If you’re looking for a book to mark Remembrance Day, I recommend Coventry, by Helen Humphreys. It’s a fairly short novel about two women in the British city of Coventry and what happens to them and their loved ones during both World Wars.
Much of it takes place on the night in 1940 when Coventry sustained its worst bombing. It gave me some sense of what it was like for civilians to live through such an attack.
Categories: Events
A new British play, That Face, is on at the Berkeley Street Theatre until Nov. 21. The playwright, Polly Stenham, was only twenty when the play premiered in London in 2007. Here’s an interesting Globe and Mail interview with the playwright.
If you’d like to read the play, we have it at Laidlaw Library.
Categories: Events
In honour of Lit City (which “celebrates writers who find inspiration in Toronto and use the city as a setting in their work”), I’m reading Dionne Brand’s powerful novel What we all long for. It touches on so many Toronto places and so many sides of life in Toronto.
Categories: Events
This Tuesday evening, May 5, artist Iain Baxter and writer Alastair MacLeod (author of the wonderful novel No Great Mischief) will be appearing at the U of T Art Centre, in a discussion facilitated by Nino Ricci (whose novel The Origin of Species won this year’s Governor General’s award).
Categories: Events · University College
Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada (from which he’ll be reading at Convocation Hall on May 8), is about his mother’s side of the family, including his great-grandfather George Monro Grant (author of Ocean to Ocean) and his uncle George Grant (author of Lament for a Nation, which Ignatieff criticizes in his new book). We have all these books at Laidlaw Library — not to mention Ignatieff’s earlier book about his father’s side of the family, The Russian Album.
Linda Hutcheon will be giving this year’s Alexander Lectures, beginning March 23. Her intriguing title is “The Uses and Abuses of Reviewing.” Professor Hutcheon is the author of A Theory of Adaptation (among many other books).
Categories: Events · University College
Yesterday Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes won CBC’s Canada Reads competition. I’m glad since I’m in the middle of reading it (it’s riveting). The only other of this year’s contenders that I’ve read is The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, which I loved. (The other books, which were knocked out of contention over the course of the week, were Fruit, Mercy Among the Children, and The Outlander.)
Categories: Events
Next week, March 10-12, Ruth Leys (from Johns Hopkins University) will give a series of lectures at University College, on “Emotions in Turmoil: Genealogy and Critique.”
In honour of these lectures, Laidlaw Library has acquired two books by Ruth Leys:
Categories: Events · University College
The University College drama program is currently putting on Attempts on Her Life, by British playwright Martin Crimp, at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse:
Categories: Events · New Books · University College
CBC is having their annual Canada Reads event, with the debates airing in March. As usual, there are five books in contention, and each one has a “defender” — this year’s defenders include Avi Lewis and Nicholas Campbell (of Da Vinci’s Inquest). If you’d like to read the books, they’re all available at Laidlaw Library:
The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, by Michel Tremblay
Fruit, by Brian Francis
Mercy Among the Children, by David Adams Richards
The Outlander, by Gil Adamson
Categories: Events
