Articles by Andrew Saikali
July 20, 2009
A Bookshop Remembered: What Pages Meant to Me 0
The eulogies are already being written, but there are still six weeks of life left in Toronto’s best bookshop. There’s no escaping reality though: Pages, that literary hotbed amid the faux-cool of Queen Street West, is shutting its doors at the end of August. A casualty of skyrocketing rents, Pages has been THE place to [...]
June 11, 2009
Toronto’s Tell-Tale Heart 0
In the darkened Anglican church, separated from a looming early-Victorian tower by an idyllic garden, we summoned the spirits and welcomed the macabre into our tell-tale hearts. Nestled at the bottom of Grange Park, the city’s bustle was a two-minute walk away, but it could have been two-hundred years away as the Luminato arts festival [...]
May 26, 2009
Woke Up With A Fever: The American Journals of Albert Camus 0
“Obliged to admit that for the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse.” Albert Camus was in Montevideo, nearing the end of a lecture tour of South America, when he entered those words into his diary. American Journals, chronicling Camus’ 1946 voyage to North America and his [...]
April 6, 2009
Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music #3: Sidelined By Pete Doherty 1
This isn’t the music post I’d planned on writing today. I was going to tell you all about the time a certain British guitar legend from the 60s shouted at me and a friend (yes, at us – specifically at us) across a packed hall in Greenwich Village eleven years ago. I was all set [...]
March 11, 2009
Context is everything: Lit City in Toronto 3
Millions readers in the Toronto area should check out the Lit City exhibit at the Market Gallery (second floor of the St. Lawrence Market, on now through the spring, free). As part of the ongoing festivities marking Toronto’s 175th birthday, the Market Gallery, occupying a room that served as council chambers in the mid-late 1800s, [...]
March 3, 2009
Thinking of a Dream I Had: The “Formative Novel” 7
So, it’s the early hours of the morning and I’m fast asleep. I dream the following: I’m in an empty restaurant, deep in conversation with someone I’d never met before. Even in the dream, this person is meant to be a stranger – a Millions reader named Oliver. (I had recently watched a new BBC [...]
