Summer 2009

By Lindsay Gibb

My first encounter with Broken Pencil was on a zine rack at the now defunct Record Peddler on Queen Street West. It was 1996 and I’d just started making my own zine. I was running around getting it in any store that would accept 15 photocopied pages detailing events from my life and the health of the Brampton music scene.

By Tanis Rideout

“For a lot of our participants this is likely the first book that they’ve ever finished.” Jo Altilia, founder and executive director of Literature for Life holds up a novel with a lurid pink and purple cover; the red puffy lips are a slash of sexuality. There’s a blurb at the top by Sean “Puffy” Combs. The book is Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, a "street literature" bestseller. “It’s our introductory drug.”

A Cold Season in Shanghai by S. P. Hozy is an historical novel to be published by Napoleon & Company in September 2009 under its RendezVous Press adult fiction imprint. It's the story of two women, who meet as girls in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century. Their story is told through the eyes of Tatiana, who has arrived with her family in Shanghai as a child in 1905. There she becomes friends with Lily, a local businessman's daughter and this is their story as their lives take them through political upheaval, personal turmoil, a tumultuous love story ending in murder and their eventual reunion in Toronto in 1957.