Upcoming Toronto Readings: A Puritan Guide

Ho, boy. A cluster of late Spring, early Summer literary activity in the Big Smoke. Allow The Puritan to be your guide over the next few weeks of launches, readings, and general shindiggery.

The All We Want Is Everything event poster.First up: former Puritan Associate Editor Andrew MacDonald will be giving a reading at the Taddle Creek Summer Launch on Friday, June 14 at 8:30 p.m. at the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament Street (along with writers Michelle Winters and Michael Lista, who was interviewed in a recent issue of The Puritan here). With a promise of free beer, bbq, and only $5 magazines, this seems like a great excuse to get out of doors and enjoy the freshening air.The next night, on Saturday, June 15 at 2 p.m. at 258 Indian Road (holy west end, Batman!), Coach House poet Margaret Christakos will be reading at The Elegy Roadshow (along with Tanis MacDonald, Susan Glickman, Ruth Roach Pierson). Read our resident reviewer, E Martin Nolan, on Christakos's Welling here. Puritan reader and past contributor and all-around good guy, Matthew R. Loney, will be giving a riveting fiction read at The Exile Writers Series to support the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology. Head on down to The Dora Keogh at 141 Danforth Avenue on Monday, June 17 at 7 p.m. to hear Loney read alongside other heavyweights like Leon Rooke and Priscilla Uppal.

Everything Is Fine, According to Little BrotherALSO on Monday, June 17, starting at 7 p.m. at No One Writes to the Colonel is the launch of Everything Is Fine, a flash fire fiction zine dedicated to Rob Ford and Toronto's municipal exploits. Puritan Co-Editor Spencer Gordon (author of Cosmofrom Coach House Books) and Puritan Associate Fiction Editor Andrew Sullivan are featured in the anthology and may even give a reading (alongside others, perhaps, such as Andrew Kaufman, Shawn Micallef, Zoe Whittal, Jowita Bydlowska, Chris Randal, Natalie Zina Walshots, and more). Everything Is Fine is a Little Brother and Emily Keeler production. Buy it here.The Pivot Reading Series holds its season finale on June 19, 8 p.m., at The Press Club (850 Dundas Street West) with readers Mark Callanan, Michael Lista, Jael Ealey Richardson, and Jacob Scheier, and hosted by the ever-hatted Jacob McArthur Mooney, whose poetry you can read here. The secret to any good Pivot is staying late, and convincing others to follow suit. Hopefully there'll be nice weather for a back patio social, but knowing Toronto ...Here's a biggie: Saturday, June 22 is The Toronto Luminato Festival's "A Literary Picnic," which will feature over 60 authors giving readings from three stages over the course of the afternoon in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Shit gets started around 12:00 p.m., so come early to grab a spot (wrap up is 4:00). You gotta hear this one to believe it. From the Luminato website:

On the theme of “Beginnings” over 60 authors will take to three stages to share selections from their work and offer insight into where a story begins, and how writers confront the blank page. Many of the participating authors will also be setting up their own picnic blankets backstage for one-on-one exchanges with the public throughout the day.In the spirit of literary exchange, the Luminato Festival also invites the public to bring in their pre-loved books to be offered in trade to other book lovers at a special table.Also at the picnic will be the Toronto Public Library bookmobile. Librarians will be compiling a list of 60 books with “great beginnings” and the books will be available for borrowing on site, along with regular offerings from the bookmobile.Also on site for the day: Type Books; First Book Canada; an author signing area; the Toronto Public Library Book Mobile; and food trucks offering many different tastes of the city.Bring your picnic basket, your favourite used books and your own beginnings to A Literary Picnic.

Luminato's "A Literary Picnic"Sounds good, no? On hand you'll have Puritan Co-Editor Spencer Gordon, recent Puritan authors such as Andrew Faulkner, Jessica Westhead, and Matthew Tierney, and past Puritan interview subject, Mathew Henderson. And, like, fifty more authors, such as Michael Winter, Damian Rogers, Evan Munday, Grace O'Connell, Edward Keenan, Tamara Faith Berger, Heather Birrell, Andrew Kaufman, Stacey May Fowles, and a whole lot more.Puritan Associate Fiction Editor, Andrew F. Sullivan, will also be launching his debut collection of short stories, All We Want Is Everything (Arbeiter Ring Publishing) on Wednesday, June 26 at 8 p.m. at The Garrison (1197 Dundas Street West). Join him for this awesome occasion and see readings from the man himself alongside past Puritan contributor Suzannah Showler, Puritan Co-Editor Spencer Gordon, and writer Emma Healey. There may even be DJs from the future!Check out what ARP is saying about Sullivan's super debut:

All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark.Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.Find out more from : http://arpbooks.org/books/deta...all-we-want-is-everything/

So: no excuses. You can't miss these events.

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