For New York-area author Gail Carson Levine, fairy tales sometimes do come true. The highly successful children’s author, who gave a reading recently (2004) at Toronto’s Bialik Day School, is the creator of Ella Enchanted, a young person’s novel that has been turned into a movie by Miramax Films. The film stars Anne Hathaway and…
Blurb on ‘Crossing the Distance’
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Toronto Life had less than great expectations last winter when it published a short but blistering diatribe about newscaster Evan Solomon’s not-yet-published first novel, Crossing the Distance. The manuscript needed massive editorial work, sneered the magazine, and its intended publisher, McClelland & Stewart, had taken it on merely because of its author’s high media profile.…
Obit: Sylva Gelber (1910-2003)
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Sylva Gelber, who gained national prominence in the late ‘60s as director of the Women’s Bureau in the federal department of labour, was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights who helped to introduce equal pay legislation, maternity leave and women’s pension benefits into Canadian society. Known for her wit, humour and a love of music,…
Winchester on the Frisco quake of ’06
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Simon Winchester has just produced (1995) another non-fiction gem: A Crack in the Edge of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperCollins). The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa opens this recent non-fiction book with a view of the earth from the moon, and a description of…
Paris wins prize for ‘Long Shadows’
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A book by a well-known Toronto author won a $10,000 prize for non-fiction last month and is in the running for a second $10,000 prize to be awarded in May (2001). Erna Paris’s sixth book, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, which was published last year by Knopf Canada, was awarded the Pearson Writers’ Trust…
Two by Cynthia Holz
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Bronx-born Cynthia Holz first came to Canada as a correspondent for Business Week, then left journalism so she could focus on writing fiction. She’s been a resident of Toronto since 1976. After two dozen of her stories were published in Canadian magazines, Random House published 10 of the best in Home Again, a short story…
Powerful stories from Nora Gold
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Fortunately for lovers of fiction, Warwick Publishing, a Toronto-based publishing house that usually publishes non-fiction, has departed from its specialty to present Marrow and Other Stories, a debut collection of short stories from Toronto author Nora Gold. Gold, a professor at McMaster University, offers seven literary creations of varying lengths in the book. They range…
Novel set in Bathurst Manor
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Whereas writers of first novels often agonize over finding a publisher, that was not the case for Elyse Friedman, a 36-year-old Torontonian who has produced four screenplays and much comic material for radio and television. Friedman’s first novel, Then Again, was snapped up by Random House, a major Canadian publisher, which has championed the book…
Three by Cary Fagan
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When Toronto author Cary Fagan began writing the first draft of the novel that would become Sleeping Weather (Porcupine’s Quill), he had little notion that its protagonist, Leon Stone, had been in prison or that Leon’s father, Mordecai, had been an habitue of the racetrack. “I knew nothing about the racetrack,” says Fagan. “When I…
Howard Engel’s Memory Book
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Howard Engel, creator of the popular Jewish literary detective Benny Cooperman, was perplexed to discover, one morning about four years ago, that the pages of his morning newspaper seemed filled with an unfamiliar foreign typescript, resembling Serbo-Croatian. Actually, an overnight stroke had left him with alexia sine agraphia, a rare mental condition that had deprived…
