Raise a glass to Mennonite cocktail book

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This article was published 06/11/2021 (1745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You might think a book on Mennonite cocktails would be a thin as a volume titled Tasteful Decorating Tips From Donald Trump, but Toronto writer and blogger S.L. Klassen is proving that assumption wrong with Menno-Nightcaps: Cocktails Inspired by That Odd Ethno-Religious Group You Keep Mistaking For the Amish, Quakers or Mormons (TouchWood).

Klassen, who has a PhD in history and blogs at The Drunken Mennonite, fills her book with 77 cocktail recipes tied thematically to various aspects of Mennonite history and culture.

She’ll discuss the book in an online conversation with Steinbach novelist/humorist Andrew Unger, founder of the website The Daily Bonnet and author of Once Removed, on Friday at 7 p.m. The evening opens with an optional cocktail demo. To register and for a list of ingredients, see wfp.to/klassen.

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Six years after her death, a memoir by Canada’s first female minister of foreign affairs, Flora MacDonald, is giving readers an insider’s look from one of the most prominent political women of her generation.

In the recently launched memoir, MacDonald writes of her role in bringing 60,000 Vietnamese refugees to Canada during the brief Joe Clark government in the 1970s, and of getting the federal Employment Equity Act passed as Minister of Employment in the Mulroney government of the 1980s.

The memoir, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World (McGill-Queen’s University Press), is co-authored by Geoffrey Stevens, a former managing editor of the Globe and Mail.

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The Canadian-born wife of the president of Iceland gives readers a glimpse of life in what may be the most gender-equal nation on earth in a forthcoming book entitled The Secrets of the Sprakkar. The book is scheduled for publication in February.

Eliza Reid met her husband Guðni Jóhannesson, whose current job is similar to that of Canada’s Governor General, when they were both studying history at Oxford University. According to a story on the CBC Books website, she followed him back to Iceland, where she immersed herself in the island nation’s culture and language.

She describes the book, based on interviews with dozens of Icelandic women, as a “love letter to Iceland,” and to the nation’s sprakkar, an Icelandic word defined as “extraordinary women.”

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Two Manitobans were among the winners of this year’s Aurora Awards for Canadian fantasy and speculative fiction.

Chadwick Ginther won the prize for the best short story for All Cats Go to Valhalla, which was published in the anthology Swashbuckling Cats: Nine Lives on the Seven Seas. The best artist prize went Samantha Beiko for her cover of the young adult novel Flights of Marigold, for which Calgary author Susan Forest won the best young adult novel award.

Vancouver writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia won the best novel award for her best-selling Mexican Gothic, set in the 1950s in Mexico.

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Readers can meet the authors shortlisted for this year’s Vine Awards for Jewish Canadian literature through a series of online events Nov. 16-18, before the winners of the $10,000 prizes are announced Nov. 23.

The awards are presented in four categories and made possible by the Lillian and Norman Glowinsky Foundation.

Fiction nominees this year are Sidura Ludwig, for You Are Not What We Expected; Nessa Rapoport, for Evening; and Carold Windley, for Midnight Train to Prague. History nominees are Paul Roberts Bentley, for Strange Journey: John R. Friedeberg Seeley and the Quest for Mental Health; Sharon Kirsch, for The Smallest Objective; and Celia Rabinovitch, for Duchamp’s Pipe: a Chess Romance.

Non-fiction nominees are Rachel Matlow, for Dead Mom Walking; Rick and Gideon Salutin, for Gideon’s Bible: a Father and Son Discuss God, the Bible and Life; and Myriam Steinberg with illustrations by Christache, for Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of (in)Fertility. Young adult and children’s nominees are Michelle Barker, for My Long List of Impossibles; Helaine Becker, with illustrations by Kari Rust, for Emmy Boether: The Most Important Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of; and Gordon Korman, for War Stories.

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