or inadequate for not having read any particular book, however current or canonical.
There are simply too many of them, and even the most prodigious reader can absorb but an infinitesimal fraction of what he calls ‘the universal library.’
Yet, Bayard insists, this shouldn’t prevent people from voicing their opinions on what they haven’t consumed. He agrees with literary critics (and husbands) everywhere: “It is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you are talking about in order to talk about it accurately."
It’s online here.
And, speaking of online, Lauren Mechling took a look at the book for the CBC Arts website:
Drawing from literary luminaries like Montaigne, Valéry and Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, Bayard shows us how to discuss all manner of unread books. “It is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you’re talking about in order to talk about it accurately,” Bayard’s narrator maintains, adding that talking about a book you haven’t read is actually an avenue for creativity and self-discovery. He goes on to argue that if you actually read a book, you will probably be in a worse position to discuss it than had you abstained: you’ll get bogged down in the details. It’s much better to ponder the book in question from a distance, and use your powers of ingenuity to cook up an opinion. As Bayard craftily suggests, “Knowing how to speak with finesse about something with which we are unacquainted has value far beyond the realm of books."
Finally, in the most acerbic (and funny) review that I’ve read, Sam Anderson sums up the book for New York Magazine thus:
Western culture has fetishized books almost as much as it has breasts and cash. Our reading is governed by a corrosive idealism that fills us all with secret shame: We believe we should be doing it more and better, and that, until we do, we fully deserve to be sneered at by college dropouts at the Strand. To Bayard, however, this is unrealistic. The line-by-line, cover-to-cover experience of a text, he argues, is passé; true reading consists mainly of nonreading. By this he means not just an absence of reading but a positive set of shadow skills that we should honor and cultivate and teach to our children: browsing covers and spines, reading first sentences, skimming key passages, monitoring gossip, and b.s.-ing at cocktail parties.
There… Now technically you don’t really need to read the book about ‘non-reading’, but what hey - give it to someone for Christmas.
If you are a fan of independent comics and graphic novels you really should check out Robin McConnell’s radio show Inkstuds. Every Thursday between 2:00 - 3:00pm Robin interviews the best creators in the medium, from publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics and Top Shelf, for Citr Radio in Vancouver. Then, bless him, Robin posts up a podcast on the Inkstuds website so those of us unlucky enough not to live on the West Coast can listen too!
Inkstuds recently interviewed the masterful Chris Ware (ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK, QUIMBY MOUSE and JIMMY CORRIGAN) and comics scholar Jeet Heer about the influential and much loved work of Gasoline Alley’s creator Frank King. The newspaper strips he created are being loving collected in a series of beautiful books edited by Chris with introductions by Jeet (and published by Drawn & Quarterly) called WALT & SKEEZIX.
Three volumes of WALT & SKEEZIX available so far:
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK ONE
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK TWO
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK THREE (New!)
Click here for the Inkstuds interview with Chris Ware and Jeet Heer
As the New York Times reported earlier in the year, reprints of vintage newspaper strips have suddenly become very popular as contemporary cartoonists and graphic artists like Chris Ware, Seth, and Joe Matt openly pay homage to these 4 panel masterpieces.
Other collected reprints of classic newspaper strips available include:
HANK KETCHAM’S COMPLETE DENNIS THE MENACE (Fantagraphics)
KRAZY & IGNATZ by George Herriman (Fantagraphics)
POPEYE by E. C. Segar (Fantagraphics)
POGO by Walt Kelly (Fantagraphics)
THE COMPLETE PEANUTS by Charles M. Schulz
Fantagraphics have also published R. C. Harvey’s definitive (nee massive!) biography of the legendary Milton Caniff, creator of newspaper strips Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates.
If you interested in all this stuff, but you don’t quite know where to begin, I’d recommend you download the awesome PDF sampler available from the Fantagraphics website. It’s very cool resource with loads of images.
If contemporary comics are more your thing, Inkstuds also interviewed the mighty Adrian Tomine recently.
As Siobhan mentions below, Adrian is appearing at Sophia Books in Vancouver on Tuesday November 13th and 7pm, to launch his first full-length graphic novel SHORTCOMINGS. He’s being interview by Vancouver author, journalist and all round good guy Kevin Chong!
AND you can also win a free signed poster of the cover art to SHORTCOMINGS (which are awesome - if I could enter, I would!) by leaving a comment on Siobhan’s post.
Apart from SHORTCOMINGS we also have several collections of Adrian’s work available from D&Q:
SCRAPBOOK
SUMMER BLONDE
SLEEPWALK
32 STORIES (which is almost out of stock so get them while you can!)
If you are really obsessive you can also get Adrian Tomine Stationery from Chronicle Books:
SHE READ THE LETTER… Journal
OPTIC NERVE postcards
(yes, yes… I do own all of these and I did get Adrian to sign them when he was in Toronto...)
This morning, I ran a workshop on blogging for our Raincoast Publishing department. So expect to see some new writers here on the Raincoast blog soon (in addition to us Marketing and Publicity folks—yeah, we’re here to stay!).
They’re the ones on the frontlines of the book biz—from acquiring manuscripts, to editing books, designing them and getting them printed—so chances are they’ll have some interesting things to say. Plus, they’re pretty great people. Be sure to stop by the blog soon and say hi.
Raincoast podcasts are available from iTunes by searching for "Raincoast" or the RSS feed is available from Feedburner at 
Check out our NEWEST Podcast for Clancy with the Puck, a hilarious tale of hockey hubris.