Notebook On Cities And Culture

Near the University of Toronto, Colin Marshall talks to Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of Coach House Books and author of the novel A Grammar of Endings. They discuss the past twenty years' boom in Toronto writing; what factors, including an embarrassing mayor in the nineties, made "mythologizing our own city" possible; why Coach House prints right there on premises, "giving cultural producers access to the means of production"; the technological palimpsest of Coach House's offices; the origin of their uTOpia series, which envision the Toronto of the future and which began when "you simply didn't publish about Toronto"; the broadness of the ideas about the city that surprised her, as well as the number of its "civic nerds"; how Coach House pushes for "adventurous" writing, such a recent book on surveillance, a novel about Andy Warhol's Sleep, and Christian Bök's Eunoia; their shifting relationship over the years with the printed book; how she got interested in Toronto herself; what she shows students who tu