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Articles by Dan

Happy Birthday Saul Bass!

by Dan
Design & Typography / May 08, 2013

Saul Bass

I've talked about my love of Saul Bass here on the Raincoast blog before (more than once!), and so I was overjoyed to see today's Google Doodle which marks the legendary designer's 93rd birthday:  

 
 

The animated 'doodle' is based on Bass' film title credits, film posters and corporate logos. Bass passed away in 1996, but if you would like to see more of his work be sure to check out Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, written by his daughter Jennifer Bass with design historian Pat Kirkham. Published in 2011, it was the first book to be published on Bass, one of the greatest American designers of the 20th Century, and it has more than 1,400 illustrations, many of them never published before. It really is the definitive study of Bass's work.

Saul Bass


Canadian Crime Authors Southwestern Ontario Crime Spree

by Dan
Events + Fiction + Mysteries and Thrillers / May 02, 2013

Four Canadian crime authors are joining forces this month to visit libraries in seven Southwestern Ontario towns — Woodstock,Orangeville, Cambridge, Guelph, Brantford, Thornbury, and Orillia — for a literary crime spree.  

The Crime Tour authors are Hilary Davidson, Ian Hamilton, Robert Rotenberg, and Robin Spano. All four are relatively fresh faces on the crime-fiction scene, though they have 15 novels (count them!) published amongst them over the past four years.  

Evil In All Its Disguises

This is the second time Davidson, Hamilton, and Spano have toured together. In June 2012, they visited a series of libraries in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, from Vancouver to Squamish, with novelist Deryn Collier. Since Collier was unable to travel this year, the trio will bejoined by Toronto-based Rotenberg.  

“We are all writers who rage on the page,” says Robin Spano. “But we are really friendly in real life. Whether you're an aspiring writer looking for inspiration or you love books and are intrigued by what goes into their creation, we hope you'll come away having learned something.”  


The Events:  

Thursday, May 9,2013, Woodstock, ON, 2pm
Woodstock Art Gallery
sponsored by Woodstock Public Library
449 Dundas St., Woodstock, ON, N4S 1C2
519-539-6761
This event is free and open to the public.

Thursday, May 9,2013, Orangeville, ON, 7pm
Centre Fellowship

375 Hansen Blvd., Orangeville, ON, L9W 0C2
519-942-9421
Tickets are $10 with proceeds going to the University Women Scholarship Fund.

Friday, May 10, 2013, Cambridge, ON, 9:30am
Clemens Mill Library

50 Saginaw Parkway, Cambridge, ON, N1T 1W2
519-740-6294
This event is free and open to the public

Friday, May 10, 2013, Guelph, ON, 1pm
Guelph Public Library

100 Norfolk Street, Guelph, ON, N1H 4J6
519-824-6220
This event is free and open to the public.

Friday, May 10, 2013, Brantford, ON, 4:30pm
Brantford Public Library

173 Colborne Street, Brantford, ON, N3T 2G8
519-756-2220
This event is free and open to the public.

Saturday, May 11,2013, Thornbury, ON, 1pm
L.E. Shore Memorial Library

173 Bruce Street South, Thornbury, ON, N0H 2P0
519-599-3681
This event is free and open to the public.

Sunday, May 12, 2013,Orillia, ON, 1pm
“Murder and Mayhem on Mother’s Day at Manticore”
Manticore Books

103 Mississauga Street,Orillia, ON, L3V 1V6
705-326-7776
This event is free and open to the public.


About the Authors:

hilary davidsonHilary Davidson’s debut, The Damage Done, won the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It also earned a Crimespree Award and was a finalist for an Arthur Ellis and a Macavity award. Her third novel, Evil in All Its Disguises, was released on March 5, 2013. Says the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Her voice is a freshand welcome addition to the noir landscape.”


Ian HamiltonIan Hamilton’s first novel, The Water Rat of Wanchai, won the 2012 Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel. It was also chosen by Quill and Quire as one of the top five novels of 2011 and was nominated for a CBC bookie award. The fifth book in the Ava Lee series, The Scottish Banker of Surabaya, was published on February 16, 2013. Says The Toronto Star: “Ava Lee is unbeatableat just about everything…She’s perfect. She’s fast.”


Robert Rotenberg’s debut, Old City Hall, was called “a hard-boiled classic” by The Globe & Mail and widely praised by Entertainment Weekly, Maclean’s, and Kirkus. The book was shortlisted for a Dagger Award and a Thriller Award. A prominent criminal lawyer with Rotenberg, Shidlowski & Jesin, his fourth novel, Stranglehold, will be published on May7, 2013.


Robin SpanoRobin Spano’s undercover protagonist Clare Vengel has been described as a “slightly slutty grown up Nancy Drew.” Spano has been dubbed one of Canada’s Hot New Crime Writers by Crime Fiction Lover. She has fast developed a loyal following with her “smart, stylish and sharp” writing in Dead Politician Society and Death Plays Poker. Her third novel, Death’s Last Run, has just been released. 


Paul Anka at the Eaton Centre Today!

by Dan
Biography & Memoir + Events + Music / April 16, 2013

My Way Paul Anka

Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Anka will be signing his highly anticipated autobiography, My Way, and celebrating the release of his latest album, Duets, at the Indigo Eaton Centre store in Toronto, at 12pm today!

 

Paul Anka 'My Way' Signing
12pm April 16, 2013
Indigo Eaton Centre
220 Yonge Street Toronto, Ontario
T: (416) 591-3622


Sign Painters Documentary Vancouver Premiere

by Dan
Craft + Design & Typography + Events / March 27, 2013

Sign Painters

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.

 

In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon began documenting the work of traditional sign painters, their time-honoured methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship.  

The subsequent book, which features a foreword by legendary artist (and former sign painter!) Ed Ruscha, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in November 2012. 

The first anecdotal history of the craft, Sign Painters tells the stories of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout North America. It profiles sign painters young and old, from the new vanguard working solo to collaborative shops such as San Francisco’s New Bohemia Signs and New York’s Colossal Media’s Sky High Murals

The accompanying movie, also called Sign Painters, premieres in at The Smithsonian in Washington DC at the end of this month. But like Levine's previous documentary, Handmade Nation, the Canadian premiere of the film will be in Vancouver in association with Got Craft?

The screenings will take place on Friday June 7th and Saturday June 8th at the Rio Theatre on Broadway, and directors Sam Macon and Faythe Levine will be there to answer questions afterwards. There is limited seating and tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. If you're a fan of lettering, typography, or hand-crafted signs, the film is not to missed!

 

 

VANCOUVER SCREENING JUNE 7/8
Doors at 6:30pm | Screening at 7:30pm | Directors Q+A to follow
Rio Theatre, 1660 East Broadway @ Commercial Drive
Tickets & additional information HERE
Screening followed by a directors Q&A


Here Be Monsters!

by Dan
Fiction + Science Fiction and Fantasy / March 26, 2013

 
Game of Thrones Season 3 is coming!
 
The new season returns to HBO on Sunday (March 31st) at 9pm, and to mark the occasion this week's Raincoast newsletter focuses on new and recent fantasy books we love. Not only is there the official companion to the TV series, Inside HBO's Game of Thrones, there's the wonderful A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan, and an anthology of 'gaslamp' fantasy called Queen Victoria's Book of Spells edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. You can see the other books our list here
 
A Natural History of Dragons
 
But if none of those pique your interest (I'm not quite sure how that would be possible, but you know...), you can always set to work on the epic The Wheel of Time series. The fourteenth and final book, A Memory of Light was published in January and will soon be available as an e-book.
 

An Interview with the Suspiciously Nice Hilary Davidson

by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction + Mysteries and Thrillers / March 04, 2013

Hilary Davidson

In 2011, Canadian writer Hilary Davidson won the Anthony Award for her debut novel The Damage Done. The book also earned a Crimespree Award and was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis and Macavity awards.

I met Hilary a year later when she came to back Toronto to promote her second novel The Next One to Fall. I was positively taken aback that someone quite so charming and successful spent so much time thinking about how to dramatically kill people! Appearances can be deceptive, apparently...

Now a resident of New York, Hilary is a travel journalist and the author of 18 nonfiction books and countless short stories. You can also find her all over the web, including on FacebookGoodreads, Google+, Pinterest and Twitter.

With the release of her Evil In All Its Disguises tomorrow, Hilary (being so nice and all) kindly agreed to answer a few questions for the Raincoast blog about her writing, travel, social media and more. Just remember, however lovely Hilary seems while you're reading this, she is out there secretly plotting something dastardly. Take my word for it...

Do you remember when you first became interested in becoming a writer?

If you ask anyone who knows me, they’ll say it’s a lifelong obsession. When I was in elementary school, I won a short-story writing contest in Crackers Magazine. It was called “Ameteafear’s Tomb,” and I blame it for putting me on this dark and twisted path. That, and Nancy Drew books, or course. They’re the gateway drug to crime novels.

What was your first writing job?

Paid or unpaid? I started early, founding a newspaper at my elementary school when I was in Grade Five. In high school, I worked on the student newspaper, which was rather appropriately called The Cuspidor. At the University of Toronto, I worked on a couple of newspapers and interned at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, writing for its newsletter. But it wasn’t until I started freelancing while I was on staff at Canadian Living magazine that I made money from writing. The first cheque I earned was for writing a travel piece about New Orleans’ cemeteries for the travel section of The Globe & Mail.

What was the appeal of travel writing?

I’ve always learned so much when I travel, and I want to share that when I come home. I remember visiting Pompeii and being amazed by the brothels there. They have some very vivid murals on their walls! That was a kind of delightful surprise, and it turned into another travel story for The Globe & Mail. A few years ago, I spent three weeks in Peru, and that gave me a tremendous amount of inspiration, both for fiction and nonfiction. I’m obsessed with Inca history and culture, and my second novel, The Next One to Fall, let me explore that in great detail. Killing a (fictional) tourist at Machu Picchu was an unusual way to show my appreciation, but I was struck by both the grandeur of the site and the danger there when I visited.

Where are you going next?

My upcoming travels are all related to my tour for Evil in All Its Disguises. I start at the Tucson Festival of Books, then hit Scottsdale, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Denver, Colorado Springs, Austin, Houston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Toronto. After that, who knows? Last year, I did a weeklong tour of BC with Ian Hamilton, Robin Spano, and Deryn Collier, three of my favourite crime writers, and we’ve been talking about doing something similar this year, possibly in Ontario. Last year, I was lucky enough to visit Israel and Argentina. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go anytime soon, but I’m dying to visit Cambodia.

How has your journalism informed your fiction?

Being a journalist teaches how to grab your audience’s interest quickly, and it makes you shameless about asking questions to figure out how things work. Even though I’m writing fiction, my books are set in the real world, and I like to get the details right. That’s made me do things like go to a gun range to shoot targets, because I wanted to feel the weight of a gun in my hand before writing about it.

What else inspires your crime writing?

Sometimes things that have happened to me or someone I know have a way of getting into my work. Evil in All Its Disguises is the third book featuring Lily Moore, but it’s a standalone mystery about the disappearance of a journalist in Acapulco. It’s the first time that the scenario for one of my books was directly inspired by real-life events — in this case, the disappearance of a Frommer’s Travel Guides editor who vanished while on a press trip to Jamaica in 2000. The book is a work of fiction, but the circumstances around her disappearance have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore that.

Evil In All Its Disguises Hilary Davidson

Who are some of your favourite crime writers?

It’s such a long list! Some classic favourites: Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy L. Hughes, and Donald Westlake. For contemporary crime fiction, it includes Laura Lippman, Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott, Ken Bruen, Linda Fairstein, Kate Atkinson, Chris F. Holm, Dennis Tafoya, Jennifer Hillier, Louise Penny, Denise Mina, and Dennis Lehane.

What is your next book about?

It's the story of a wealthy, adulterous couple who go away together for a weekend and are abducted. The strange behaviour of their kidnappers makes one of the victims wonder who they’re really working for. After the couple’s bodies are found—apparently killed in an accident—it's up to the dead woman’s brother and one of the kidnappers to figure out what really happened that weekend.

When can we expect Lily to return? Readers are going to miss her!  

I definitely have more plans for Lily! She will be back. My first three books — The Damage Done, The Next One to Fall, and Evil in All Its Disguises — follow her through a short space of time. They’re set just a few months apart. When readers see her again, more time will have elapsed.

Are you still writing short stories?

Absolutely. Short stories let me explore all kinds of characters and voices and scenarios that I wouldn’t necessarily want to follow throughout a book. I also love writing short fiction because it’s helped me reach audiences who wouldn’t necessarily have picked up my books otherwise. I’m up for a Derringer Award right now for a story about a couple whose relationship is falling apart because one of them wants to visit a dominatrix. I’ve got stories coming up in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and in a new publication from Macmillan called the Malfeasance Occasional.

When did you become interested in vintage fashion?

When I was fourteen, I started shopping in Toronto’s Kensington Market, so I got hooked on vintage early. My mom and grandmother were always very stylish dressers, so they inspired me. I love the idea of wearing clothes that have a history — it’s like they have their own stories to tell.

Who are some of your fashion icons?

A few years ago, I saw an exhibit about Elsa Schiaparelli, and I instantly fell in love. Her approach to fashion was just so irreverent and playful. For instance, she designed a pair of glamorous, elbow-length black evening gloves with pointed gold talons attached. They look like bear claws! To me, that’s the ultimate in chic.

You’re very engaged with social media. As a writer do you find being online a help or a hindrance?

The best thing about social media is that it introduces you to a lot of interesting people. The worst thing is that some people mistake it for a megaphone, and they think it’s just a means to publicize their own books. For me, it’s all about the social — I get into a lot of interesting conversations with people, and I was invited to the first-ever QuebeCrime conference thanks to Twitter. It’s definitely a help, but I have to limit myself, because otherwise I’d be online chatting with people all day instead of getting any work done!

When we’ve finished reading Evil In All Its Disguises, what should we read next? 

I’m looking forward to reading Brad Parks’ latest, The Good Cop, and Andrew Pyper’s The Demonologist, which I’ve heard wonderful things about. My TBR (To Be Read) pile just keeps growing and growing. That’s true for everyone who loves books, isn’t it?

Thanks Hilary! 

Hilary Davidson will be appearing at Ben McNally Books in Toronto on April 18, 2013. Details to come. Read an excerpt of Evil In All Its Disguises


Raincoast to Distribute Figure 1 Publishing

by Dan
News / February 26, 2013

Chris Labonté, Peter Cocking and Richard Nadeau, three former senior managers with D&M Publishers, have founded a new publishing house: Figure 1 Publishing. Together, they bring more than forty years of publishing experience to the new venture, as well as a national network of top-quality writers, editors, designers, and photographers.

Figure 1 will offer organizations and individuals a full suite of high quality publishing services in both print and digital formats, and will distribute their books widely throughout the North American retail market.

Labonté says: “We learned our stock in trade at a publisher that was renowned for quality, and we intend to carry on that tradition in bold and creative ways.”

Figure 1 will focus on a handful of core publishing strands: art & architecture, food & wine, lifestyle, illustrated history and business books. They are working on projects with several clients already, including museums, art galleries, restaurants, and corporations.

“Our goal is to become the premier publisher of high quality illustrated books in the country,” Cocking said. “What we’re doing is different, I think, than anyone now publishing in this country. Think Chronicle Books, or Rizzoli—certainly those are influences.”

Figure 1 is securing U.S. and international distribution and will be distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books, who will also provide sales representation and marketing. Nadeau said that, “Raincoast is a fantastic distributor and we are delighted to be working with them. With their strong nationwide sales and marketing teams, we feel we’ve got the perfect partner.” Figure 1 will publish its first list of titles in Fall 2013.


Guest Post: Cory Doctorow for Freedom to Read Week

by Dan
Guest Blogger + YA Fiction / February 24, 2013

Freedom to Read Week is an annual event that encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

 
To mark this year's Freedom to Read Week, which starts today, we asked author Cory Doctorow to contribute a guest post on libraries and technology.
 
 

Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution

Every discussion of libraries in the age of austerity always includes at least one blowhard who opines, "What do we need libraries for? We've got the Internet now!"

Facepalm.

The problem is that Mr. Blowhard has confused a library with a book depository. Now, those are useful, too, but a library isn't just (or even necessarily) a place where you go to get books for free. Public libraries have always been places where skilled information professionals assisted the general public with the eternal quest to understand the world. Historically, librarians have sat at the coalface between the entire universe of published material and patrons, choosing books with at least a colorable claim to credibility, carefully cataloging and shelving them, and then assisting patrons in understanding how to synthesize the material contained therein.

Libraries have also served as community hubs, places where the curious, the scholarly, and the intellectually excitable could gather in the company of one another, surrounded by untold information-wealth, presided over by skilled information professionals who could lend technical assistance where needed. My own life has included many protracted stints in libraries — for example, I dropped out of high-school when I was 14 took myself to Toronto's Metro Reference Library and literally walked into the shelves at random, selected the first volume that aroused my curiosity, read it until it suggested another line of interest, then chased that one up. When I found the newspaper microfilm, I was blown away, and spent a week just pulling out reels at random and reading newspapers from the decades and centuries before, making notes and chasing them up with books. We have a name for this behavior today, of course: "browsing the Web." It was clunkier before the Web went digital, but it was every bit as exciting.

(Eventually my parents figured out I wasn't going to school, and after the ensuing confrontations, I ended up at a most excellent independent/alternative school, but that's another story)

Later, I worked as a page at North York Public Library's central branch, in the Business and Urban Affairs department. Working at a library is an unparalleled opportunity to witness the full range of human curiosity, from excited students working on school assignments together to wild-eyed entrepreneurs pursuing their dreams to careful senior citizens researching where to invest their personal savings to supplement their pensions (and lots more besides). All these people were using the library as a place, a resource, and a community. Because that's what libraries are.

And we've never needed that more than we need it today. We've run out of places. What used to be public squares and parks are now malls. Places that used to welcome kids now prohibit them (in England, where I live, some smart-aleck invented a device called "the mosquito," which plays a shrill tone only audible to young ears, used to drive children away from semi-public spaces like the benches in front of stores).

What's more, we're *drowning* in information. Pre-Internet librarianship was like pre-Internet newspaper publishing: "select, then publish." That is, all the unfiltered items are presented to a gatekeeper, who selects the best of them, and puts them in front of the rest of the world. Now we live in a "publish, then select" world: everyone can reach everything, all the time, and the job of experts is to collect and annotate that material, to help others navigate its worth and truthfulness.

That is to say that society has never needed its librarians, and its libraries, more. The major life-skill of the information age is information literacy, and no one's better at that than librarians. It's what they train for. It's what they live for.

But there's another gang of information-literate people out there, a gang who are a natural ally of libraries and librarians: the maker movement. Clustered in co-operative workshops called "makerspaces" or "hack(er)spaces," makers build physical stuff. They make robots, flying drones, 3D printers (and 3D printed stuff), jewelry, tools, printing presses, clothes, medieval armor... Whatever takes their fancy. Making in the 21st century has moved out of the individual workshop and gone networked. Today's tinkerer work in vast, distributed communities where information sharing is the norm, where the ethics and practices of the free/open source software movement has gone physical. Such hackspaces play a prominent role in my own fiction (thanks, no doubt, to the neighborly presence to the London Hackspace, which is directly over my own office in Hackney). In my new novel,

Homeland (the sequel to 2008's Little Brother), my protagonist Marcus discovers the tools of personal and social revolution through his friends at Noisebridge, a real-world makerspace in San Francisco.

At first blush, the connection between makers and libraries might be hard to see. But one of the impacts of building your own computing devices (a drone, a 3D printer, and a robot are just specialized computers in fancy cases) is that it forces you to confront the architecture and systems that underlie your own information consumption. Savvy librarians will know that our access to networked information is mediated by dozens of invisible sources, from the unaccountable search algorithms that determine our starting (and often, ending) points, to the equally unaccountable censoring network "filters" that arbitrarily block whole swathes of the Internet, to underlying hardware and operating system constraints and choices that make certain kinds of information easy to consume, and other kinds nearly impossible.

In the automobile age, everyone was expected to know the fundamentals of how their cars worked. Even if you paid someone else to change your oil, it would take an act of will to attain adulthood in the USA without learning a bit about the mechanics underpinning the signal invention of your era. There were just too many ways that a car could go wrong, and too many ways that your life revolved around cars to rely on the rest of the world to understand them for you.

Now we live in the computer age, and if we thought we relied on cars, we hadn't seen anything. Some people spend so much time in their cars that it's like they live in them. But you literally do live inside a computer -- a modern house, car, or institutional building is just a giant computer you put your body into. And modern hearing aids, pacemakers, and prostheses are computers you put inside your body.

Every part of our lives have been permeated by computers, and these computers have the power to peer into our private lives, to compromise our finances, to shape our political beliefs, to disrupt our families, and to destroy our workplaces. That is, if computers don't serve us, they can (and do) destroy us.

But for people who master networked computers and make them into honest servants, computers deliver incredible dividends. A UK study compared similar families, some with access to the net and others without, and found that the families with net access had better education, were more civically engaged, more politically informed, had better jobs and income, were more socially mobile  even their health and nutrition was better. If computers are on your side, they elevate every single thing we use to measure quality of life.

So we need to master computers  to master the systems of information, so that we can master information itself.

That's where makers come in. One of the curious aspects of computers is that they evolve so quickly that they rapidly become obsolete. That means that our communities are drowning in "e-waste," often sent to developing nations where children labor in horrific conditions to turn them back into materials to be reintroduced into the manufacturing stream.

What if, instead of shipping our communities' "dead" computers to China to be dipped in acid by unprotected children, we brought them to our libraries. What if we enlisted our makers to run workshops at the libraries, workshops where the patrons who come to the library to use the limited computers there were taught to build their own PCs, install GNU/Linux on them, and *bring them home*? People who say that it's dumb to turn libraries into book-lined Internet cafes are right.

Internet at the library should be the gateway drug for building a PC of your own, from parts, learning firsthand how computers work, what operating systems are capable of, and what locked-down devices and networks take away from their users.

Making a PC isn't hard, especially when you get the parts for free. The easiest way to get good at stuff is to make mistakes ("to double your success rate, triple your failure rate"). The best mechanic I know learned his trade by buying $100 junkers on Craigslist and destroying one after another until he got good (then: *excellent*) at it. When you're building PCs out of literal garbage, you can do no wrong. Your failures just end up back in the same dumpster they were headed for in the first place.

Look, we've got more computer junk than we know what to do with and a generation of kids whose "information literacy" extends to learning PowerPoint and being lectured about plagiarizing from Wikipedia and putting too much information on Facebook. The invisible, crucial infrastructure of our century is treated as the province of wizards and industrialists, and hermetically sealed, with no user-serviceable parts inside.

Damn right libraries shouldn't be book-lined Internet cafes. They should be book-lined, computer-filled information-dojos where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy, where initiates work alongside noviates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up.

My young adult novels always feature kids who build their own tools, in part because the coolest, most curious kids I know are already doing this. But it's also because this is a hobby that's available to anyone. The information is online, free. The raw materials aren't just free, they're worth *less than nothing*, a liability and a nuisance to be rid of. And the dividends are stupendous. Only through understanding the tools of information can we master them, and only by mastering them can we use them to make our lives better, rather than destroying them.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow will be at the Lillian H. Smith Library in Toronto on March 1, 2013 at 7:00pm (doors open at 6pm). 


Homeland Launch in Toronto

by Dan
Events + YA Fiction / February 20, 2013

Homeland by Cory Doctorow Toronto Launch March 1

Cory Doctorow will be back in Toronto next week for the launch of his new novel Homeland at the Lillian H. Smith Library on Friday March 1, 2013.

Cory will be discussing his new book and, knowing Cory, whatever else he feels like talking about on the night! The event will be held in the downstairs meeting room at library. Doors open at 6pm, the event will start at 7pm. Bakka Phoenix Books will be selling books.

If you haven't had chance to read Homeland yet, it picks up a few years after the events of Little Brother. California's economy has collapsed, but Marcus Yallow's hacktivist past has landed him a job working for a crusading politician who promises reform. But trouble — in the shape of a thumbdrive from his former nemesis Masha —  is not far behind... 

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother — a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

Cory Doctorow credit: Jonathan Worth

photo: Jonathan Worth

Cory Doctorow Homeland Launch
7:00pm, March 1, 2013 (doors open at 6pm)
Lillian H. Smith Library
with Bakka Phoenix Books
239 College Street
Toronto, ON, 
M5T 1R5
416-393-7746


Marissa Meyer in Toronto

by Dan
Events + Kids + YA Fiction / February 19, 2013

Marissa Meyer in Toronto March 9

New York Times bestselling author Marissa Meyer is coming to Toronto!

Marissa will be signing Scarlet, the sequel to last year's break out hit Cinder, at the Yorkdale Indigo at 12pm on Saturday March 9, 2013. 

Follow @indigogreenroom and @raincoastbooks for more details. 

Marissa Meyer Book Signing + Q&A
12:00pm, March 9, 2013 
Yorkdale Indigo

3401 Dufferin Street Unit #29
Toronto, ON M6A 2T9
416-781-6660 


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