Toews learns to live with past

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This article was published 28/05/2011 (5585 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The past, it would seem, isn’t yet done with CanLit luminary Miriam Toews.

“There are a lot of ghosts there,” says the novelist, who was born in 1964 in Steinbach and left Winnipeg for Toronto in 2009. Although Toews once claimed she was done drawing on her own Mennonite upbringing, her new novel, Irma Voth, concerns a teenage Mennonite girl who escapes from her domineering father to Mexico City.

Toews herself returns to Winnipeg June 4 to read from the novel at McNally Robinson Booksellers.

“I made a mistake when I said I was finished,” Toews says. “My background remains rich territory, and I had more to say.”

Previous novels by Toews include the 2004 Governor General’s Award-winning bestseller A Complicated Kindness, and the 2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Award-winning The Flying Troutmans.

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Chosen by Oprah Winfrey for the official retrospective of her show, which ended after 25 seasons this week, the American-based publisher Abrams is publishing The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy after winning a publisher hunt last August.

“It’s one of the biggest books we’ve ever done,” Abrams CEO and president Michael Jacobs told the U.S. trade journal Publishers Weekly. Among the book’s contributors are Bono, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.

Founded in 1949, Abrams is one of the world’s pre-eminent art book publishers.

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The venerable second-hand store Burton Lysecki Books will celebrate its 40th birthday next week.

The occasion will be marked June 4 at the store’s 527 Osborne St. location, with 25 per cent off all books, many of them quality rare or out-of-print editions.

“I’m 66, so I probably won’t be here to mark another 40 years in business,” Lysecki drily remarked.

The store’s manager, Karen Sigurdson, becomes an equal partner in the business as of June 30.

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The Manitoba Writers’ Guild is putting out a call for papers for a symposium on Manitoba writing, to be held in Winnipeg in May 2012, in celebration of the MWG’s 30th anniversary.

Aboriginal and francophone literature will be highlighted, but proposals for papers on all aspects of Manitoba writing are sought.

Deadline for proposals is Dec. 1; for complete submission information visit mbwriter.mb.ca.

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While audiobook publishing has been prohibitively expensive for most publishers, according to leading Canadian literary trade mag Quill & Quire, one B.C.-based company is taking a notable crack at the market.

Post Hypnotic Press, which launched last fall and focuses mostly on non-fiction, released several audiobook titles this past April, including Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin’s Harperland (Viking Canada).

The audio version of Harperland is now available via iTunes and Audible, the audio-based retail wing of Amazon. All Post Hypnotic titles are exclusively available through the company’s website.

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