| >>BOOKENDS
This year’s Freedom to Read Week starts on Sunday, February 26, with events and readings leading up to the 24-hour reading marathon on Saturday, March 4. The annual event has been happening since 1994, when, coincidentally, Stockwell Day (who was the Conservative Foreign Affairs critic at the time) was advocating banning John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, due to its supposedly offensive language (and we all know how blasphemous it is – what do you remember more, Lennie talking about rabbits or George dropping the odd "Christ"?).
Chris Crutcher will be here to read from his young adult novel The Sledding Hill, which will be presented to city council on Monday, February 27. Crutcher will be reading from the book at McNally Robinson on Wednesday, March 1 at 7 p.m. Catherine Ford is receiving the Freedom of Expression Award and reading from her new book, Against the Grain, on the celebration night, Friday, March 3 at the Prairie Ink Café in McNally Robinson. The event, hosted by CBC Radio One’s Jeff Collins, will also feature poet Richard Harrison and winners of the Free to Read Essay Contest, leading into the 24-hour series of discussions from a variety of banned books. Tickets are available at the bookstore for a donation to the Calgary Board of Education’s Bookbags for Kids. For more information, visit http://writtenword.org/calgary_freedom.
To the other events this week: on Thursday, March 2, Pages hosts an event held by the Alberta Magazine Publishing Association, which will have readings, prizes and other goodies.
At McNally Robinson, on Friday, February 24 at 8 p.m., Robert Boyd reads from his debut novel, On the Road to Nowhere, following a young boy’s adventures from road trips to prison. The next evening, Saturday, February 25 at 6 p.m., hear readings for the "Murder, They Wrote" night from Alex Domokos and Rita Toews (Body Traffic) and D.M. Wyman (Reunions are Deadly).
Local author Christopher Willard has been announced as a finalist for the first ever Expozine Award for his techno-paranoid novel Garbage Head. The award will be given in March at the Montreal festival of the same name, now in its fourth year, which focuses on small press and comic releases.
WordFest has announced that Australian author and Orange Prize winner Kate Grenville (The Idea of Perfection) will be attending this year’s festivities with her new novel, The Secret River.
Prolific author Frederick Busch (The Night Inspector, Invisible Mending) will be the University of Calgary’s latest Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Visiting Writer. He’ll be giving a free reading from his new short story collection, Rescue Missions, on Wednesday, March 29 at 7:30 p.m. in the Eckhardt-Gramatte Hall at the U of C’s Rosza Centre. |
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