2006 Winter-Spring Author Series
Luther Village is at 141 Father David Bauer Dr, Waterloo (519-783-3710), next to Waterloo's Recreation Complex. The entrance to our event is via the Sunshine Centre: drive to the back of the property, or park at the Rec Complex and walk over the footbridge.
Knox Presbyterian Church is at 50 Erb St West, corner of Erb and Caroline in Waterloo. Parking is available beside the church, or at Waterloo Town Square.
Mary Lawson, David Adams Richards & Michael Redhill
Thursday
Feb. 2
Princess
Twin Cinema
7:00pm
$25. Devyani Saltzman, daughter of film director Deepa Mehta, will talk about her book, Shooting Water – a mother-daughter journey and the making of a film. Her talk will be preceded by a showing of Water, Mehta’s final release in her Elements film trilogy after Fire and Earth. It has been nominated for 9 Genie Awards.
Water examines the lives of Indian widows in the 1930s and centres on a seven-year-old who is brought to a widow house after the death of her 50-year-old husband. Young and innocent, precocious and defiant, Chuyia refuses to accept her fate and rebels against the traditional role that society has dealt her. The film production began in February 2000 in Benares, India, but quickly became the target of vicious attacks by Hindu fundamentalists who accused Mehta of creating a negative portrayal of India. Sets were destroyed, effigies of the director were burned, Mehta’s life was threatened – within a week the filming was shut down.
So begins the five-year odyssey that culminated in the completion of Water at a secret location in Sri Lanka. Mehta’s daughter Devyani Saltzman traveled to Benares to reunite with her mother and work on the film. Part Jewish (her divorced father is Canadian producer and director Paul Saltzman), part Hindu, Devyani has spent her life navigating between two people, two religions, and two cultures. Shooting Water chronicles her life-changing experience in India, and through the struggle to produce a film, the emergence of a deeper love and mutual recognition between mother and daughter.
This event begins at 7pm with a showing of Water, followed by a reading and question and answer session with the author. Tickets are $25., with proceeds going to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. (we last worked with this organization in May 2005 with Nelofer Pazira and the Kandahar film.)
Ross King
Tuesday
Feb. 21
KW Art Gallery (101 Queens St. N, Kitchener)
7:30pm
$8.
The Judgment of Paris (Random $35.) is the fascinating new book
by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s
Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade
leading to the birth of Impressionism.
If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France
in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest
Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism”
and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult
now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who
was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical
sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary
people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important
Paris Salon.
Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous
challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public
alike for his meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating
story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to
view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire,
his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871.
Ross King was born in Alberta and now lives near Oxford, England.
Ross won the 2006 Governor
General's Award for Nonfiction for this book, and was shortlisted for the
Charles Taylor Prize.
Lynn Coady & Leah McLaren
Thursday
Mar 16
Waterloo Entertainment
Centre 730 pm $8.
Small-town budding poet, Lawrence Campbell, is fascinated by his poetry professor, the charismatic and uncompromising Jim Arsenault. Larry is determined to escape a life of thrifty drudgery and intellectual poverty working for his parents’ motel and mini-golf business on Prince Edward Island. Jim appears to the young poet as a beacon of authenticity – mercurial, endlessly creative, fearless in his confrontations with the forces of conformity. And he drinks a lot.
Closely observed and deeply funny, Mean Boy (Doubleday $29.95) tells the story of Larry’s year-long battle against the indiscriminate use of quotation marks in advertising and his disillusionment as his narcissistic, hard-drinking idol spins out of control and threatens to take the young man’s cherished notions about art and poetry down with him. Mean Boy is Lynn Coady’s most polished and ambitious work to date. Set in the seventies, it took me back to all those earnest wordsmiths in university.
Lynn Coady was nominated for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her first novel, Strange Heaven. She received the Canadian Author’s Association/Air Canada Award for the best writer under thirty. Her second book, Play the Monster Blind, was a national bestseller and a Best Book of 2000 for The Globe and Mail; Saints of Big Harbour, also a bestseller, was a Globe and Mail Best Book in 2002. Her articles and reviews have appeared in several publications including Saturday Night, This magazine, and Chatelaine. Lynn Coady was born in Cape Breton and now lives in Edmonton.
The Continuity Girl (HarperCollins $18.95) is Meredith Moore: reluctant daughter, devoted friend, flawless continuity girl, raging sperm bandit.
Meredith Moore is the perfect continuity girl. An on-set film script supervisor, it is her job to make sure every frame of the picture is consistent with the one before. She is the error catcher. The needle-in-the-haystack finder. A cigarette in the left hand when it should be in the right, a prematurely melted
ice cube in a half-empty glass of Scotch, a stray lock of an actor’s hair—these
are the details by which she measures out her life.But when Meredith wakes up on the morning of her 35th birthday yearning for a baby, her personal sense of continuity is thrown into flux. Determined not to marry, she impulsively flees to London to reunite with her eccentric single mother and accept a new job on a well-known producer’s film set. Her covert plan: to become a Sperm Bandit and find an unsuspecting donor to father her child.
Navigating London’s murky social waters, Meredith is thrown into a strange new story, one that quickly spins out of control. In her quest to get pregnant on her own terms, she will accidentally uncover a web of secrets that will change the way she envisions both her working life and the nature of love.
Leah McLaren is best known for her popular weekly column in The Globe and Mail’s Style section. In 2002 she acted as the paper’s London arts correspondent. Her writing has been published in The Times of London, The London Evening Standard, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator magazine. She now divides her time between Toronto and a farm in Grafton, Ontario. This is her first novel.
Karen Armstrong
Saturday
Apr. 1
First United Church 2 pm $8.
co-sponsored by St.Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience,
The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity
and Interfaith Grand River.
Rudy Wiebe
Tuesday
Apr 11
Conrad Grebel College chapel 7:30pm free
co-sponsored by Conrad Grebel College
R
Mary Gordon
Tuesday
Apr
18
The Record’s Canada Room $8
730 pm
co-sponsored by The Record - a portion of ticket proceeds go to The Record's
Literacy Fund
John Bemrose & Madeleine Thien
T
Judy Rebick
Tom Slee
Laurie Gough & Barbara Kingscote
John Lorinc
autographed books available
Collecting First Editions
A signed first edition from our author
events can be a valuable investment. The attention heaped on Joseph
Boyden’s novel, Three Day Road, may point
to its future value.
Signed copies of titles in the first edition from
past authors who have appeared at Words Worth, such as
Yann Martel, Andrew Pyper and Miriam
Toews, now routinely trade at many times more than
their initial cover price.
What is
a first edition?
A first edition is the first printing of a book. First editions differ
from subsequent printings as they are by definition the closest edition to
the author's original work. Publishers vary in the ways they identify their
first editions. A signed first edition can become a special and valuable book
for the owner.
Readers sometimes become interested in collecting when books become important
objects that they wish to own, admire and preserve. These bibliophiles develop
a passion for an author's work or subject area, wishing to create a fine and
complete collection of work. To collectors, the first edition is the most desirable
and valuable edition. Regular patronage of our spring and fall reading
series (and of course regular visits for signed editions!) is an excellent
way to build and maintain a library of both enduring quality and value.
TWENTY-TWOYEARS OF AUTHOR EVENTS
It was November of 1984 when the late WO Mitchell read for us at Waterloo Library. We had dinner with him before the reading at the restaurant at what was then The Seagram Museum. He was impressed with the large hall there and suggested we use it for future readings. We took his suggestion and held many events there, even some with a breakfast time slot. Over the years, we've used The Canadian Clay and Glass Museum, Waterloo Stage Theatre, and uptown churches: Emmanuel, First United and more recently, Knox Presbyterian. On many occasions we linked a new author (e.g. Jane Urquhart in 1986) with someone more established (Timothy Findley). Almost 200 authors (not counting kids' authors) have been hosted by Words Worth Books.
Fall 2005 was
our twenty-first season. We hosted Jane
Urquhart, Lisa Moore, Michael Crummey, Alison Pick and Thomas King. Jane,
Alison, Thomas as well as John Brady and Anne Fleming, all made
return trips to our podium.
Here's a chronological list of most of the authors of adult books. Many of these names are
displayed as a border around the ceiling of the bookstore.
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1984,1990 W.O.Mitchell ALSO Tony Aspler, Alan Daniels, Sandra Gwyn, Dennis Lee, Jim Bedard, Jean Little, Nancy-Lou Patterson
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