Amnesty International Writeathon
Saturday, December 5, 2015 ~ 1 PM to 7 PM
Centre for Social Innovation Annex ~ 720 Bathurst Street, Toronto

WRITE A LETTER. CHANGE A LIFE.
JOIN AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL FOR WRITE FOR RIGHTS.

Your hand-written letters, combined with millions from around the world, can change a life. Become part of Amnesty International’s Write for Rights by signing up to host or join a letter writing party, or by writing on your own. However you participate, you’ll be adding your voice to the growing movement for justice and human rights.

Come out to the Centre for Social Innovation Annex at 720 Bathurst Street, Toronto on December 5th or check out the dozens of other Amnesty International activities in your area and across the country in celebration of Human Rights Day on December 10th.

Writers’ Trust Gala 2015
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 ~ 6:30 PM 
The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto

The annual Writers’ Trust Gala is a true celebration of Canadian authors and Canadian literature and a major fundraising event in support of the Trust’s programs. Join some of this year’s hottest authors for an evening of food, fun and conversation. Hosted by Steve Patterson.

The Canadian Authors Series
Thursday, November 26, 2015 ~ 7 PM
Roselawn Centre for the Living Arts
296 Fielden Ave, Port Colborne, Ontario

Reception at 7 PM ~ Reading at 8 PM

For twenty-two years the renowned Canadian Authors Series has been hosting Canada’s finest writers at Port Colborne’s Roselawn Centre for the Living Arts, a haunted but lovely Victorian Mansion featuring a 265-seat theatre. Over the years the series has placed over 10,000 Canadian books into the hands of readers and has donated more than $30,000 to charities including the Niagara Peninsula Children’s Centre, Port Cares, Easter Seals and the United Way.

After its first week in bookstores, Sleep has come in at #2 on the Globe and Mail‘s Canadian Fiction Bestseller List, just behind Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal. Reached at his home, where he had cracked open a bottle of lemon Perrier in celebration, Ricci commented, “I think people will finally understand now what it means to come from a big Italian family. I don’t think they actually read any of my books, but at least they buy them.”

On the main Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List, Sleep comes in at #6, ahead of Harper Lee and Danielle Steele.

“I’m hoping this is just the beginning,” Ricci said. “Given how long it takes me to finish a book, I’m going to have to live off this one for quite a while yet.”

Sleep hit the ground running at its September launch, already backed by a starred review from Quill & Quire and a rare rave from Phil Marchand in the National Post, who called it “one of the Ricci’s most deeply felt novels, and one of his riskiest.”

Emily Donaldson, writing in the Globe and Mail, described Sleep as “Ricci’s Bad Lieutenant moment,” though with Sleep‘s David Pace raising the ante on Harvey Keitel’s bad lieutenant. “It’s a novel likely to spur another insipid debate about whether characters need to be ‘likeable,'” she writes, “which David is not. But let’s hope that it doesn’t, and that readers are willing to follow Ricci to the festeringly grim but undeniably compelling place he has travelled to.”

Robert Collison takes up that very debate in his Toronto Star review, finding “much to commend in this book, including long bouts of wonderful writing” but describing Pace as “one of the most thoroughly disagreeable characters I’ve encountered in recent fiction.” Spoiler alert: Collison gives away a few crucial plot points, bemoaning, among Pace’s other sins, his “systemic plagiarism,” his “horrendous parenting skills” and his “shockingly disturbing sadomasochistic affair” with a friend’s wife.

Buzz has been building over Sleep since the summer, when the Globe and Mail chose it as one of the 20 books to watch for in the fall season, along with heavy-hitters like Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. In August Sleep was one of four books excerpted by the Globe as among the fall’s most anticipated. A feature profile of Ricci in the trade publication Quill & Quire, closely watched by booksellers and industry insiders, was followed by their starred pre-publication review, which has set the tone for the book’s reception.

The book’s launch was marked by wide media coverage, including profiles in the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire and appearances on Canada AM and Global’s Morning Show. Ricci now begins a national tour with stops in a dozen cities, including Montreal, Windsor, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria. For information on upcoming appearances, visit his Events page.

Read an excerpt from Sleep in the Globe and Mail.

DREAMLAND

The Globe and Mail
Aug 15 2015

It occurs to David that the loop he has imagined has really happened: somewhere ahead, a version of the horror he has averted is playing itself out. He will drive by and see his own child lying dead, his own double howling in bloodied agony Awash of…read more…

Photo illustration Ming Wong/The Globe and Mail

Nino Ricci reviews RM Vaughan’s Bright Eyed, on why insomnia is the banner affliction of our time, and gives a short history of sleep.

The real threat to civilization as we know it, it turns out, isn’t melting ice caps or zombie pandemic but the disappearance of sleep. So argues writer and provocateur RM Vaughan in his extended essay Bright Eyed, making a compelling case for sleep as the inevitable casualty of our 24/7 culture and for insomnia as the banner affliction of our time, like neurasthenia for the late Victorians or leprosy for the early Christians. . . .

Camilla Gibb and Nino Ricci
Monday, November 16 ~ 7:30 PM
Casablanca Winery Inn
4 Windward Drive, Grimsby, Ontario
Doors Open at 7 PM

The renowned Grimsby Author Series presents award-winning author Camilla Gibb talking about her moving memoir This is Happy and Nino Ricci talking about his novel Sleep. At Grimsby’s beautiful Casablanca Winery Inn.