Join Irish author Elaine Feeney for the Toronto launch of her Booker Prize-longlisted novel How to Build a Boat (Nov 7, 2023)! Elaine will be reading from her book, followed by a Q&A and book signing. The event will take place at Noonan’s on Wednesday, October 25.
Time and details TBA.
Order How to Build a Boat here!
Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall”
A funny and deeply moving novel about a boy, his dream, and the people who lend him a hand, by the acclaimed author of As You Were
Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it’s about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.
Join us in Toronto for the launch of Casey Plett‘s On Community (Nov 7, 2023)! Casey will be reading from her new book, followed by a discussion with host Yes-Lee Suski, and an audience Q&A. Books will be available for signing! The launch will take place at Queen Books on Friday, October 27 at 7PM.
More details here.
Order On Community here!
ONE OF CBC BOOKS CANADIAN NONFICTION TO READ IN THE FALL
We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it’s slipping away?
We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges.
Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community’s boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another.
Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Don’t miss as Jeannie Marshall discusses her book All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel at North York Central Library Concourse! Jeannie will be in conversation with journalist and deputy editor of Inuit Art Quarterly, Sue Carter, about All Things Move, a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing, with books available for purchase. The event will take place on Thursday, November 2 at 7PM.
Registration and more details here.
Get All Things Move here!
A deeply personal search for meaning in Michelangelo’s frescoes—and an impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age.
What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context—but in the process, she also found what she didn’t know she was looking for.
All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall’s relationship with one of our most cherished artworks. Interwoven with the history of its making and the Rome of today, it’s an exploration of the past in the present, the street in the museum, and the way a work of art can both terrify and alchemize the soul. An impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look.
Jeannie Marshall is a writer who has been living in Italy with her family since 2002. A nonfiction author, journalist, and former staff features writer at the National Post in Toronto, she contributes articles to Maclean’s and the Walrus and has published literary nonfiction in The Common, the Literary Review of Canada, Brick, and elsewhere.
Toronto Star Books editor Deborah Dundas, author of On Class (May 9, 2023) joins New York Times bestselling author and inspiration for the hit Netflix series Maid, Stephanie Land, to talk about their shared experience of growing up poor and struggling to overcome the barriers faced by the working class. In this timely conversation, Dundas and Land consider the ways in which we talk about class: who tells the stories and who doesn’t, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this has to change. This online event, part of TPL’s On Civil Society series, will take place on Monday, December 4 at 12PM.
Registration and details here.
Get On Class here!
Growing up poor, Deborah Dundas knew what it meant to want, to be hungry, and to long for social and economic dignity; she understood the crushing weight of having nothing much expected of you. But even after overcoming many of the usual barriers faced by lower- and working-class people, she still felt anxious about her place, and even in relatively safe spaces reluctant to broach the subject of class. While new social movements have generated open conversation about gender and racism, discussions of class rarely include the voices of those most deeply affected: the working class and poor.
On Class is an exploration of the ways in which we talk about class: of who tells the stories, and who doesn’t, which ones tend to be repeated most often, and why this has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? And what might happen if, finally, we did?
Deborah Dundas grew up poor in the west end of Toronto. She is now a writer and journalist, has worked as a television producer and is currently an editor at the Toronto Star. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the UK and Ireland including Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, The Belfast Telegraph and The Sunday Independent. She attended York University for English and Political Science and has an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from the University of King’s College. She lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter and their loving, grumpy cat Jumper.
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