<center>Wednesday, November 30th, 2011</center>

Our very first Argo Featured Reading with (in order of sonic appearance) Jaime Bastien, Gillian Sze and Marko Sijan. The event was hosted by Argo co-owner J.P. Karwacki. 

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Jaime Bastien: 

An Aylmer, Quebec-born resident, Jaime Bastien's short stories have been shortlisted for the Irving Layton, Eric Hoffer and Great Blue Heron awards.

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Gillian Sze: 

Winner of the carte blanche award for her poem 'Like This Together - Crisis', Gillian resides in Montreal where she co-edits Branch Magazine and is pursuing a phD in English Literature at Universite de Montreal. When she is not teaching, she is a writer/facilitator at the Quebec Writers Federation's (QWF) Writers in the Community Program. Her debut collection 'Fishbones' was shortlisted for the QWF McAuslan First Book Prize, and her work has appeared in a number of Canadian and international journals. The book she is reading from in this recording 'The Anatomy of Clay' was published by ECW Press in April 2011.
For more information, visit her website at http://gilliansze.com/

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Marko Sijan:

Marko Sijan (Shee-yan) co-wrote a script for a short film entitled Eva Meets Felix, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 1999. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Maisonneuve, Canadian Notes & Queries, Branch and Encore magazines, and on the Parliamentary Poet Laureate website. Marko lives in Montreal, where he teaches and is now an editor of Encore magazine (http://encoremagazine.ca/).

Here's the review that is riffed on for Marko's introduction:
(http://argobookshop.ca/2011/12/a-review-of-marko-sijans-mongrel/)

"(As) Jim Bartley of the Globe and Mail aptly wrote of Marko Sijan’s debut novel: “Out of the mud of teenage hope and desperation, [Marko Sijan] generates black diamonds.”
These ‘black diamonds’, gems of dark and elegiac humor, are the book’s five interconnected chapters, capturing five aggressive youths in the prime of their dreams and delusions. While the catalysts of their lives range from drugs and sex to power and ambitions, with anxiety hovering above it all, the book itself maintains authenticity through plausibility of voice and detail. Yes, there is intensity and urgency to Mongrel, but the text doesn’t peddle shock value, especially when one considers its framework: A parallactic and simultaneous catharsis in five separate lives set over the course of 12 hours in Windsor, Ontario.
As today’s turn-of-the-century youth aspire to culturally slip further and further from definition, it’s a novel like Marko’s that captures the spirit of this demographic: Its veneration of elders, its grapples with shunting old traditions and creating new ones, issues of vocation and social roles… As was said in the New York Times’ article ‘What is it about 20-somethings?’, it’s about feeling both elevated and trapped in a world of pure possibilities.
All this, topped with a pervasive ambivalence toward self and North American multiculturalist society as a whole. Sijan’s book is an odd contrast to what is the presumably contented view that Canadians culturally live in relative harmony with one another. While some may take that as a safe assumption, Mongrel‘s outsiders and immigrants (Jamaican, Quebecois, German-American and Serbian) demonstrate a different reality. Given the setting with Windsor’s proximity to Detroit, Michigan, one may infer some feeling that this is a conflicted environment composed of fringes, but really, in terms of just Canada, a peach can’t be without a bruise now and then."

Argo Featured Reading #1 - Jaime Bastien, Gillian Sze & Marko Sijan

<center>Monday, January 16th, 2012</center>

Our second Argo Featured Reading with (in order of sonic appearance) John Eric Bennett, Argo Co-Owner Jesse Eckerlin, Kasper Hartman & Zachariah Wells. The blubbering and overly loquacious host is Argo Co-Owner J.P. Karwacki.

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John Eric Bennett:

Eric Bennett is a long-time friend of and volunteer for the Argo. He's (at the time of this recording) an undergraduate student at Concordia University, and he's been living and writing in Montreal for the last five years, calling London, Ontario home before that.

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Jesse Eckerlin:

Born in Montreal in 1987, Jesse Eckerlin grew up in the Outaouais region and the outskirts of Ottawa. His poems and critical work have appeared in the Puritan, the Antigonish Review, Existere and others. Along with his partner Meaghan Acosta and their friend J.P. Karwacki, Jesse took over Montreal's historical Argo Bookshop in November 2011. May the gods grant its continuation under their steerage.

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Kasper Hartman: 

Kasper is a first-place winner in the Quebec Writers' Federation Quebec Writing Competition for his short story (that he reads here) 'Someone Has to Save Us From This' (available to read through the Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine). Aside from prose and poems, Kasper is a translator and an editor of Encore Literary Magazine. 

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Zachariah Wells:

Zachariah Wells is a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries, the author of 'Unsettled' (Insomniac Press, 2004), a collection of poetry about the Arctic, and the editor of The Essential Kenneth Leslie (Porcupine's Quill, 2010). His three Biblioasis titles are the anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (Biblioasis, 2008), the children's story Anything But Hank! (Biblioasis, 2008) with Rachel Lebowitz and Eric Orchard, and the poetry collection Track & Trace (Biblioasis, 2009). He lives in Halifax, where he works as a freelance writer and editor and as a passenger rail attendant.

Argo Featured Reading #2 - John Eric Bennett, Jesse Eckerlin, Kasper Hartman & Zachariah Wells

<center>Tuesday, February 14th, 2012</center>

Our third Argo Featured Reading took place on Valentine's Day, and coincidentally, much of our readers' work centered 'round the topic. In order of appearance, we had the devastating sentiments of Michael Saunders, the romantic travelogues of Blade Runner's Deckard and Rachel in the poetry of Jacob Spector, and Asa Boxer, who presented a wide-range of topical pieces including a salacious tale of Rimbaud and Verlaine, and the journey of Dante through Ikea.

Our apologies for the occasional, nigh-nautical creaking of the ol' Argo you'll hear now and then in the recording.

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Michael Saunders:

At the time of this recording, Michael Saunders was currently aiming for Masters studies in Theory at Western Univeristy, with academic work focusing on the realms of Speculative Medievalism, Speculative Realism, and Object-Oriented Ontology. He recently gave a talk at Concordia’s first Undergraduate Colloquium with the paper Storm Still: Aristotelian Hamartia as Radical Unknowing in King Lear.

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Jacob Spector:

Jacob Spector is a graduate of Creative Writing at Concordia Univeristy. He has participated in a recording with the Synapse Readings (created by Sina Queyras, and curated by Steph Colbourn and Lizy Mostowski). Jacob has contributed poetry to The Incongruous Quarterly, Void Magazine, and Black and White Journal, and is the author of Scrapple (No Press 2012).

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Asa Boxer:

Asa Boxer’s first book Mechanical Bird was first published by Montreal’s Vehicule Press in 2007, and won the Canadian Authors Association Prize. As Mechanical Bird had hit a controlled, yet coiled note on the relationship between authenticity and artifice, his latest book Skullduggery upped the ante when published in 2011. It is deeper in its breadth of forms and achieves even greater highs and lows of falsity and truthfulness, with comic twists to boot. Essentially, it gives “a simple message: Trust nothing” (Vehicule Press). For some preambulatory reading, check out Asa’s online chapbook on the subject of his father, Avi Boxer, an East-end poet who ran alongside the likes of A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. Either that, or check out the issues of Poetry London , Arc, Books in Canada, Maisonneuve, and Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ) he’s been in.

Argo Featured Reading #3 - Michael Saunders, Jacob Spector & Asa Boxer

Want to hear more recordings from Argo Bookshop's Featured Reading Series?
You can find them at 
http://argobookshop.ca/argo-sound-archive/

Argo Bookshop is among the oldest retail bookstores in the city. We’re proud to bring new choice books to the city of Montreal, from Jeanette Winterson and Fernando Pessoa to James Joyce and Thomas Bernhard. Citizens tend to agree when they take the time to browse our shelves, noting that despite the store’s size, it is well-packed with quality. We specialize in literature, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, religion, environmentalism and a broad selection of historical topics. 

Currently, the store is owned by Meaghan Acosta, Jesse Eckerlin & J.P. Karwacki, who took over on November 1, 2011. These three delinquents can often be found at the store drinking tea or coffee, talking books and music, or working on their respective artistic endeavors. They bought the store for its quality and a love of books. The store now acts as a means to the end of continuing the practice of supporting and promoting literary culture through the sale of books and literary performance events.

The posts made online here on Sound Cloud are a sample of the recording material from the shop and shop-related events. It is primarily composed of recordings from our Argo Featured Reading Series, but our main archive (accessible via our website argobookshop.ca) also includes recordings from special events, interviews and more.