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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

PAPER CHASE: Children's trilogy ends at our zoo

By: Kenton Smith

Posted: 10/2/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

An Ottawa-based writer has concluded her trilogy of self-published children's books set in Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park Zoo.

Author Amanda Sage says she has arranged for the final instalment, Zootopia, to be carried in the zoo's giftshop.

"The books are set in your city because my three nephews live there," Sage said in an email, "and each book is dedicated to one of them."

Her nephews' mother, and Sage's sister, is Winnipeg writer and policy analyst Rebecca Walberg,

Sage's first two books, Dinostory and Astrorocket, were published last year. She told The Ottawa Citizen that there's been "strong interest" in turning the books (two of them illustrated by her younger sister, Louisa) into an animated TV series.

While the zoo's gift shop is only carrying Zootopia, readers can order all books at www.wonderpress.ca.

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Winnipeg's second annual Heart of the Continent Book Fair takes place this weekend at the Masonic Memorial Temple, 420 Corydon Ave.

A few of the noteworthy items said to be on offer include: a first edition of the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Hound of the Baskervilles; a 1885-86, 16-volume set of Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights; and an early edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Admission tickets, $4, are available at Bison Books at 424 Graham Ave., and at the door. Book fair hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and 11-4 Sunday.

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Almost presciently, the University of Kentucky is to release a new memoir of celebrated American director Arthur Penn, who died this past week at age 88.

Penn is best known for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which challenged Hollywood's censorship code with its portrayal of graphic onscreen violence.

Arthur Penn: American Director, by Nat Segaloff, is scheduled for release in March 2011, the publisher said in a news release.

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For the first time, Random Acts of Poetry will be perpetrated on young people across Canada.

The seventh edition of the annual event will visit juvenile detention centres, alternative schools and youth centres from Monday to Saturday next week.

Thirty poets across Canada will participate, reading to youth and distributing copies of their books.

For more information about Winnipeg events, contact Carmelo Militano, at adpoe@mts.net, or by phone at 489-7280.

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Dr. Eli Landau's The White Book is being touted as the first Israeli pork cookbook.

Filled with 80 mainly Mediterranean and Eastern European recipes, the cookbook is aimed at Israelis who've never prepared pork -- nor perhaps even sampled it.

According to the book's distributor, 2,000 copies were printed and almost 1,200 have already been sold.

Pork is forbidden under Jewish dietary laws.

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New York celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who recently enthused about the "high level" of Canada's gastronomy to The Canadian Press, is releasing a graphic novel tentatively titled Get Gyro, according to a report in the Omaha World Herald.

Bourdain, author of behind-the-scenes memoir Kitchen Confidential, signed a deal with DC Comics to release the comic next year.

"It's about ultraviolent food nerds. It's a gourmet slaughterfest, sort of like Fistful of Dollars meets Eat Drink Man Woman," Bourdain said.

ksmithpaperchase@gmail.com

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 2, 2010 H8

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