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If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, food-security concerns, how chefs are trained: how a city nourishes itself might say more than anything else about what kind of city it is. With a cornucopia of essays on comestibles, The Edible City considers how one city eats. It includes dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches. There are incisive studies of food-safety policy, of feeding the poor, and of waste, and a happy tale about a hardy fig tree. Together they form a saucy picture of how Toronto – and, by extension, every city – sustains itself, from growing basil on balconies to four-star restaurants. Dig into The Edible City and get the whole story, from field to fork.
The definitive survey of an essential feminist poet. In June 2019, Nicole Brossard was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Trust. Rarely has a prize been so richly deserved. For five decades she has writing ground-breaking poetry, fiction, and criticism in French that has always been steadfastly and unashamedly feminist and lesbian. Avant Desire moves through Brossard’s body of work with a playful attentiveness to its ongoing lines of inquiry. Like her work, this reader moves beyond conventional textual material to include ephemera, interviews, marginalia, lectures, and more. Just as Brossard foregrounds collaboration, this book includes new translations alongsid...
More trees. Hydrogen-fuelled cabs. Urbiology. A new model of taxation. Solar panels on big-box stores. The art of salvage. Composters for dog poo in city parks. Retrofitting our urban slabs. Gardening the Gardiner. Ravine City. What would make Toronto a greener place? In the third volume of the uTOpia series, dozens of imaginative Torontonians think big and small about sustainability. From suggestions for changes to our transit system and more mixed-use neighbourhoods to a tongue-in-cheek proposal for a painted line aroudn the city and a short comic book about Toronto in the year 2057, GreenTOpia challenges the city and its residents to rethink what it means to be green in a metropolis, and how to take their love of the city one green step further. Other pieces include an interview with Mayor David Miller and a breakdown of the ecological impact of our morning coffee. GreenTOpia features photos, maps and a 56 page green directory of resources, organizations, incentives and programs promoting sustainability in the GTA.
Decisions about the things that matter most on a daily basis - our roads and schools and houses - happen at the city level. So, how do we influence these decisions? What motivates ordinary citizens to take action and improve their community? How do neighbours organize together? Does City Hall facilitate engagement, or stand in the way? Local Motion explores how we, as citizens, can make a positive change in our city.
Since the election of Mayor David Miller in November 2003, Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. At long last, Torontonians see their city as a place of possibility and potential. Visions of a truly workable, liveable and world-class city are once again dancing in citizens’ heads. In the past two years, this spirit has, directly or indirectly, manifested itself in multifarious forms: in writer Sheila Heti’s sui generis lecture series, Trampoline Hall; in the transformation of derelict hotels such as the Drake and the Gladstone into cultural hotspots; in renewed interest in waterfront revitalization and public transportation; in exciting, contro...
A stolen sign, ‘No Jews Live Here,’ kept John Lorinc’s Hungarian Jewish family alive during the Holocaust. From pre-war Budapest to post-war Toronto, journalist John Lorinc unspools four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution, and finally exodus from a country that can't rid itself of its antisemitic demons. This braided saga centers on the writer's eccentric and defiant grandmother, a consummate survivor who, with her love of flashy jewelry and her vicious tongue, was best appreciated from afar. Lorinc also traces the stories of both his grandfathers and his father, all of whom fell victim, in different ways, to the Nazis’ genocidal campaign to rid Europe of Jews. This is a deeply reported but profoundly human telling of a vile part of history, told through Lorinc’s distinctively astute and compassionate consideration of how cities and cultures work. Set against the complicated and poorly understood background of Hungary's Jewish community, No Jews Live Here is about family stories, and how the narratives of our lives are shaped by our times and historical forces over which we have no control.
A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020 AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21 A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022) Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty? If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference. "Historically we have associated the disabled body image and disabled life with an unhappy ending” – Sue Carter, Toronto ...
The surrealist antics of Gary Barwin will run the predictability of your universe through a particle accelerator. Watch as your right eyebrow turns into you as a child. Watch Jeff connect the mower to the Internet to cut other people's lawns. Hear the sploosh as Barwin drops some extra syllables in Basho's frog pond. Funny, smart and as unexpected as the Spanish Inquisition, Raising Eyebrows is divided into four mind-boggling sections - dirty dogs, my life in the salad spinner, ukiah poems: frogments from the frag pond, and bassoon throng blues. Raising Eyebrows will make you do just that.
"'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' This book of avant-garde literature features the intersection of poetry and science, and explores the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure."--Provided by publisher.
Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Drama Penelope Douglas is an ex–forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a western boomtown grown three sizes too crazy. But then a television writer offs himself in her sleek bathroom and her oil-wife friend pronounces Penelope her baby's godmother. Will she be able to find heart in this wild and soulless landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to "cowboy up"? Drama, a new play by the master of edgy dark humor, has all the answers. Karen Hines is the author of Hello . . . Hello (A Romantic Satire) and The Pochsy Plays. A Second City alumna, Hines has appeared in numerous television and film productions and is the director of cult horror clowns Mump & Smoot.