A Tribute to Phyllis Lambert

Phyllis Lambert is a Montreal powerhouse. Born here, she studied architecture at Yale and had her hand in the building of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York. Lambert herself selected Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson as the architects and was instrumental in getting Mark Rothko to create the mammoth installation which was part of the lobby's construction.

The building has often been called one the 20th century's most iconic and innovative structures. Novel at the time, the building was constructed slightly off the street which allowed a large public space to be opened up and filled with sculpture, benches, fountains. It was a very democratic milestone for urban architecture, making a private building part of the public space, the public consciousness. It has been widely mimicked since.

Yesterday's New York Times has a piece about the building and about Phyllis Lambert's new book (Yale University Press), Building Seagram, which talks about the launch of the book.

And what a beautiful book: it tells the story of the construction of the Seagram Building (with all kinds of fascinating anecdotes about Picasso, Philip Johnson, Brancusi, and Mark Rothko). One constant is Lambert's strong personality: her challenge to her father, Samuel Bronfman (she rejected all his ideas on what should be built on the site with a letter that started, "NO NO NO NO NO NO!" Later Bronfman invited her to New York, from where she'd been living in Paris, to advise on the project.), and the process by which Lambert was instrumental in choosing Mies from a pool of some of the most famous architects of his day.

Canadians love these kinds of stories, make no mistake: local girl/guy makes it big in New

York (or London or Paris) and now we must pay attention to them. But in Phyllis Lambert's case, this really is a big deal: the book, her story, her role in building one of the most famous and influential buildings in 20th century architecture. She really is a major figure and our city should be proud to call her one of our native daughters...

All this to say that it's a rare treat we'll have to hear Phyllis in person at a 2013 Festival event, A Tribute to Phyllis Lambert. Eleanor Wachtel will be there. Deni Bechard will be there. Many important notables, architects, writers, artists, Montrealers, New York-a-philes and assorted groupies - all there to celebrate the book's publication, to hear Phyllis read from it, to hear hilarious anecdotes about one of the coolest cities in the world, to make a toast in her honor.

A Tribute to Phyllis Lambert, in our official closing Festival event on Sunday, April 28 at 5pm at Hotel 10, 10 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. Click here and then click on the ticket price to get tickets (you'll be redirected to the website of La Vitrine). Tickets are $10!

What do Chad Harbach, Edmund White, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath have in common? Blue Met 2013 Meal Events and Food Workshops

Due the success of our "food" events last year, we've expanded them slightly in 2013 and have some interesting events involving meals, drinks, and snack foods.

First, we have two breakfast events, one in French featuring the diary of Virginia Woolf. This

Bell Jar fan? Sylvia Plath Breakfast!

one will involve each participant reading a provided page from Woolf's diary and then there will be a discussion of her diaries after everyone reads. This event is on Saturday, April 27 at 11am at Hotel 10 and is hosted by Marie-Andree Lamontagne.

We have another breakfast reading event on Sunday, April 28 on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. This one, too, will be a discussion over breakfast on the work with some reading samples provided. Hosted by Magnificent Octopus' Isabella Kratynski.

Tickets for both events, $25 each, include breakfast. Last year both our Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway breakfasts were sold out and highly acclaimed.

We have an Edmund White brunch on Saturday, April 27 at 12:30. What a great opportunity to sit at the same table, break bread, chat, laugh, and listen to one of America's best-loved writers talk about his career and his works. Hosted by Peter Dube. This one costs $45 and includes brunch.

An Israeli Cooking event is planned for Thursday, April 25 in the evening at Appetite for Books in Westmount. This will be a really lovely evening: wine, conversation, and Jonathan Cheung, the owner of Appetite for Books, will prepare a meal while participants sip wine and listen to Janna Gur, one of Israel's top food writers. The best part is that the $125 ticket includes a copy of her gorgeous book The Book  of New Israeli Food. Personally, I think this will be a memorable evening that should be a Blue Met highlight.

Janna Gur will also teach a workshop on Saturday, April 27 at the hotel on magazine

writing and how to balance the necessity for recipes while maintaining the creative side of cooking spontaneously. This one is 90 minutes long and will be a great opportunity to talk to Gur about how to approach food writing.

In addition to Gur, we have food critic (formerly of the New York Times) Molly O'Neill in a workshop on cookbook writing. This will allow a great chance for those who dream of writing their own cookbook: how to develop a persona, how to pitch a book, how to sell yourself and your book. Should be fun!

Baseball and Beer with Chad Harbach

O'Neill will also do an event at the hotel called Baseball and Beer with Chad Harbach (author of the best-seller The Art of Fielding. Harbach will beam in via Skype), David McGimpsey and hosted by The Gazette's Richard Burnett. The event will be a discussion about baseball in literature and writing. With a big frosty one, the event will be a great chance to hear about baseball writing from some literary baseball fanatics. This one costs $20 and includes a beer! Saturday, April 27 at Hotel 10.

Finally, our closing breakfast on Sunday morning gives you your chance to send the 2013 Festival off into history, a large table shared with writers, editors, publishers and lovers of literature to talk about highlights, lowlights and all the other lights in between.

All tickets can be purchased at bluemetropolis.org or at LaVitrine.com

Hisham Matar and Colm Tóibín doing what they do....

Hisham Matar, our 2013 Blue Met Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Prize winner was interviewed the other day by Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

He also has a piece in this week's New Yorker.

Check them out and then come check him out in person as part of our 2013 Festival. Matar will be interviewed by CBC Ideas' Paul Kennedy on Friday, April 26 at 7pm. Tickets are $15 and are selling quickly! You can get them here while they last!

And our Grand Prize winner, Colm Tóibín, had an excellent short story in the New Yorker from a couple of weeks' back. Tóibín is on-stage with Eleanor Wachtel at the Grande Bibliotheque on Thursday April 25 at 6:30pm. Get tickets here.

Alison Bechdel in Montreal

The other day I saw a young woman reading Are You My Mother on the metro and I wanted to grab her and say: "Hey, did you hear that Alison Bechdel will be in Montreal soooooooon?"

I didn't, of course. And for all I know, she was the one who arranged it (maybe she works for McGill University, one of the sponsor's of Bechdel's appearances).

But I am really looking forward to seeing Bechdel again. I've written about her before here, of course. Her books are a revelation and more than that, show how powerful the graphic novel/memoir/comic books (whatever) can be.

For any fans of the graphic memoir, you'll be in for a treat. But for anyone who doesn't "get it" and hasn't quite gotten on board with the way visuals and text can beautifully sit alongside one another on the page, I highly encourage you to check out Bechdel. It'll change the way you think about what "reading" means...

Sponsored by Drawn & Quarterly, she's here on Friday, April 12 at 7 p.m. in Mile End.

One of the best parts of the deal is that ticket purchase gives you $5 off her books.

Miriam Katin: Letting it Go

I've long been a fan of comics in novel or memoir form and so I was really happy when Drawn & Quarterly contacted us about doing an event at the Festival with Miriam Katin's new book, Letting it Go. Katin was born during WWII in Hungary but her work simmers with youthful and contemporary rhythms.

In Letting it Go, the author/artist (the book is a memoir) is confronted with her fears and anger, traumas from her past which centre around Berlin after her grown son informs her that he is moving there with his girlfriend. The book unfolds in these emotional bursts as Katin works through all her charged feelings that linger from her experience as a young girl, her prejudices against the city, her worries for her son.

It's beautifully drawn with a (what seems to me) intentionally amateur style (almost like it was taken directly from a sketchbook and publishes), naive, blunt coloured pencil drawings and no panels. But in the pages are gorgeous sketches of New York, of Berlin, of the past, and one gets a real sense of Katin's personality and her contemporary life as a New Yorker.

I am really excited that we can host Miriam for the book party at Blue Met. Her event, which will also feature Drawn & Quarterly Editor-in-Chief, Chris Oliveros, will be held at Hotel 10 on April 28 at 1:00 p.m.

And, hey, hey, it's free to attend!

Jonathan Goldstein, Vincent Lam and other big names headline The Walrus Talks at Blue Met

This year, for the first time, Blue Met and The Walrus have joined forces to bring you one of their ever-popular Walrus Talks. This year the discussion centres around the theme of "Building Bridges" and will consist of several short (5-7 minutes each) talks by various writers and intellectuals with national and international reputation. This year, the talk will feature:

Jonathan Goldstein

Jonathan Goldstein: broadcaster, journalist, writer, contributor to This American Life, Goldstein's last event at Blue Met was standing room only.

Cameron Charlebois: Vice-President of Canada Lands and a trained architect, Charlebois will present his ideas of Building Bridges in a very real-world way given his role and also since bridges and Montreal are two subjects inextricably linked, particularly the last couple of years with talk of rebuilding the Champlain.

Alison Pick: writer of the really fantastic novel, Far to Go, Pick is a writer who I've been watching for a few years.

Vincent Lam: Giller Prize-winner and author of The Headmaster's Wager, Lam is a medical
doctor with a unique point of view given his background. And it's paid off: his books have been both critical and financial successes.

Pasha Malla

Saleema Nawaz: one of this year's "It" girls for the buzz surrounding her latest book (and first novel), Bone and Bread. Nawaz will, in fact, launch her book in Montreal tonight, Thursday, March 28, at Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore in Mile End, starting at 7p.m.

Pasha Malla: author of the collection of stories, The Withdrawal Method, Malla's new book, People Park, was short-listed for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Will Straw: head of McGill University's Canada Institute, Straw is a good friend to Blue Met and has done several events with and for us in the previous years (including last year's much talked event, Montreal's Most Notorious Crimes and Criminals.

Saleema Nawaz

Henry Mintzberg: head of McGill University's business school, Mintzberg is an international expert on strategic planning.

Rachel Giese: writer and Senior Editor at The Walrus.

The event will be held Saturday, April 27 at 2pm at the McCord Museum. Seats are very limited and there is no doubt in my mind that this event is going to sell out very quickly so don't say I didn't warn you if you can't get tickets for waiting too long! Buy them now while we still have some left. More information at the Blue Met website.

This event is in association with The Walrus, Blue Met, McGill University, Canada Lands, Enbridge and the Segal Centre.

Come check out some of the most interesting, innovative and exciting voices in contemporary Canada...

Arab Prize-Winner, Blue Met 2013

We are really thrilled that we have managed to land Hisham Matar as our 2013 Al Madjidi Ibn Dhaher Blue Met Arab Prize winner. Mr. Matar is one of the youngest and most haunting voices coming out of the Arab world the last number of years and his presence on the international literary stage is considerable.

When I saw him in New York in October as part of the New Yorker Festival, in conversation with a few other big name writers, I knew that our jury had awarded him the prize but was bummed that I couldn't share it yet because on stage he was fascinating: articulate, funny, dry, intelligent.

His book In the Country of Men haunted me for weeks after I read it years ago. The book tells the story of a young boy growing up in Tripoli until his father disappears into the Libyan prison system. The novel was short-listed for a slew of prizes, including the Booker Prize, and translated into dozens of languages.

On the occasion of his last book, Anatomy of a Disappearance, Matar passed through Canada though we didn't have him in our line-up for various reasons. At that time, he was interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel as part of her Writers and Company and the interview was one of her best interviews: moving & shocking, it literally moved me to tears.

Hisham Matar will do two events at the Festival, an interview with Paul Kennedy (host of Ideas) as well as the awarding of the prize in the evening of Friday, April 26 at Hotel 10, 10 Sherbrooke Street West.

He will also be part of an event on Saturday, April 27: Literature as Refuge, a discussion at the Goethe Institute about the importance that literature has in a time of social, political or personal crisis. This event is with German writer Thomas Pletzinger, Italian Gianrico Carofiglio and Spaniard Ignacio del Valle, hosted by Katia Grubisic.