.ll.

After a certain period of time, say forty years, I think we should be allowed to admit that we no longer know somebody we used to know and be permitted to go back to the beginning and start again, I’ve known some people for so long without speaking to them and we’ve all changed so much in the interim that we need to be re-introduced.

The Toronto battle has not yet made its mark nationally, but it should. If Toronto library users and supporters lose this fight, you can depend on it that other municipalities will be encouraged to follow suit. I am a Montrealer, not a Torontonian, but I know this is my battle, too. And I think it’s a battle we should all be fighting.

When it comes to the future of public libraries, we are all Torontonians.

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

The more our lives as writers and readers are spent online, the more we appreciate what the literary festival – of whatever size – has to offer: not only personal contact with other writers and readers, but also friendliness, warmth, and the kind of intimacy that conversations about good books bring out in people who love reading. When the festival is small, these priceless qualities are all the more concentrated. And when a superb setting is added to the mix, the small festival becomes irresistible.

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Knowlton was full of summer visitors in pastel-coloured shorts and skimpy tops. Cars were sidling along rue Knowlton with their tops down, the boutiques had their doors wide open, and the village was festooned with petunias.

286 Knowlton *

The relationship between Quebec’s Jews and the francophone majority has known some rocky times − the life of Adrien Arcand is only one part of that story. But there is a more positive story as well. These three books are evidence that this story is continuing, while the one represented by Adrien Arcand is of another time.

                                       Fascist rally in 1930s Montreal

Amazed to discover there are people, or at least computers, in 40 countries checking out this salon, and can even correlate these visitors with what I posted on any given day. Peak time to read salon posts is lunchtime, between 12 and 2 p.m. And the number of visitors spiked on June 13th when I announced the publishing company.

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Photo: Phyllis Papoulias

Quebec novelist Louis Hamelin is a talented writer with a genuine passion for his cause, but his new book La Constellation du lynx is remarkable as much for what it leaves out as for what it includes.

LL: You have been writing about the culture shock experienced by immigrants from India in the United States for 40 years or more. Do you see yourself as being a pioneer in this exploration of the immigrant experience?

BM: My short and emphatic answer: Yes.

The assumption in “One Night at the Risiera” that the Risiera killed mainly Jews and the silence about the other victims may just be examples of Morris’s fabled carelessness and the ignorance of her reviewers, in homage to her lyrical cluelessness.

So, do you believe me, or the great Jan Morris? Do you trust me or the woman who says that Toronto is on Lake Superior, that there is a great hatter on a street in Toronto called Spandia, and that Yonge Street runs all the way to the “prairie farmlands”?