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“We’ve invited her since the beginning of the festival, but to no avail,” Arnold said in an interview at the festival kickoff news conference. “Last January, I was at the airport in Toronto going through customs. I was with a friend who looked back and saw Margaret Atwood. I started shaking and hyperventilating, grabbed a business card out of my wallet, went up to her, told her I was a huge fan and invited her to come.
Alan Cochrane/Times Transcript

“Do you think your mother will want to save his glasses or his false teeth? They take those out prior to cremation.” I have to be at work, behind a counter, in about an hour and a half. I will have to answer this question: “How’s it going today?” This will happen many times.

Along with some of my friends, and some people who were part of the Top 100 Canadian Singles project, several DOZEN of her friends showed up. We were getting close to a hundred in there. Pages sold all but two of the books they brought. I got hand cramp from signing.

The Top 100 Canadian Singles has had its second official launch event, this time in Vancouver. Zulu Records was the site, and how appropriate. Zulu has been active in the Vancouver music scene since the 70’s, and is the spiritual home of the indie/alternative/punk scene in that city. Its roots go deep, with such bands as Payolas, DOA, Slow, and Pointed Sticks.

The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn’t scare them, not one bit. If you’re a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’ve got more pressing concerns: Dragons. Monsters. Big waves at the beach that might separate a girl from her mother. Thirty years ago, quicksand might have sprung up at recess, in pools of discolored asphalt or the dusty corners of the sandbox—step in the wrong place, and you’d die. But not anymore, a boy named Zayd tells me. “I think people used to be afraid of it,” he says. His classmates nod. “It was before we were born,” explains Owen. “Maybe it will come back one day.”
Daniel Engber/Slate

As OnFiction readers will know, we have from time to time demonstrated a certain editorial affection for travelogue. Professional geographers also have a strong travelogue tradition–and a rather parallel tradition of field guides and guidebooks: stories of places visited ahead of time and reported back to travelers who might follow.
Kerstin Valentine Cadieux/OnFiction

NUTSHELL: We want to make a batch of prints, t-shirts and totes featuring the lovely artwork of Carson Ellis, that we will then sell and use the proceeds to support all the purposey but not profity things we do — like host dozens of free events for unknown and emerging authors and artists, dedicate ample space to free and local literature, and donate time and resources to kindred causes.
Chloe Eudaly/Kickstarter

Milan Kundera, meanwhile, is one of the few writers to win the dubious accolade of being called both overrated (”The Unbearable Shiteness Of Being,” says theswagman) and underrated (”why Kundera hasn’t won the Nobel prize is beyond me,” says @m0ses).
Alison Flood/The Guardian

Like many of us, Larkin loved best the music he grew up with – in his case Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, the classic swing bands and the small groups led by Eddie Condon – and loathed the arrival of bebop and the further flights of modernism that followed.
Charles Spencer/The Telegraph (UK)

Cohen will take to the stage tonight for his second of two concerts at the house, following a ‘homecoming’ concert by Westlife which took place on Friday night. ‘‘When John spoke to us, we were closed and were not considering anything like this, but when it was Leonard Cohen, who is such a Yeats fan and such a great poet himself, it would have been dreadful to say no,” said Isobel Cassidy, manager of Lissadell Estate and sister of Constance.
Sunday Business Post (Ireland)