Argo Bookshop -

Boy, do we have a treat for you folks this Wednesday  night:

Visiting Montreal from Ireland for one week only as part of the 2012 IASIL conference,
poet Leontia Flynn (Jonathan Cape, UK) and novelist/short-story writer Kevin Barry (Random House, UK) have agreed to a last minute reading engagement with the Argo for tomorrow night, Wednesday, August 1st.

Leontia Flynn has been called “one of the most strikingly original and exciting poetic voices to have emerged from Northern Ireland since [Paul] Muldoon,” while Kevin Barry has already in a few short years accrued a cult following for his edgy, bawdy and fiercely observed fiction, whose originality of language and breadth of character puts him in some bizarre register between Tom Waits and Samuel Beckett.

We had the rare pleasure of witnessing both read today, and cannot stress enough that this is the real deal and a rare opportunity – we felt compelled, nay obliged to put this on for anyone who might have missed it. Barry is likely the most involving and theatrical reader you will see for quite some time, while the poignant, funny and understated lyrics of Flynn provide perfect counterpoint.

Due to space considerations and the heat, the reading will take place next door to the shop at La Croissanterie who have been so kind as to offer their space with such short notice.
Drinks and snacks will be available from them and we will be selling copies of the authors’ books, which they would be pleased to sign. The event is Free and everyone is welcome.

We hope to see you in numbers! Please pass this along to anyone who might be interested!

To read more about Barry’s new novel, the dystopian Irish-western City of Bohane from The Millions click here

To read a review of Flynn’s new collection of poetry Profit & Loss from The Guardian click here

For posterity’s sake:

The Argo Bookshop would like to thank two award-winning, critically acclaimed authors who read as Argo Bookshop’s Featured Readers for July: The American award-winning poet & translator Geoffrey Brock, who will be presenting work from his latest translation The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) alongside the superb novelist Padma Viswanathan, who will be reading from her novel The Toss of a Lemon (Random House, 2008). Their books are available at the shop.

A translator of six books, Geoffrey Brock holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Florida and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. Recipient of the Guggenheim, Stegner and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Brock has published a highly lauded book of poems Weighing Light (Ivan R. Dee, 2005) and has published his work in Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, PN Review, New England Review, The Hudson Review The Best American Poetry 2007.

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian playwright and fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in Subtropics, New Letters, PRISM International, Boston Review, and Malahat Review. A graduate from University of Alberta, Viswanathan is the recipient of an MA from John Hopkins Univeristy and an MFA from the Univeristy of Arizona, fellowships from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the NEA, as well as residencies at MacDowell, Sacatar and Banff Center for the Arts. Her widely star-reviewed novel The Toss of a Lemon was shortlisted for both Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book Award.

We’ll be putting up our collection of recorded readings soon, so please keep an eye out for Brock and Viswanathan’s!

Guess what!

On July 24th at 7PM, Norm Ravvin and Carmine Starnino will be reading at the Argo Bookshop. The focus of the reading will be Ravvin’s novel The Joyful Child (Gaspereau Press, 2011) and Starnino’s poetry collection This Way Out, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry.

As a special one-time-only promotion, the Argo will be offering, with the purchase of either Norm Ravvin or Carmine Starnino’s books, 20% off any additional Gaspereau title on the night of the reading!

The Gaspereau titles include:
~ Robert Bringhurst’s Selected Poems
~ Christopher Patton’s Curious Masonry
~ Susan Gillis’ Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids
~ Bruce Johnson’s Firmament
~ Tim Bowling’s The Annotated Bee and Me
~ Monica Kidd’s Handfuls of Bone
~ Peter Sanger’s John Stokes’ Horse
~ Jan Zwicky’s Forge
~ Sean Howard’s Incitements
~ Don McKay’s The Shell of the Tortoise
~ Thomas Wharton’s The Logogryph
~ Basma Kavanagh’s Distillo
~ George Elliott Clarke’s Red & Blue
~ Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentamentalists

Norman Ravvin’s books include two novels, Lola by Night and Café des Westens, a story collection, Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, and Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in magazines across Canada as well as on CBC Radio. A native of Calgary, he lived in Vancouver, Toronto and Fredericton before making his home with his family in Montreal.

Carmine Starnino is a poet, essayist, critic and editor of Signal Editions (an imprint of Véhicule Press). His first poetry collection, The New World, was nominated for the 1997 QSPELL A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His second collection, Credo, won the 2001 Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. His recent publications include With English Subtitles (GP, 2004), Lover’s Quarrel on criticism of Canadian poetry, and an anthology called The New Canon. He lives in Montreal.

For all interested parties:

Tomorrow night, American-born and UK-based author and globetrotter Christien Gholson will be at the Argo to read from and sign copies of his first novel A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books, 2011). This light- hearted book follows six people living in a small town in Belgium on the morning of the St. Woelfred festival, when dead fish are found everywhere throughout the town. Are they proclamations, omens, signs?

Author of the critically acclaimed book of poetry On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, 2006), Gholson’s fantastic and speculative work has appeared The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review the speculative magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

On Saturday July 14th, Argo Co-Owner Jesse Eckerlin will be launching his debut poetry collection We Are Not the Bereaved (Frog Hollow Press, 2012) alongside Shane Neilson and Jim Johnstone! Doors @ 8:00PM & Reading @ 8:30PM. The admission is FREE: Refreshments will be served.

 Here’s a write-up on Jesse’s book, care of Shane Neilson:

“Jesse Eckerlin’s debut chapbook, We Are Not The Bereaved, has no trace of apprenticeship or lack of development. He has left the struggling find-a-voicers behind, once and for all. On a poem-by-poem level, the book feels as if the poet is deep into a career. Every poem is sonically constructed and carefully planned. Some poems prefer the ethereal density of thought; others prefer the slapping of syllabics and sound; some want to ramble and roughneck, others wish to get right to the point of something small, beautiful, and sad.
Eckerlin pays homage to a unique catalogue of influences, ventriloquizing, modifying, mixing and ultimately weaving together a book that compares favourably to any debut this country’s seen. A single chapbook does not constitute a trajectory, but it is my hope that in ten or twenty years We Are Not The Bereaved contains the fire and pulse of a life lived entire in poetry.”

And here’s some info about the poets reading alongside Jesse:

Jim Johnstone (born 1978) is a reproductive physiologist and Canadian poet. He was born in Stouffville, Ontario and is the author of three collections of poetry: Sunday, the locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008).

Johnstone’s work has received numerous awards including Arc Poetry Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award, a CBC Literary Award, the E. J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, The Ralph Gustafson Poetry Award, and he won This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt.
Currently, Johnstone edits Misunderstandings Magazine, a literary journal he founded with Ian Williams and Vicki Sloot in 2005, and is the poetry editor for Cactus Press.

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Shane Neilson (born 1975) is a Canadian physician, author and poet. Neilson was born in New Brunswick, Canada and trained in Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine, followed by Memorial University of Newfoundland. He currently has a medical practice in Erin, and lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.

His books of poetry include Complete Physical, Meniscus and Exterminate My Heart. In 2010, Neilson won Arc Poetry Magazine’s 15th annual Poem of the Year contest. He has also published two books of non-fiction: 2006′s Call Me Doctor, and 2011′s Gunmetal Blue.
In addition to poetry, Neilson is a notable critic known for his incisive reviews and essays as well as the poetry editor for Frog Hollow Press, which has published work by Mark Anthony Jarman, Alexander MacLeod, Alden Nowlan, A.F. Moritz and many others in fine hand-sewn, letter-pressed editions under his steerage.

Hello, Montrealers!

For the past 7 years, Jovan Vuksanovich has been presenting his poetry across Canada and in Poland, and has published his work in Canadian, American and European literary journals.

On July 13, Jovan will be at the Argo Bookshop reading from and selling his album Deviant Melody, a CD of 9 poems drawing from surrealist and symbolist influences in imagery, combining imagined landscapes with humour and “bitter doses of reality”. The event will be filmed by Montreal documentary filmmaker Frederic St. Hilaire.
You can peruse Jovan’s poetry @ www.youtube.com/rollingzenpoet