Argo Bookshop

Turkish-born and Toronto-based author Loren Edizel will be coming to read from her second novel Adrift at the Argo on Saturday, December 3rd as a follow-up to her book’s launch the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. Adrift was published by TSAR Books. It’s a novel that will challenge the reader to confront their capacity to engage with a stranger through that stranger’s actions and thoughts, social circles and intimacies. Here’s the low-down on Adrift from TSAR Books:

“John arrives in a Montreal airport with a suitcase in hand. We do not know where he is from, or who he is. The novel sets out to explore his identity by following his daily movements and intimate thoughts, as well as his connections to those coming into contact with him. He writes his own reflections and impressions in a notebook which he carries with him at all times.

The story unfolds through non-linear narrative connections that flow across city blocks, continents and oceans, and meander in and out of characters’ minds, dealing with questions of displacement, identity and meaning.”

And here’s Loren’s bio from TSAR & her website:

“One of her novels, Izmir Hayaletleri (The Ghosts of Smyrna), was published in Turkey in 2008 by Senocak Yayinlari (trans. Roza Hakmen) and a short story “The Conch” appeared (Nov 2009) in Turkish translation as part of an anthology entitled Kadin Öykülerinde Izmir (Izmir in Women’s Stories). “The Imam’s Daughter” was published in Montreal Serai. She has recently completed a collection of short stories under the working title ‘The Confession.’”

The doors will open at 5PM.

Loren will be available to sign copies of her book after the reading.

edit:

Hey everyone,

We’ll change this in the future, sorry you’ve all had to deal with the confusion.
As Loren stated, call the shop (514-931-3442) if you’re confused.

This Wednesday, November 30th!

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Hello everyone,

As previously announced, we are on schedule for our nigh-monthly Featured Reading Series. This month, throw aside your plans and obligations and come listen to Encore Literary Magazine editor Marko Sijan (She-yan), who will be reading from his critically-acclaimed debut novel ‘Mongrel’, published by Mansfield Press. We currently have a limited amount of copies available at the store, so come and grab a copy before they’ll all disappear at the reading! Here’s a sample of Marko reading on Mansfield’s website.

Alongside Marko, we have poet and editor of Branch Magazine Gillian Sze, author of two books of poetry: ‘Fish Bones’ and ‘The Anatomy of Clay’, the latter published in April 2011 by ECW Press. Here’s (1) a sample of her reading and (2) a preview of her work.

We’ll also get to hear from Jaime Bastien, whose short stories have been shortlisted for the Irving Layton, Eric Hoffer and Great Blue Heron awards.

Free, and open to all.
Doors @ 8PM, and the reading will begin shortly afterwards.
Space is limited, so we stress you come on time if you’d like a place to sit.

For more information, please call: 514-931-3442

ps. If you can’t make it, invite your friends!

The Argo’s first Open Mic night was a great success. A big thank you to everyone who came out to share their work! We had a great turn-out of 25 people, half of which were readers, varied in voice and consistent with quality. We’ll be holding the next open mic a month from the last. Here’s the inaugural speech that kicked off the readings:

“A stiff breeze is blowing, the sun is shining: A sinner’s paradise.”

- Commentator, Kenora Centennial Regatta Newsreel, 1966

“Hello to you all.

I’m pleased as pink to hit restart on the Argo Open Mic, and to see you all here, patrons and patience alike. It seems to me that open forums like this are either difficult to go to, for lack of time or will, or just falling out of favor. My hope is that you all disagree with that preposterous supposition.

Whether many will read tonight, or a select few, here’s to the act of. Let’s keep our most biased valuations to ourselves, and let the dialogue of level-headed criticism play out. That is, after all, what poets do in a sense: Have a conversation with you.

Everyone here has been tremendously supportive, and knowing there are at least this many people willing to come out reassures me (albeit only slightly) that running a bookshop with two good friends wasn’t the most foolhardy decision I could have possibly made…

…That was my poem, by the way. Welcome!”

Dance With Snakes – Horacio Castellanos Moya

Moya's "Dance With Snakes"

Where the dull wind of lesser books merely makes them consent to turn their pages, Moya’s Dance With Snakes pulls the reader in like a scarf in a propeller. Reading like a kind of Rabelaisian Grand Theft Auto, Dance With Snakes is a sustained and violent surrealistic binge told in an oddly contrasting minimalist, documentary style. It is a disconcertingly humorous tale rife with identity theft, legerdemain, gratuitous murder, stumped gumshoes, opportunistic journalists, that refracts the socio-political unease of El Salvador after more than a decade of civil war. On the surface at least, it might be the most unliterary book you read all year, but don’t be fooled: Moya is a first-rate satirist who conveys and explodes the milieu and trials of the lost and damned with a propulsive and controlled urgency. He belongs on the shelf next to such contemporary greats as Vollmann, Bolano, and Brautigan.

Blow-Up and Other Stories – Julio Cortázar

Cortazar's " Blow-Up and Other Stories"

“Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.” – Pablo Neruda

War Music – Christopher Logue

Logue's "War Music"

For a work of forty years in the making, Logue’s rearrangements and adaptations of Books 1 through 16 of Homer’s Iliad do not renunciate the tale; they carry the essence of it with a modern voice that charges the original text with new meaning:

“Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet…”

A work for lovers of the classic, War Music’s textual theatrics and lyrics read as though it were pieced together joyfully and painstakingly, to the point of standing boldly apart from Homer, without pretensions.

Given – Wendell Berry

Berry's "Given"

An ethics of care in verse. Written with artful simplicity, these intimate and poignant poems reflect Berry’s deep and abiding reverence for nature, God, and the Kentucky community in which he resides. Berry is a conservative in the old and true sense with a steadfast moral obligation to the land, to the commons, to human dignity who expresses a distaste for facetious progress and academic obscurantism. In an age of indiscriminate yay-saying and Corporate hubris, Berry is a voice of moderation, clarity, and reason. He is an Emerson or Thoreau for our times.

Frost – Thomas Bernhard

Bernhard's "Frost"

Bernhard’s prose is a force of nature, as devastating and as inevitable as an earthquake or a rock-slide. He is a neurotic genius, whose hypnotic and unforgiving novels, often written in one unbroken paragraph and taking the form of an uninterrupted dramatic monologue, are monumental testaments to intellectual and artistic obsessions in their various guises. Frost, Bernhard’s first novel, and the work that brought him renewed International acclaim in recent years, is the story of a friendship between a young man beginning his medical career and a painter in his final days. As always, the relatively plain domestic situation is a transfigured occasion for Bernhard’s trademark unapologetic wit and probing psychological analysis. To read Bernhard is to be enthralled by a singular literary sensibility: caustic, mercilessly honest, hilarious, moving, unforgettable.

Hey everyone,

We want to ring in the new year with an open mic! Firstly, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to hear/read from any one of you who I’ve known to be writers, so I hope you’ll consider coming to share with myself, the other owners and good friends.

Otherwise, if you’re not at home watching True Blood or foolishly polishing off a bottle of Ballantine’s next to the phone with your old black book set out in front of you, come to our open mic and be a supportive philanthropist of the emerging and polished writers of the city! Afterwards, there will be the option to check out some of Concordia and Montreal’s jazz musicians jam at Grumpy’s on Bishop Street.

Poetry is good, prose is good, pulling up an audience member to read your script with you is good, giving us a lecture is good… Bring your best, and your worst, it doesn’t matter. Playing a song is always nice too.

Doors at 8, readings begin not long afterwards.

ps. Keep an eye out for our featured author readings in the near future!

- JP

Hello dear friends and book-lovers,

For those of you who may have wondered if the store was closing, have no fear. J.P. is here, one of the new co-owners of the Argo alongside Jesse and Meaghan. If you’ll have a look at our history, you’ll get the whole story. For now, I want to reassure all of you that we will do our best to carry the mantle John George had forged back in 1966, and continue to give all of you the same great service and book selection the Argo has always had; if anything, we’ll try to improve it.

With the recent change in ownership, we’ve collectively decided to sell off selected titles to bring in new editions of old favorites and some great titles you may not have seen in stock before. So, here’s the low down:

Select New Titles @ 25%!

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Loads of remaindered titles available @ $5!

Whether you’re an old customer and friend of the store, or a newly-arrived aficionado of literature, drop on by and say hello, and have a look at the sale! Any support can help us not only stay in the community, but improve what’s already here.

Much love,

JP