| Jordan Scott will launch his first poetry collection at Pages on Kensington on Tuesday, February 8. Entitled Silt, the new volume is published by NewStar and follows Scott's two previous chapbooks, Mere Mismemory (from delusional books) and A Walking History of Wladyslaw's Body in Parts (from housepress). Carol Maylon will also read from her new novel A Migration of Butterflies. Plus, there's classical guitar music courtesy of Martin Watson. It's all co-sponsored by the dANDelion magazine society and it's at 7:30 p.m.
The next night at Pages, Brad Smith reads from his new novel Busted Flush. The author of All Hat (as in "all hat and no cattle," of course), Smith is described as a "hard-boiled detective author," but Busted Flush isn't exactly a whodunit, although there is a historical type of sleuthing going on in the book. It's more a tale of a straight talkin' wiseass defending something of value against the hucksters and fraud artists of our shining new century. And it's set in Gettysburg. That's on Wednesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m.
Without the Alexandra Writers' Centre and the Writers Guild of Alberta, a large chunk of Alberta's literary mass would long ago have slipped off into the void, like those polar ice shelves in Antarctica. Hence the significant literary territory that's covered in a joint reading between the two groups on Sunday, February 6 at 1:30 p.m. Weyman Chan, Barb Hesson, Suzette Mayr, Susan Plett, Faye Reineberg Holt and Tim Rogers will all read. Vilnis Muiznecks will host. Door prizes will make crossing the threshold of Annie's Book Company (912 - 16th Ave. N.W.) a more rewarding experience than usual.
And without filling Station's Flywheel Reading Series every second Thursday of the month, would the Earth even continue rotating on its axis? Fortunately the momentum continues on Thursday, February 10 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson, when Laurie Fuhr, Natalie Walschots, Sharanpal Ruprai and Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence Natalee Caple all read.
Speaking of institutions that both hold the writing world together and also keep it moving forward, how about all of those writers, students and scholars at the University of Calgary's English department? I work with these smart, creative people, whose relentless energy goes a long way to making Calgary the busy book town on the Bow that it has become. To showcase a little bit of what those profs get up to when not teaching 6,000 students every year, and what the students do in their "spare time," this week the U of C Bookstore has assembled most of the 60-plus books now in print from U of C English students and faculty. Five new books will be launched during the week, each at noon, starting on Wednesday, February 9 with two books co-written by Susan Rudy: Poets Talk (interviews with seven contemporary Canadian poets) and Writing in Our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003). Then on February 11, it's Pamela McCallum and Wendy Faith's Linked Histories: Postcolonial Studies in a Globalized World; Kirsten Pullen's Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society; and Suzette Mayr's new novel Venous Hum. And if you get there early for the book launches, you can see how this publishing thing used to get done: by hand, with lead type and a platen press. The letterpress demo will be run by Murray McGillivray at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday and Friday, February 9 and 11. That's all at the university bookstore, downstairs in MacEwan Hall.
Best-sellers
Best-selling books for January 21 to 27 at McNally Robinson
Fiction
1. Love
by Toni Morrison
2. A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews
3. The Broker
by John Grisham
4. The Full Cupboard of Life
by Alexander McCall Smith
5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
by Mark Haddon
6. The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
7. Nights of Rain and Stars
by Maeve Binchy
8. Chainfire
by Terry Goodkind
9. Whiteout
by Ken Follett
10. Shopaholic & Sister
by Sophie Kinsella
Non-fiction
1. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
by Lynne Truss
2. A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
3. Future Tense: The Coming World Order
by Gwynne Dyer
4. The Museum Called Canada
by Charlotte Gray
5. The End of Faith; Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
6. Shake Hands With the Devil
by Romeo Dallaire
7. A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
8. He's Just Not That Into You
by Greg Behrendt
9. Chronicles, Volume I
by Bob Dylan
10. Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi |
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