LITMIR.BIZ

We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated – if anything, we’re told we’re oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. Over half of women report having a sexual complaint, whether that’s lack of desire or difficulty reaching orgasm. But this issue doesn’t get much press; the urge is to ignore or medicalize it (witness the quest for ‘pink Viagra’). If so many ordinary women suffer from sexual frustration, then perhaps the problem isn’t one that can be addressed by a pharmaceutical fix – or isn’t a problem. Maybe we need to get hot and bothered about a broader cultural cure: a reorienting of our current male-focused approach to sex and pleasure, and a rethinking of what’s ‘normal.’ Using a blend of reportage, interview and first-person reflection, journalist Sarah Barmak explores the cutting-edge science and grassroots cultural trends that are getting us closer to truth of women’s sexuality. Closer reveals how women are reshaping their sexuality today in wild, irrepressible ways: nude meetings, how-to apps, trans-friendly porn, therapeutic vulva massage, hour-long orgasms and public clit-rubbing demonstrations – and redefining female sexuality on its own terms.Sarah Barmak is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and author. Her writing has appeared in Maclean's, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Canadian Business, Marketing, and Reader's Digest.

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For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He's not alone, not by any stretch.More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can't stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twenty-four-hour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation?Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we've created, predicting a cultural collision—will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done?—and wondering about the cause-and-effect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it's an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists—does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the long-term cultural consequences of this increasing sacrifice for the ever-elusive goal of «total productivity»? RM Vaughan is the author of nine books and many short video works. He contributes essays on culture and society to numerous publications and his video works play in galleries and festivals around the world.

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Tannahill is a mover and shaker in the Toronto arts scene, and his work has gained international attention at festivals and galleries. He directed the world premiere of Sheila Heti's All Our Happy Days Are Stupid at his storefront theatre Videofag in 2014; the play will be remounted by McSweeney's in NYC in 2015.Declining theatre patronage have forced many once-vibrant companies and venues into difficult financial situations; Vancouver's celebrated Playhouse Theatre closed in 2012, despite public outcry. We tend to mourn the loss of these cultural institutions and move on. Tannahill suggests that contemporary theatre could be more engaging, forward-thinking and accessible than it is, and do more to grow its audience instead of blaming slow ticket sales on society's lack of cultural engagement.

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In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish , the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices—providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents. Tim Maly is a regular contributor to Wired , the Atlantic , and Urban Omnivore and is a 2014 fellow at Harvard University's Metalab. Emily Horne is the designer and photographer of the webcomic A Softer World .

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, no Canadian band rocked harder, louder or to more hardcore fans than Teenage Head. This high-energy quartet – consisting of four guys who'd known each other since high school – were a balls-to-the-walls sonic assault. And they almost became world-famous. Almost. This is their story, told for the first time.

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In a partnership spanning four decades, Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman have been the pre-eminent power couple of cutting-edge graphic art. From Raw magazine to the New York, where she serves as art editor, Mouly and Spiegelman have revolutionized the art. In Love with Art profiles the pair and interviews Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine and more.

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How did farmer's markets, nose­-to-­tail, locavorism, organic eating, CSAs, whole foods, and Whole Foods become synonymous with “good food”? And are these practices really producing food that is morally, environmentally, or economically sustainable? Rebecca Tucker's compelling, reported argument shows that we must work to undo the moral coding that we use to interpret how we come by what we put on our plates. She investigates not only the danger of the accepted rhetoric, but the innovative work happening on farms and university campuses to create a future where nutritious food is climate-­change resilient, hardy enough to grow season after season, and, most importantly, available to all—not just those willing or able to fork over the small fortune required for a perfect heirloom tomato. Tucker argues that arriving at that future will require a broad cognitive shift away from the idea that farmer's markets, community gardens, and organic food production is the only sustainable way forward; more than that, it will require the commitment of research firms, governments, corporations, and post­secondary institutions to develop and implement agri­science innovations that do more than improve the bottom line. A Matter of Taste asks us to rethink what good food really is.

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Whatever the underlying motives—be they love, financial security, or mere masochism—the fact is that getting involved in a romantic partnership is emotionally, morally, and even politically fraught. In Hard To Do, Kelli Marìa Korducki turns a Marxist lens on the relatively short history of romantic love, tracing how the myth of economic equality between men and women has transformed the ways women conceive of domestic partnership. With perceptive, reported insights on the ways marriage and divorce are legislated, the rituals of twentieth-century courtship, and contemporary practices for calling it off, Korducki reveals that, for all women, choosing to end a relationship is a radical action with very limited cultural precedent. Kelli Marìa Korducki is a journalist and cultural critic. Her byline has appeared frequently in the Globe and Mail and National Post, as well as in the New Inquiry, NPR, the Walrus, Vice, and the Hairpin. She was nominated for a 2015 Canadian National Magazine Award for «Tiny Triumphs,» a 10,000-word meditation on the humble hot dog for Little Brother Magazine. A former editor-in-chief of the popular daily news blog Torontoist, Korducki is based in Brooklyn and Toronto.

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Ruthnum won the Journey Prize in 2013His short fiction has also won the Peterson Prize for Writing, and the Malahat Review’s Novella Contest.His first crime novel to be published under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley will appear in 2018.Curry was inspired by Salman Rushdie's Imaginary HomelandsCultural authenticity and appropriation are currently hot-button issues

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS The problem of consciousness may just be a semantic one. The brain absorbs a sea of sensory input, the tiniest fraction of which reaches the shore of our awareness. We pay attention to what is most novel, most necessary at the time. At its most reductive, the word 'consciousness' refers to the synchronized firing of neurons across multiple areas of the brain, the mental experience of attending.But should consciousness be summed up simply by its subsconscious mechanism? I would prefer a more imaginative answer.After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate. Howard Akler is the author of The City Man, which was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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